Disney+Hotstar recently released a pre-taped comedy special called Hardly Working by Naukri (sponsored by naukri.com), wherein five Indian comedians performed 15-minute sets based around their previous work-lives in sales, IT, business management, investment banking and so on. During her set, comedian and former category head Prashasti Singh said that after watching her colleague string together a 10-point summary of an indecipherable work meeting, she became convinced that the unlikeliest things in life could still happen: she could, for example, find romance. “There will come a person in your life who will need you day and night, who’ll keep calling you and texting you,” said Singh. “Of course, that person will be your manager.”
Prashasti Singh
Nishant Suri, who worked as an investment banker before embracing comedy full-time, joked that his job satisfaction was directly proportional to how happy his boss’s marriage was. “Now I have to manage my job as well as my boss’ marital bliss!”
It’s instructive that for these comedians, the figure of the corporate boss — irate, irrational and wrathful — has replaced the idiosyncratic (and/or demanding) spouse as comedic-target-in-chief. The latter was the mainstay of every aspiring Indian comedian, not to mention some established comics who have been quite happy to rattle off ‘my wife’ jokes one after the other. This shift is indicative of the fact that young Indians, especially professionals working in corporate spaces, are increasingly dissatisfied with their work lives.
Earlier, jokes around the workplace would be quaint observations on, say, the neologisms periodically churned out by the corporate world: ‘core competencies’, ‘blue sky thinking’ and so on. Now, even a cursory look at Hardly Working tells you what’s on the minds of these young professionals: unnecessary meetings, salaries that have barely increased in a decade or more, bosses abusing their juniors in broad daylight, no hopes for career progression, hectic work lives killing off any chance these people had at a social life. The list of complaints is long and damning.
Nishant Suri
The humour is no longer gentle
Hardly Working is the latest manifestation, but things have been on a simmer for many years now. The Indian adaptation of The Office, despite being not particularly well-written, struck a chord with audiences. Workplace comedies such as Mr Das (2019), Cubicles (2019), Pitchers (2015-) and Better Life Foundation (2016-) all mined the workplace for humour — gentle humour, it has to be said, but the tone of these shows has been getting darker and darker with time. And it’s a phenomenon that one can observe in other Indian TV shows as well, even stories where workplace friction isn’t relevant to the plot at all.
One of the most-shared scenes from The Family Man, Amazon’s spy thriller starring Manoj Bajpayee, is from the second season’s third episode. It features Bajpayee’s spy character Shrikant, now toiling away at a regular corporate workplace, albeit with an unpleasant twist — his manager, a much younger man, keeps humiliating him and yelling at him. Until one day, Shrikant decides he has had enough and slaps the horrified manager several times in succession in front of the whole office, before chucking his ID card at the now-whimpering manager and declaring ‘I quit!’
I can tell you that I have watched this scene one or 17 times, and plenty of my peers (ie, film critics) have described it as a visceral, standout moment for the show. It’s pertinent to note that none of us feels bad for the man who has just been thrashed in his own office. This kind of consensus is seldom reached among any group of critics, let alone Indians belonging to a whole spread of languages, cultures and so on.
Proof of discontent
When I was chuckling at some of the jokes from Hardly Working, I was mindful of the extent of our discontent. If you think about it, just the mere existence of so many ex-corporate honchos among Indian comedians tells you that hundreds of thousands of our countrymen are in jobs that they have no interest in or commitment to. They’re doing so out of dire circumstances because they know the bleakness of the job market in India right now.
This by itself should scare anybody who wants to see us shaking off India’s perennial ‘developing country’ tag anytime soon.
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
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