At about this time last year, my elder son quit his very well-paying job as a senior executive in a multi-national: he had had enough of the El Dorado mirage sold by the IIMs and IITs. He had been working 14-hour days non-stop for 16 years, paying Rs 65,000 a month for a flat in Gurgaon where he just went to sleep, lunched and dined exclusively on Zomato and Food Panda, could never find the time to relax in our Purani Koti retreat near Shimla, his liver was beginning to get pickled in Blender's Pride.

In short, he was on the verge of a burnout, maybe a couple of puffs away from being stubbed out like a cigarette.

One day, he saw the light, ignored Mr Narayan Murthy's exhortation to work 70-hour weeks, regarding with justified suspicion Ms Sitharaman's pious advice to fight work pressure through "inner strength by reaching out to God". His decision to ignore her too was made easier, he told me later, by the possibility that by 'God' she meant Mr Modi, and since he himself "worked" 18 hours, reaching out to him would be futile (as Kangana Ranaut has recently discovered).

So one fine foggy morning in Gurgaon, he pinged his boss that he was quitting (that's how they do the hiring, firing and resigning these days, no "Dear sir, it is with profound regret that ..." letters as in our days), packed his suitcase and pooch in his car, and joined us in Purani Koti.

He now lives off his savings, work-from-home consultancy projects, articles on the auto world, and revdis from my pension whenever the state government periodically emerges from bankruptcy and doles it out to me. He now has the time to indulge in his passion for photography and gardening, and is currently trying to grow bananas and peepul trees at 7,000 feet in an area........

© National Herald