Corporate Wives

Every Friday changes your life. Not my observation, this. I am just quoting Bobby Deol , son of his father , the great Dharmendra. Bobby uttered the oracular words after the success of ‘ Yamla, Pagla, Deevana’. Haven’t seen the movie despite being surrounded by multiplexes screening Hindi films. That is not the point. The point is about Friday. Is Friday as life-changing to everyone as it is to the fillum folk ? Not really. Last Friday , 25th of Feb 2011, for instance, did not change my life.


But it did bring me face to face with the current profile of the educated, female workforce in Mumbai and their corporate credentials. The magic word is ‘corporate’. Globalization has endowed it with a halo and I had a close encounter with it at the Women Leadership Summit organized by Siliconindia . I have already mentioned the day and the date. The lead speakers , the panelists were women entrepreneurs ,CEOs of their own companies or women in management positions of new age corporates like Wipro,or of older giants like Bharat Petroleum. All properly suited and booted except for the Malus and Bengus who chose to be in the Indian corporate formal, the silk saree. The Malu, I must mention , was Gita Ramachandran of Bharat Petroleum, a senior artist in the work-life balancing act who gave the most commonsensical tips to meet the dilemmas to the younger delegates. The delegates , too were mostly from the corporate world. I was , perhaps the only one from academia, a profession next in ancientness only to the oldest, I suppose. Felt the difference and the isolation very acutely indeed.

The summit was a sharing of the various challenges and risks faced by the species of women I choose to call ‘corporate wives.
‘Corporate Wives’ can be any of the 4 classes of women. ‘Wife’ was not wife always. ‘Wife’ meant only woman in the early days of the language. So corporate wives are corporate women, i.e women working in or for corporates. Some of these corporate women are also wives in the modern sense,with husbands , children ,mother-in-law et al. Then there are the stay at home wives/marital partners of men who work in corporates. and the last category are corporate wives of corporate husbands. Together they may be called corporate couples. The last 2 categories were not represented at the meet.

The problems aired were not basically different from those faced by women working outside the home in general. Only they are more compounded these days by the nature of the new jobs that have come into being . Glass ceilings are being broken. Women are in key positions. With the coming of MNCs women are on the move and required to be away from the home for longer periods than before. They sometimes spend more time with male colleagues or bosses than with their husbands or families. The corporate wife’s most trusted advisor or mentor cannot be the husband always. She might tend to remember the TA’s birthday more than the husband’s ! All these create stresses and strains. One delegate touched upon a most delicate point, that of how ‘ Not tonight , darling’ is not taken well or sympathized with by the husband.

Families in India are so used to taking the woman’s services of all kinds for granted that they cannot stand any rocking of the boat. Parents, parents –in-law , husbands and children need to become aware of the new demands on the mental, emotional and physical resources of the woman professionals and learn to respect them. It was sad that Women Leadership Summit was attended only by women. A few male delegates, corporate or otherwise, could have made the Friday far more exciting and fruitful.