Sabbatical - the panacea for the modern-age overworked executive?

I recently caught up with a close pal of mine from business school. He, would to a large extent, is a good respresentation of the modern Indian executive. He is a child of the Indian globalisation phenomenon (read that as someone who did his education in the mid to late nineties), has sterling academic qualifications (read that as belonging to the elite IIT-IIM brigade) and was dishing up a nice career in Corporate India (read that as a Sales/Marketing executive in a FMCG firm). Not to mention the fact that he was married to a lady with a similar background. And as a couple, who have just entered the dreaded thirties, it doesnt get better, does it?

As i listened with open-mouthed amazement, he announced that both he and his wife have resigned their jobs and are going on a sabbatical for a year. And what do they intend to do with eir precious time.

• Go on a long planned European tour (he has even booked apartments in Paris and London for the same) on their own terms.
• Pursue their individual creative interests.
• Get their heads together on starting out on their own entrepreneurial venture.

As one would expect, this took poor me quite a while to digest this tsunamic decision. As someone, born and bought up in the under-belly of the indian middle-class, i was always conditioned to think that a job is the perfect reflection of adulthood (Udyogam, Purushalakshanam) and where the purpose of working was to save for future generations as well as to serve one well during retirement. Consdirdering that this couple too came from a similar background, a torrent questions flew out of my mouth as my bird-brain tried to wrestle with this challenge against conventional wisdom.

• Do you realise that it may take a couple of years for the economy to improve?
• Are you sure that you have taken care of your commitments?
• How do you plan to sustain your medical insurance and other needs?
• Arent you sacrificing a whole year of vibrant youthfulness (which went multiplied by inflation) would mean losing out of one quite a bucket of retirement money?
• Why couldnt you do all this fanciful stuff while you are still working. After all, both of you worked for multinational firms which would be glad to give you an international posting?

All this was met with a calm smile and a logical explanation of why this action actually makes sense. After all

• Both he and his wife were getting bored with their careers, which albeit going well was turning their lives into a mundane existence. There were occassional challenges, no doubt but they had pretty much exhausted all that in the last decade.
• They have always wanted to go aroudn the world and did not want to wait upto 60 to figure that out. Also with the workload in their current jobs, they are not going to able to spend time on their pursuits.
• W.r.t their financial commitments, either ways they dont expect very fancy pay-hikes for this year and so it is not a big risk in itself.
• Another interesting observation was that a healthy sabbatical from work would mean that they are conserving their good health (both physical and mental) to take on the onslaught that future corporate life is going to throw at them in the future.

Of all the ones, the last one made a lot of sense to me. There have been different studies all over the world that have pointed out the drastic increase in people who are suffering from life-style ailments - more and more overworked executives are grappling with diabetes/blood pressure/cholestrol flucatuations. Bear in mind that the wealth that is gained at the altar of their health gets eroded at a faster rate when it is used subsequently to manage the after-affects of these ailments. As we take on more pressure in both our personal/professional lives in the never-ending pursuit for corporate glory, we do very often forget to live in the current moment. We either keep mulling over the demons of the past or keep planning for the promise of the future. After all, a corporate career is expected to last anywhere between 30-40 years and what negative impact can 1 year make, particularly when you are devoting it to rejunevate your mental/physical health and to figure out exactly what you want to do? After all, most of us do keep talking about work-life balance and how we should learn to dictate work and life and not the other way around. Adequate rest and relaxation are equally important for corporate success as much as knowledge/hard work.

So does sabbatical offer the right panacea for the overworked executive?. I would say yes, provided one is absolutely sure of what one wants to do during this period. If the time is whiled away in useless pursuits/activities, it would end up having an adversely opposite effect. One may realise that one has blown up money/career for just about nothing and would then overwork himself to catch up on the rat-race. So if you are clear about how to use up this well-deserved rest, go ahead. It may just be the perfect medicine to keep the medical fraternity out of your life for the reminder of your existence. Interestinginglly wikitravel has a link for such endevaours which it calls as gap year