Why Are We Obsessed With 70-Hour Work Weeks?

In India, overwork isn’t a red flag—it’s a rite of passage.

When N.R. Narayana Murthy, the 78-year-old co-founder of Infosys, declared that young Indians should clock 70-hour work weeks to build the nation, it triggered the predictable outrage cycle: Twitter meltdowns, LinkedIn think pieces, weekend debates over overpriced coffee.

But honestly, what’s more telling is what came after. Silence. Acceptance. Even admiration. Because beneath the noise, many agreed. Our fathers nodded their heads in approval. Our uncles cracked the usual jokes drenched in patriarchy.

In a country where time is currency and upward mobility still feels like a limited-edition offer, working yourself into the ground has become a sort of national sport. You don’t just do your job—you prove your worth through exhaustion.

Murthy’s comments weren’t an anomaly. They were a mirror.

So when Infosys came out this week with a new “internal campaign” to encourage work-life balance, we laughed.

Over the last few months, the same tech giant whose founder romanticised relentless hustle has started sending its employees emails politely asking them to stop. To log off on time. To take care of their health.

In the new campaign, Infosys tracks how long people are working—especially those working remotely—and sends HR alerts if someone consistently crosses the 9.15-hour-per-day mark. Work more, and you get a warning.

The optics are neat. It’s a pivot to wellness. A quiet nod to the growing burnout epidemic. But basically it’s a company at war with its own mythology.

Infosys was born out of the very grind it now seems to caution against. So were thousands of middle-class Indian success stories—narratives built on sacrifice, long hours, missed birthdays, and the unshakeable belief that suffering now means security later. That belief system doesn’t fade just because a few internal memos suggest otherwise.

Why The Obsession But?

The obsession with the 70-hour work week isn’t really about time. It’s about class, aspiration, and identity. For decades, the middle-class dream in India was built on engineering degrees, U.S. visas, software jobs, and the idea that the more you worked, the more you mattered. Work became a form of moral superiority. The harder you pushed, the more deserving you were.

That hasn’t changed. It’s just evolved into a sleeker, more global form. The danger, of course, isn’t just physical burnout. It’s cultural erosion. When overwork becomes aspirational, everything else shrinks—relationships, curiosity, joy, even dissent. You stop asking questions like Why am I doing this? or Who benefits from this system? and start asking How do I get ahead in it?

This is the emotional scaffolding Murthy was tapping into—an old-school belief in work as national service. It’s a seductive message, especially in a country where poverty is visible, and guilt is easy to weaponise. But the truth is, endless hours don’t automatically build better economies. They build brittle ones. You can’t sustain growth by running your workforce into the ground. Even Infosys seems to know that now.

So, What Do We Do?

So what do we do with a culture that celebrates overwork while quietly collapsing under it?

Maybe nothing dramatic. Cultural shifts are slow and messy. But maybe it starts with seeing the 70-hour work week not as a flex, but as a failure of imagination. A failure to create systems that reward efficiency, not martyrdom. A failure to decouple identity from output.

Work is important. But it was never meant to be everything. And if we need an email from HR to remind us of that, maybe it’s time to log off.