On a day crammed with meetings, emergencies, phone calls and more meetings, 33-year-old Mohit Roy Sharma stands on the terrace of his 14-storeyed office in central Delhi, puffing manically on a cigarette. It’s 1 in the afternoon and time for the senior producer with a media house to wolf down his lunch (usually a burger); these few minutes are the only lull in his punishing 14-hour work schedule. But Sharma is not one for breaks. In the past six years, he has been away from work for only 15 days.

Miles away in Pune, a city beginning to swerve into the fast lane, 27-year-old Samir Deshmukh is hunched over his laptop as he handles an avalanche of phone calls. In the last two years, Deshmukh, a senior manager with HDFC investments division in Pune, has been off work for 13 days. “If I go on sick leave even for a day, I start feeling shaky. You can’t hand over the customer’s portfolio to someone else,” he says, as the phone peals insistently again. Even on an off day, Deshmukh gets 60-70 work-related calls.

In Maximum City Mumbai, 35-year-old glass designer Murtaza Mamajiwala is among the many professionals impatient with the indulgence of a holiday. In the last three years, Mamajiwala has allowed himself five days’ leave.

The 9-to-5 job has long been killed by graveyard shifts and the perform-or-perish diktat. Now, a new breed of overreachers is wiping the office calendar clean of that blessed word: holiday. On the job, 24x7, 365 days a year, these professionals are pushing themselves to meet impossible targets, revive flagging bottom lines and stay ahead of the competition. If in doing so their world shrinks to the office cubicle and the grid of PowerPoint presentations, they aren’t whining; burnout be damned.

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