The keyboards sound louder in an almost empty office. It is the morning after Diwali. Half the lights are off, the hum of the air-conditioning fills the silence and someone’s box of sweets lies open in the pantry. The family WhatsApp group keeps lighting up with photographs of diyas. I glance at them and return to the screen.Diwali fell on Sunday, November 8. For millions from Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, however, the festival they have been waiting for only begins now. Chhath starts with nahay-khay on November 13 and ends with the dawn arghya on November 15. To be home for both, especially after a long train journey, means securing several working days off. Leaves must be saved, negotiated or taken without pay. So people choose: Diwali or Chhath. One homecoming or the other.AdvertisementWe plan our lives around three-day weekends, celebrate festivals that fall on Mondays or Fridays, and treat 10 consecutive days away from work as an extravagant wish. We take rushed trips and call them rest. The bare minimum feels like a concession.Liberalisation accelerated the spread of a managerial vocabulary: Targets, appraisals, performance indicators, the demand to be perpetually “available”. And the new vocabulary absorbed familiar hierarchies. The saheb became the manager; obedience became “ownership”; the inability to say no became “commitment”.A century ago, in 1926, Henry Ford introduced the five-day, 40-hour week in his factories. In 2026, prominent Indian business leaders are still advocating 70- and 90-hour weeks. Technology has made us reachable everywhere, but that reachability is increasingly mistaken for an obligation.AdvertisementElsewhere, corporate life is constrained by firmer guardrails. The European Union requires at least four weeks of paid annual leave and generally limits the average working week to 48 hours, including overtime. France has a framework for negotiating the right to disconnect. Europe is not free of exploitation, nor is India without labour protections. But leave on paper means little if taking it marks you as less committed.Also Read | From Suez to Hormuz, how maritime chokepoints shape the global balance of powerThere is also a gulf between a workplace that recognises the festivals of the majority and one that makes genuine room for everyone.In his 1844 manuscripts, Karl Marx described alienation: The worker becomes estranged from what he produces, from others and eventually from himself. Today, that estrangement has a painfully domestic expression. We are becoming distant from the very lives our salaries are supposed to sustain.We grew up in households where missing a festival demanded an explanation. So we offer excuses: The tickets were unavailable; the workload is heavy; the promotion matters; next year, certainly. Sometimes we become irritable with the people we miss, defending our absence as ambition because admitting the truth, that we could not get leave, feels worse.you may likeChhath offers a rebuke to the values of the modern office. The corporation worships the rising sun: The next quarter, promotion, valuation, ascent. Chhath first bows to the setting sun. To what has sustained us. To the generation growing older while we build careers elsewhere. To the mother standing waist-deep in the cold water of Kartik, holding fruit and thekua, searching the crowd for a child who could not come.The remedy is not an impossible demand that every workplace close for every festival. It is flexible holidays, the freedom to exchange fixed days off for meaningful regional observances, the ability to combine earned leave, and an end to treating absence as a test of loyalty.On the evening of November 15, as the sun sets over the ghats of Patna, Ballia and Begusarai, someone in Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru will watch sandhya arghya on a phone screen. They will search for a familiar face in the crowd, perhaps glimpse their mother in the water. Then, at dawn, the rising sun will receive its offering. The video will end, the phone will be put away, and the laptop will open. Because it is just another work day. And the office is open.The writer is producer, Indian Express Hindi