One of my fondest childhood memories was going with dad to his office. He used to work at Nariman Point, and he would take us there – usually on a Saturday – to give mom some me time. This is an era before the term ‘me time’ was in vogue – but the bottom line was for her to get some R&R. Bringing kids to work was not frowned upon. It was normal. I met many of his colleagues’ kids at work too. This was in the early to mid-1980s.

Much later, when I began working, it was normal to see colleagues bring their kids to work. This was the early days of private-sector TV, and the rules were pretty lax. Zee, where I worked, had a larger than normal share of young women leading businesses – 35-year-olds driving what the Indian audience should see – and many of them had very young families. And the children came to work when their mothers (and sometimes fathers) had no support at home for the day or the week. All of us took turns babysitting, and nothing was thought of it. No one asked – why are you at work when you have a child. Or at least it didn’t happen in my earshot. This was in the late 90’s early 2000’s.

Incidentally, my current employer – used to encourage employees to bring their human and animal kids to the office, before we decided to go fully remote, allowing parents time to see their kids grow.

Cut to 2022 – and an IAS officer has caused a flurry because, she walked onto the stage, in a public gathering, with a child in her arms. Mind you, it was a weekend, and the public gathering was probably eating into her time with her kid.

I found the debate around whether it was appropriate for Pathanamthitta District Collector, Divya S Iyer, to bring her child to a function – very odd. In my experience, Indian employers have been fairly ok with their employees bringing kids to work for a long time. So what has changed?

The big thing that has changed is 24-hour news, which picks out stories from social media and makes it an issue. Most people across the political spectrum would not even have noticed this, but when MSM picks this up and highlights a few reactionaries as the mainstream opinion, then they are not just normalizing innate sexism, but also normalizing the fact that senior executives do not have a life outside work. And that is inherently toxic for the workplace.

In the post-pandemic era, one of the good things to emerge is the way most organizations are acknowledging, what a few of us were privileged to enjoy. Employers who saw you as a well-rounded human, with a life beyond work. This expectation that a professional has no life beyond work belongs in the dustbin of history.

Mainstream media should really stop carrying the views of outraged busybodies as news. IT is ok for them to vent on their social media pages. And it is also ok if they find like-minded people who whine about the good old days when people were ‘professional’ and women knew their place in the world (usually barefoot and pregnant, and in the kitchen). What is not ok is for mainstream media to legitimise this view by giving it credence. People aren’t outraged. Very few people, some of whom have a social media account, are outraged – and on a slow news day, that outrage becomes news. Manufactured outrage leads to more outrage. And more outrage leads to more eyeballs and more people with a view on something they would have never thought about. And there is a vicious cycle created that vitiates the atmosphere and doesn’t allow you to ask fundamental questions – why do working parents not have creches? Why do workspaces not have creches? Why are people expected to work on weekends, at the expense of their family life? Why?