My first salary after graduating was Rs. 500. Those were the days when you could buy a seer (kg) of beef for a rupee. One could travel in a rickshaw or taxi for ten miles (16 km) and pay only a rupee or even less. As the years went by, and inflation took its toll, salaries grew almost exponentially, and today I heard that the son of a class fellow of mine (an engineer, now dead) has been offered five million a month, while his soon-to-be ex-boss is offering him twice that and many perks (like a hundred million rupee loan to buy a house).
I wonder what exactly does such a man do that he is considered so valuable? When Americans managed the oil industry in Karachi, they used to say, "If you go on leave and your subordinates aren't able to run your department, you are useless". In those days they sacked such a man, who used to work fifty hours at a stretch without going home. He thought the boss would be impressed, thinking that he was a hard-working man. It didn't help him.
I've heard that nowadays it's the other way around. Every executive makes sure that among his subordinates, there is no one as competent or as intelligent as he is, so if he's absent for a couple of days, the boss calls him back to work as the organization can't function without him. During a management course I attended in 1967-68, an engineer was called by his boss on the third day of the course, and he announced that he had to go to the factory because it couldn't run without him. He said it with a grin, as if it was something to be proud of.
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