About 20 years ago, my younger son got a job at a call centre in Gurgaon. I wanted him to continue his studies and improve his skills. He spoke good English, and his accent was different from mine. What he probably liked most about the job was the junk food readily available to the staff.

A few days later, he brought home his appointment letter, which was in the form of a contract between him and the company. The contract ran several pages long, and the font was so small that I gave up reading after a few sentences.

All imaginable and unimaginable conditions were laid out in the agreement. His salary was just over Rs 10,000. Thankfully, my son soon realised that there was no future in a job like this. He probably also got tired of all the burgers and pizzas.

He quit the job, completed his graduation, applied to a few media institutes, and eventually chose to study at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.

Shortly after this, my wife and I visited her brother in Toronto, Canada, where he lived with his family. He had worked as an auditor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before immigrating to Canada, where he had grown accustomed to certain comforts not available in Kerala.

He immigrated to Canada on the strength of his savings. At the time, Canada wasn't welcoming people in ragged clothes. He proudly took us around Toronto in his new Mercedes SUV. That's how we saw the city, along with Ottawa, the capital, and Quebec, where French is spoken.

One day, he drove us to a place we hadn't identified beforehand. It was only upon arrival that we realised it was the office where he worked for a while after settling in Canada.

He wanted me to take a picture of him standing in front of the company's emblem, which read "Ernst & Young." He was proud to say that he had worked for this company. I knew it was one of the world's largest multinational firms, operating in many countries. Personally, I know several people who started their careers there but soon left to join other companies.

One of them now holds a senior position at Federal Bank. Another has struggled to decide what to do since leaving. A third sat for the civil service exam and is now a diplomat. I should also mention a friend's son, a chartered accountant who is now the vice president of a company based in Dubai.

Of course, I never asked any of them why they left. However, a relative told me about the difficult working conditions there. All of this might explain why Ernst & Young has always fascinated me.

The company's origins date back to the 19th century, and its founders, Arthur Young and Alwin C. Ernst. I attempted to learn more about its history but found it as challenging as studying the Tudor dynasty in Britain. The company has undergone so many mergers and transformations that it eventually became EY. When they decided to shorten the name to just two letters, I'm sure Arthur Young and Alwin Ernst must have turned in their graves.

You might wonder why I'm writing about a firm that provides both consultancy and auditing services, which can lead to a conflict of interest. The reason was a headline that caught my attention in the "Free Press Journal" of Mumbai, which I read daily.

The headline was catchy, but the story was painful: "The Killing Schedule of a CA, Young & Earnest." A good headline tells a story in just a few words, like "Man on Moon." I think this headline captured the essence of the story, filed from Pune.

It recounted the tragic tale of a young chartered accountant who had joined EY's Pune office in March of this year. She couldn't handle the working conditions, and less than four months later, she died of stress, even though an ECG had shown her heart was in good shape.

I discussed the case with a doctor, who explained that the human body doesn't always behave predictably. Different people have different thresholds for pain. Some can't endure the prick of a needle, while others withstand labour pains, knowing it will lead to something good. Similarly, stress hormones affect people differently.

The FPJ story was based on a letter written by Anita Augustine, the mother of the girl, Anna Sebastian Perayil, to Rajiv Memani, Chairman of EY India. After reading the report, I received the whole letter via WhatsApp.

It was beautifully written and brought tears to my eyes. Syrian Christians in Kerala are so interconnected that I soon realised that Anita Augustine is a friend of one of my friends. My friend knew Anna from her childhood. Anna was a bubbly, loveable child, adored by her parents and relatives. She excelled in school and passed the CA exam on her first try.

The letter described the punishing conditions at work. Anna would come home and collapse into bed without even changing her clothes because she was so exhausted. Her supervisor assigned impossible deadlines. On one occasion, she was given a task to complete overnight and submit the next morning. Even on her CA graduation day, she had some work to finish.

Unlike in the past, when people worked from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., companies like this don't expect employees to work set hours. Instead, each person is given assignments to complete within a specific time frame, regardless of whether it takes 10 or 20 hours a day. What matters is meeting the deadline.

Most work is done by teams headed by a supervisor, and periodic assessment meetings are dreaded for various reasons. Not everyone can withstand the pressure, so they leave. One of my friends, John Samuel, posted on Facebook about how the punishing schedules take a toll on employees.

Often, they are unable to spend time with their families. The situation for couples both working under such conditions is pathetic. Their lives are miserable because they cannot leave their jobs, having become prisoners of the equated monthly instalments they must pay for their new car, new flat, and foreign vacations.

When I joined 'The Tribune' in Chandigarh, I was allotted a bungalow with about a dozen rooms, a lawn, fruit-bearing trees, and a small plot of land for growing vegetables. I had a colleague, LH Naqvi, who warned me that the Tribune houses were like "coffins" from which the allotted would not be able to escape. He was, in a way, explaining why he stayed in "soulless" Chandigarh, where the company had given him a commodious flat.

Many multinational employees are in a similar situation. They remain in a "coffin" they cannot escape. Burnout is quite common among employees of multinationals like EY.

For starters, burnout is a state of complete mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. If you are experiencing burnout, you may find it difficult to engage in activities you normally find meaningful. You may no longer care about things that are important to you or feel an increasing sense of hopelessness.

In the case of Anna Sebastian Perayil, she fell into a state of burnout within a few months of joining EY. She could no longer attend to her personal needs. Why does this happen?

We Indians always claim that we are a nation of highly qualified professionals. We take pride in companies like Infosys, Tata Sons, and Wipro getting contracts worth billions of dollars. These contracts come from giant multinational firms in the US, Europe, and Canada.

Once, I visited an American bank's office and addressed all the employees on one floor. I wondered why the bank needed so much manpower to handle a few branches in the metros. That's when I realised the Gurgaon office managed the needs of the bank globally, including in the US, where the corporate office is located. The bank likely found it cheaper to employ people in India than in the US.

To give an example, I don't know how much Anna Sebastian earned as her monthly salary, but I checked online and found that a beginner at EY might get a package of Rs 6 lakh per year. The term used is "cost to the company." Rs 50,000 per month is reasonable for a beginner in journalism, though my wife, who is from the insurance sector, says a starter in a nationalised company in India gets a higher salary.

Let's give EY the benefit of the doubt and assume they pay Rs 1 lakh per month to a qualified chartered accountant. If EY were to employ a similarly qualified person in the US, they would have to pay between $5,000 and $10,000 per month or more. In rupee terms, this would range from Rs 4.5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh.

There's something else to keep in mind. A young American, Briton, or French person cannot be expected to sit at a computer for 10 hours or more, coding and decoding. It's a misconception that our people are doing great work. They're doing the work others won't do. This applies to most IT firms in India.

It's no surprise our people aren't creating anything new. We boast that one of us invented Hotmail, but his company was later taken over by a US IT giant. The IT sector is one area where we were ahead of China, thanks to our knowledge of English, which Home Minister Amit Shah now wants to bury in the depths of Hindutva. He proudly claims not a single file in his ministry is in English, forgetting that Hindi, like English, is just an official language.

I visited China once and was told the government was encouraging people to learn English and take a share of the contracts Indian IT firms win. Meanwhile, we deride English as if it's a foreign language. It's as much Indian as Hindi, which is actually younger than English. Who is Hindi's greatest writer? You'll say, Premchand. He died in the 20th century, nearly 200 years after the British arrived in Surat, Gujarat. Tulsidas' Ramcharitmanas was written in a local dialect because Hindi didn't exist then.

Charles Dickens' novels shed light on the pathetic conditions of factory workers in England at the time. They were slaves. Bonuses, leave, eight-hour workdays, maternity leave, etc., were all won through agitation. For lack of space, I won't explain why May 1 is celebrated as Workers' Day. Employees in big firms like EY are forced to work beyond their limits.

The apathy of EY is clear when the mother says that not a single person from the company visited her or the family to condole the death of her daughter either on the day of death or afterwards. For the company, Anna Sebastian Perayil was just one of the 3.7 lakh people EY had on its payrolls globally!

Instead of seeking to improve employee conditions, Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy wants workers to put in 70 hours a week. He should ask himself whether he, his wife, and children live to work or work to live.