The Manager I Bring Home

I ask people at work, half in fun: “Mann laga ke kaam kar rahe ho?”

Most say yes. Of course they do. That’s the answer you’re supposed to give.

And then I tell them what I actually think. Mann kaam mein mat lagao. Mann lagao wahan, jahan lagana hai. Kaam dimaag se karo.

Heart for the people and the things you love. Brain for the work.

I know it sounds backwards. We’re taught the opposite — love your work, give it everything, bring your whole heart to the desk. I believed that too, for years.

A friend sent me a short the other day. Some IAS officer doing shayari, the kind of clip that’s made to move you. The motivation part didn’t do much for me. But there was a smaller thing in it, said almost in passing — that work and love are two different things. That you shouldn’t mix them up.

And the same week, I’m sitting with a friend, more than ten years younger than me. We get talking, the way you do, about life, about spirituality, and somewhere in there I catch myself telling him the same thing I keep telling people at work. Heart there. Head here.

Two of them. Same week. Same small idea. I’m not going to call it a sign. But it stayed.

So if you asked me for one line, here’s the one I’d give you.

Home runs on the heart. Work runs on the head. Don’t carry the spreadsheet to the dinner table. Don’t carry your feelings into the meeting room. Feel at home. Think at work.

Clean. Easy to nod at.

And I don’t fully believe it.

Because it doesn’t really hold. The honesty a marriage needs — that’s not just feeling. You’re reading the room, picking your words, knowing when to shut up. That’s the head, doing its work quietly. And the work I actually care about has never run on logic alone. It starts with wanting something, and that wanting has no spreadsheet behind it. Take the thinking out, it’s a daydream. Take the wanting out, it’s just an exercise.

So yeah. The line is too clean. I know it is. I keep saying it anyway.

The thing I’ve actually sat with longer is this. Why do we calculate in love at all? Why do we bring the manager home?

I think it’s fear.

I’m not a poor man. My needs are taken care of. And still there’s this thing I can’t quite name — a not-enough, a not-yet, like I’m somehow behind. A man who has what he needs and still feels short. So what does he do? He manages. He optimises. He starts handling the people he loves the way he handles a department.

And the heart — the one that was supposed to stay home — it learns to keep score there too.

That’s the real swap. It was never heart-at-work. It’s fear-at-home.

I wrote something a while back about thought, and thoughts. How much of it just runs on its own, and how little of it we actually choose. This feels like the next bit of the same thing. Once you start to feel that gap — between the thinking and the one who’s doing the thinking — you start to see where each thing belongs.

We say “romanticising life” like it’s a warning — like it means fooling yourself. Maybe it just means letting the heart have the things it was made for. And not handing it the head’s job.