Death of an Indian Tech Worker

Parth MN | Rest of World | 27 Jan, 2026

But something has gone awry in the industry Somwanshi was entering. Eighty-three percent of India’s tech workers suffer from burnout, according to one recent survey. One in four clocks over 70 hours a week. In Karnataka state, home to Bengaluru, tech workers account for a starkly disproportionate 20% of patients seeking transplants due to organ failure, according to a leading regional newspaper. A study of tech employees in the IT hub of Hyderabad found that 84% had a liver disease linked to long hours of sedentary work and high stress.

India has long struggled with suicides, especially in its declining agrarian class. In 2022, according to the most current government data, the country marked its highest-ever recorded suicide rate of 12.4 per 100,000 people. (The global rate is 9.2.) Sanjeev Jain, a professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, told Rest of World that suicides have traditionally been linked to cases of extreme poverty in India. But they are expanding, he said, within a professional class that feels they “increasingly have precarious jobs.” This is magnified, said Jain, for white-collar employees from poorer backgrounds who count on their jobs for economic mobility.

Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period?

Nitsuh Abebe | New York Times Magazine | Jan 15, 2026

It is widely understood that exclamation points must be inserted into the modern professional email at precise intervals — just enough to create a tone of eagerness and warmth without tipping over into sounding fake, sycophantic or batty. So people appeal to the internet, terrified they’re hindering their careers by striking the wrong balance; they seek advice from job coaches; they joke about their obsessive budgeting of exclamations. They fear seeming overexcited, yes — but they also know the risks of the plain old period. Too brusque. Too cold. Too testy.

In the workplace, though, more upscale methods of period avoidance have thrived. Consider, for instance, the application of question marks to non-questions we’re hoping to advance gently — the same wheedling uptalk used when we fake-wince and tell a colleague “I don’t know if that will work?” As speech, this habit is so associated with corporate management that it’s mocked in comedies like “Office Space” and early stories by George Saunders, who once had a police officer explain an apparent grave-robbing with the line “Typically it’s teens?” And yet in text it has irresistible utility.