What Norway considers normal
Norwegian law guarantees full-time employees a minimum of 25 paid working days of vacation every year. Employees over 60 are entitled to 31 days. Three consecutive weeks of that leave must be taken between June and September. Taking time off in Norway is not a perk negotiated through goodwill. It is a legal entitlement which is expected, planned, and protected. The Norwegian workday operates on a system of core hours and flexible hours. Core hours are when the team is expected to be present for collaboration. The rest of the working day is designed around the employee's life. This is not progressive, in Norway, it is ordinary. Whereas, in India, it would be considered radical.
What India considers normal
Indian workers are among the most overworked globally. The International Labour Organisation has consistently placed India among countries with the highest proportion of workers exceeding 49 hours per week. The culture that produced this did not emerge from legislation or policy. It emerged from an assumption that has been built over decades and reinforced daily, that presence equals commitment and overtime signals ambition.
In 2023, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy publicly urged Indian workers to adopt China's 9-9-6 work culture — 9am to 9pm, six days a week, a 72-hour working week — arguing that young Indians needed to demonstrate greater work ethic to advance the country. The call sparked a national debate. In December 2025, MP Supriya Sule introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill in India's Parliament, a draft law that would give employees the legal right to ignore work calls, emails, and messages outside official hours, with penalties for non-compliant firms. The bill reflects what many Indian professionals already know: that the boundary between work and life has been so thoroughly eroded that legislation is now being proposed to restore it.
The gap between Norway and India is not just cultural. It is structural that has been built into how organisations manage, how managers are trained, and how the labour market operates.
Why the system holds
India is an employer's market. There is always someone willing to say yes. Managers push because they can. Because the supply of willing professionals makes extreme expectations commercially sustainable. Workers accept them because the fear of being replaced is real and the alternative of standing fiirm feels like a career risk rather than a right. The result is a vicious cycle that everyone perpetuates. Companies normalise extreme demands because they work. Professionals meet those demands because they have been told this is what dedication looks like. And a culture forms — one where working weekends feels like loyalty, where not taking leave feels like seriousness, and where someone like Vinod arrives in Norway genuinely confused about why his work ethic is a problem.
It is a problem because it was never sustainable. Because the Indian professionals who built careers on it are now, in their forties and fifties, arriving at the reckoning that Preeti D'mello has written about for WOCULT, recognising that the trade they made was not the one they intended.
What Vinod's scolding actually means
The Norwegian manager who pulled Vinod aside was not criticising his commitment. He was identifying a pattern of behaviour that, in his professional experience, leads to burnout, disengagement, and eventually the loss of the person the organisation was trying to keep. This is the distinction that Indian work culture has never made cleanly: the difference between working hard and working in a way that is unsustainable. Between dedication and dysfunction. Between ambition and a slow self-erasure that masquerades as professionalism.
The feedback Vinod received in Norway and that many Indian professionals moving abroad have received in various forms, is not a verdict on Indian capability. It is a verdict on the conditions Indian workplaces have created and the habits those conditions have produced. The capabilities are not the problem. The culture built around them is.
The question worth asking
India's parliament is debating a Right to Disconnect Bill. Norway's employees take three consecutive weeks of summer leave by law. The distance between those two realities is not just geographic. The question Vinod's story places in front of every Indian professional and every Indian organisation is not whether we work too hard. It is whether we have confused the cost of working this way with the proof that it is working.
What looks like dedication from the inside sometimes looks, from the outside, like a system that has forgotten what work is actually for.
Sources
Economic Times — Indian work ethic is not okay: man who moved to Norway says he was scolded for working weekends and postponing vacations, June 2026
Vacation Tracker — Norway Leave Laws, April 2026
South China Morning Post — India tycoon's call to adopt 996 work culture spurs debate, 2025
International Labour Organisation — Working time data, India
Right to Disconnect Bill 2025, introduced by MP Supriya Sule, December 2025
