Years ago, I watched a well-known ‘upper caste’ writer announcing on stage at a literary festival that he had learnt to cook because his mother practised ritual seclusion during her period every month. He sneered as he said it and though I’ve had the opportunity to watch him sneer many times before and after, that particular sneer has stayed laminated in my memory.

He had offered this anecdote to the universe as part of his anti-caste activist persona and I was amazed (once again) at how often my fellow savarnas fling women’s labour like party confetti. This 30-something man could well have resented his mother and profited by writing about it like the rest of us. Instead, he chose to represent his ability to cook (something he was very vain about and deployed like a social brahmastra) as something he was forced into as a tender lad because of his mother’s self-indulgence.

He could have substituted “because of her periods” with “because she was smoking ganja” and his tone would have stayed the same. Where was Appa? We don’t know but I presume he had a long day of sneers to accomplish.

I found myself thinking about that delicate fraud when I read about the Supreme Court’s response to a writ petition seeking paid menstrual leave for women in all workplaces in India. The court’s disposal order says the ‘competent authority’ (Union government/ ministry of women and child development) ‘may consider the representation and examine the possibility of framing a policy on menstrual leave after consulting all relevant stakeholders’.

The observations of the bench, consisting of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, expressed deep concern that a mandatory paid menstrual leave policy would discourage the private sector from hiring women and cause discrimination against women in the workplace.

CJI Surya Kant reportedly said, “If they are giving (it) voluntarily, then it’s excellent. But the moment you introduce it as a compulsory condition in law, you do not know the damage it will do to the career of women. They (employers) will say you should sit at home… nobody will give them responsibilities, even in judicial services, a normal trial will not be assigned to them.”

When workplaces need to include under-represented groups — women, trans people, people with disabilities — inevitably there is twitching and frothing and raising of ‘practicalities’. Yet the average workplace is an irrational environment teeming with prejudice and impractical behaviour.

Offices are full of inexplicable ritual and irrational displays. CEOs and founders go on LinkedIn every day to air their most nutty ideas about hiring employees and keeping employees. ‘We only interview people on weekends at midnight’. ‘Our employees sleep in the office to get things done’. ‘Why are employees so eager to go home and gaze upon their wives?’

Men in charge of hundreds of lives and incomes type up screeds like this and we all respond part mocking, part worried that this is what it means to be hardcore. Instead of declaring this a global mental health crisis.

When nurses go on strike — because thankfully they can draw on a history of nurses going on strike — it is often because their precious degree certificates are being held hostage. Shady and non-shady establishments alike are all about the free market until their staff want to be practical and rational — that is, seek better pay and better working conditions.

When workplaces have worker-friendly regulations thrust upon them — maternity leave, limits on work hours, anti-sexual harassment policies — through labour activism and law, their inevitable response is ‘don’t say we didn’t warn you, but we won’t be hiring people who make our workplaces difficult’. If you lived through the relatively recent #MeToo years as a working adult, you could have filled your Notes app with details from tut-tutting conversations about how women will not be hired any more.

What did those conversations mean? That you can’t control your male employees? That you are not equipped for complex conversations about privilege and power? That you would rather keep paying the same sexual assaulter than hire non-violent employees? That you are not prepared for turmoil?

Not that India believes in hiring women in the organised sector anyway. I will leave you to go look up the ever-depressing numbers.

Would implementing period leave in India be complicated? Of course. Would it need new models and revised models before it works? Sure.

The vaunted shift from maternity leave to parental leave in Sweden started in the 1970s, but it took decades of legislation and thoughtful adjustments to make it so that fathers took up their share of early parenting.

Would legislated menstrual leave help millions of women think of work, at least conceptually, as a social realm that welcomes them — rather than tolerates them? Yes. Capitalism has never been logical or practical. Why pretend otherwise? Money moves like a beast and folks try to ride its tail pretending they have it on a leash.

I have been at a workplace where a creepy member of the top leadership secretly moved to another city, drew a salary for many months, stopped answering the phone, was fired and then… then he was re-hired some time later. You can’t tell me that hiring him again was a practical decision. Perhaps everyone involved was on their period. Or maybe they were doing ganja.