A deeply personal story about work culture in India, burnout, and the hidden cost of over-responsibility in high-pressure engineering projects. From a mega power plant site in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, this is a reflection on anxiety at work, guilt-driven performance, and how blurred boundaries slowly erode mental health. A reminder that professional dedication should not come at the cost of your well-being.
Disclaimer: I write from lived experience, not professional authority. This space is for connection and reflection, not diagnosis or treatment. If you need support, please speak to a trained mental health professional.
There are some jobs that don’t end when you leave the workplace.
They follow you home.
They sit with you while you eat.
They climb into your sleep and keep working.
Work culture in India has always been difficult, but one job stands out—the worst and the best at the same time. The kind of opportunity that looks impressive on paper and slowly consumes you in real life.
I was working in Khandwa, the city in Madhya Pradesh, know famously for the Late Legend Singer Mr. Kishore Kumar. I was posted as a site engineer on one of the most ambitious projects of the Madhya Pradesh Power Generation Company Ltd.—two 600 MW units, erection, testing, and commissioning. For an electrical engineer like me, this was everything I had hoped for. A mega project. Real engineering. Coal turning water into supercritical steam, turbines spinning at unimaginable speeds, generators producing power that would light entire regions.
I loved it.
Every day, I watched theory turn into reality. Core concepts unfolding right in front of my eyes. It gave me a satisfaction no other job ever had.
Slowly, my dedication became an assumption.
Every technically critical task landed on my desk. I didn’t refuse. I didn’t question it. Somewhere inside me lived a rule I didn’t know how to break: if I can do it, I must do it.
One task—outside my core electrical scope—got stuck. It was delayed, messy, and demanding. Workers were putting in fourteen- to fifteen-hour days. The site ran from late morning to two in the night. Unskilled manpower, poor tool handling, compromised quality. The same work had to be redone again and again.
Everyone was frustrated. Managers, engineers, workers. And I absorbed it all.
At the same time, my personal relationships were falling apart. Work stress and emotional stress started pressing from both sides, like a vise tightening slowly. I didn’t want to ruin the job. I couldn’t afford to. So I pushed harder.
My body noticed before I did.
Hunger disappeared. Food made me nauseous. Sleep broke into fragments. When I rested, guilt flooded in immediately—someone else is working, why aren’t you? Even at home, I saw site drawings and procedures in my dreams.
Eventually, I fell sick. I had no choice but to take two days off. Before leaving, I explained everything to a colleague. I even wrote detailed instructions on paper—how the job had to be executed, what could go wrong.
But one crucial detail was missed by my collegue.
The work got completed on time—but without proper quality. I was called back to scolding from seniors. Strangely, the scolding hurt less than the failure itself. I felt responsible. Even though I wasn’t there, the guilt sat squarely on my shoulders.
When after few months I finally left the site, I knew I couldn’t survive that pressure again. I had already given two years of my life to that project. I asked for an experience letter.
The head office told me I didn’t exist in their records.
Just like that.
After everything—the nights, the stress, the health, the losses—I wasn’t even officially there. Only after involving colleagues who documented my work did I finally receive the letter.
Around the same time, I lost a close friend on that site in a work-related accident. He was just 21. Unmarried. Gentle. That loss stayed with me longer than the job ever did.
I left feeling defeated, cheated, and strangely hollow. I had given everything I had—yet it wasn’t enough. Later, that very experience helped me land a job in the Gulf.
But anxiety came with me.
Today, I see that the job was demanding—but my mind made it brutal. My inability to rest, my fear of letting people down, my belief that responsibility had no limits—that’s what slowly eroded me.
I didn’t burn out because I was weak.
I burned out because I didn’t know where to stop.
I’m still learning that doing your best does not mean doing everything. And that no job, no matter how meaningful, is worth disappearing from your own life.
A gentle question for you:
Have you ever stayed in a job longer than your body or mind could handle—because you felt responsible for everyone except yourself?
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