Los Gatos, Calif. — IT'S Sunday dinner in the Khanna family's spotless three-bedroom condo, and the matriarch, Ritu, is happy. She munches a spicy stew of cauliflower, carrots and peas with her husband, Vivek, and their teenage son, Kanishka. She and Vivek swap memories of growing up in Kolkata and sip Chardonnay.
Daylight slips away. Then so does her husband.
"There it starts," she says.
Vivek sits up a little straighter. His BlackBerry begins to buzz more frequently. He seems ready to spring from the table.
That's because his attention is shifting to another place and time -- Mumbai, India, nearly 9,000 miles away. There it's just before 9 a.m. on Monday morning, 12 1/2 hours ahead of California, and he can imagine his colleagues at the back-office outsourcing company he works for, filing into the office, turning on their computers, chatting about their weekends.
They will soon want to talk with Khanna, the firm's U.S. director of business development, about processing payroll forms, healthcare claims and accounting vouchers. They may have leads to help him drum up more clients. The 40-year-old multitasker will take their calls and e-mail from a desk in his garage, where he sits between a foosball table and some bicycles, until 11 p.m. He will wake up to resume work before 5 a.m. so he can catch the end of the Indian workday.
"If you look at it," he says, "I'm never at work, and I'm never off work."
Khanna is a new breed of globalized worker, testing the limits of international commerce, his body and his family's patience. It's an often overlooked side effect of sending jobs overseas: Work spread across many time zones demands that managers and co-workers attune to the world's business cycle while living out of sync with those around them.
"It's the sun-never-sets model," says Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex Inc., a business research firm in New York. He calls people like Khanna "time-zone shifters." His company estimates that about half of the 46 million so-called knowledge workers in the U.S., a category that covers anyone whose primary job is to work with information, are engaged in some kind of time-zone shifting, extending the day beyond the normal 9 to 5.
More and more, their responsibilities span continents -- clients in California, colleagues in India, software engineers in Romania or China.
"Bicoastal is so passe," Spira says.
