Ah, this is the life. No, I am not in Goa, or the south of Australia, places writers across the hall from where I work-they work for a travel magazine-seem to be get sent to on assignments all the time. Still, I muse, as I revel a little more in the comfort of my immediate surroundings, things could be worse. It's the chair, you see: Aeron, by Herman Miller. Haven't heard of it? Well, you don't know what you are missing out on.

At my office-a swank one, more a foreign bank type than a media outfit one (there, that should mollify my editor)-I sit on a local unbranded office chair. It has castors, levers to adjust height and extent of lower lumbar support, and arm rests, but, alas, it is no Aeron. The chair I am sitting in right now, at Adobe India's Noida facility is something else. For starters, it does something to mind and body to know that the chair one is sitting in was a shoo-in for the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Then, there's the suspension: Pellicle mesh in an aluminum frame that accommodates all kinds of body types, allows for even distribution of weight, and facilitates ventilation (yup, your back needs air too, docs tell me). For those of you interested in such things, Pellicle was developed exclusively for use in the Aeron chair. And the structure: a high and wide-contoured back that supports the body and reduces the quantum of weight the lower spine needs to support; a custom-adjustable lower back; armrests that are independently height-adjustable and which pivot both in and out by several degrees; a super-smooth tilt mechanism; a tilt-range of five degrees to 112 degrees (for those times when you really want to lean back and put your feet up) and a permanent contact system that supports the preferred posture of the user at rest, and in motion.

There's more but surely, you get the picture? Designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf and launched by Herman Miller, a $1.5 billion office furniture major, as far back as 1994, Aeron won the Gold in idsa's Designs of the Decade competition for having a great business impact. Dotcommers loved it. So did just about everyone else. "Eight years ago," wrote LA Times writer Preston Lerner in a paean to Aeron in September 2002, "the office chair hierarchy was stood on its head by the introduction of Herman Miller's seminal Aeron chair, which set new standards for ergonomic efficiency while emerging as an I'm-so-cool icon... by merging the utility of task seating with the status of a throne, it forever changed the landscape of the modern office." Today, there are around 2 million Aeron chairs in offices around the world, some 3,000 in India alone.

Aerons don't come cheap: Adobe spent over Rs 83 lakh importing 377; iNautix Rs 2.25 crore for importing 815. Both benefited from concessions in import duty software exporters are eligible for; In India, Aeron retails for around Rs 60,000. Is it worth it? "No other chair matches up to the performance of Aeron," gloats Umesh Munot, Country Manager (India), Herman Miller. That's a biased opinion, so here's another. "The chairs have definitely helped combat office-stress," says Jagdish Rangwani, Chief Operating Officer, iNautix.

As the 3,000 sold in India show, Aerons are yet to catch on. One reason for that could be that Rs 60,000 is just too much to pay for a chair (even Rs 20,000-plus, which software exporters have to pay, is way too high). So, most companies are content to go in for ergonomic chairs on offer from Godrej & Boyce (it has a 38 per cent share of the Rs 400-crore organised sector market for office chairs), Blow Plast Ergonomics, even local vendors. Everyone down from Chairman Azim Premji at Wipro uses Godrej & Boyce chairs. And Infosys experiments with local vendors, collecting feedback from employees before making the final decision (everyone sits on the same type of chair here too).

Godrej & Boyce sent this writer copies of certificates issued by the Indian Association of Occupational Health and the All India Occupational Therapists Association to prove that its Premium range was as ergonomically designed as the best. The company's answer to Aeron is the leap chair from SteelCase, a US company, which Raviprakash Gupta its General Manager, Marketing, claims, "is functionally similar to Aeron." Blow Plast Ergonomics' Head of Marketing Ranjit Bakshi is downright derisive of Aeron. "It is like a gizmo; 90 per cent of it is never put to use," he laughs. For the record Godrej & Boyce's chairs cost anything between Rs 2,500 and Rs 6,000 (Rs 60,000-Rs 70,000 for the leap chair); Blow Plast Ergonomics' between Rs 2,900 and Rs 15,000 (up to Rs 1 lakh for the customisable Vitra chair). Maybe, once the novelty wears off, I'll tire of Aeron, but right now, sitting on one (and enjoying every bit of it), it's hard to see how. "There are some 40 replicas of Aeron, but none comes close to the original's performance," gushes Munot. Herman Miller's new Mirra could: this chair needs fewer adjustments than Aeron for the same kind of comfort. Please, please Mr Editor, could I have an Aeron instead of my next increment?