Yet Another Flop Story!

Stanley asked me to come for the movie - AARAKSHAN! And I instantly rejected the idea. The hint of an idea that the movie has been a flop was not at all running through my mind. But my intent was to avoid my own flop show later this year when gentle breeze would bring the coolness and proclaim to our utter dismay, "The D-day has come!"

And we left office at quarter to nine in the "evening" and plodded towards the auto-stand. The auto driver was happy to see a bunch of young crowd avidly awaiting some carriage to nearest junction at Karunamoyee. But as soon as he picked us up, his competitors came out of their hide, as if they were lurking for the fruit to be ripe and full. And as soon as it's full, they know that they have got a good number of passengers whom they can bank upon. They came like the Public Prosecutors of Lokpal Bill, and ensured that their AARAKSHAN may be duly honored. That pick up point is reserved for a few specific auto and restricted to the rest.

I came home after this short drama at auto stand a day long usual drama at my exceptionally hellish workplace. Talked to people who missed me over the whole week, made up some plans for the coming days. But, halfhearted, the efforts were showing no trace of lustre. And then I logged on to my testing window - of one of the most useful tools of modern day study methodologies - the mock test. It was a complete mockery on my part to do nothing for it in last 15 days and appearing for it with baseless hope. The test was submitted midway, nothing's really working out for me for the last 3/4 weeks - either a small pimple will take the shape of a small size volcano and I get hospitalized for the same - or a bid date comes close with no real support from our support groups - everything that can go wrong for me is, as if, coming together at the same time. Morphy's law! - true it is.

But now I am tired of complaining. And I need a sigh of relief. It's not that I can see an iota of light even at the furthest and darkest end of my road, but the hope that kills million mortal men, is killing me as well. Failure is waiting with its empty stomach, and absolutely ready to devour me in. But like Indian test cricket team, I too can forget the last few weeks as just another bad patch of life. And life goes on. And comes a day, each day, with a new beginning, with a new zeal. To see and prove that it's not over until it's over.

90 days is all I have, too little for the pessimistic self in me, and too much when that Nike punchline punches me hard. Time is what evokes you, go accompany her, and do your best, and one day you both cross the river of futility with the bridge of achievement.

Hope beckons, standing tall, just 90 days away from you!

Dreams Derailed

To me the most beautiful words in Dictionary are hope and dream. While in one of my earlier blog I wrote about hope, let this one start with the other one - Dream. So, what's dream? When I wanted a proper definition of dream, thefreedictionary.com suggested that "dream" is a series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Oh! so technical, isn't it? But when Martin Luther King Junior in his famous speech, uttered the phrase, "I have a dream", he obviously meant something else - some condition or achievement that is longed for; or, in simple language, an aspiration. Yes my story starts with dreams as in aspirations that we bear and tread across the drudgeries of life.

Youngsters have great dreams and they follow it. So did I when I was in college. Dreamt about a decent job that will pay me 15 thousand rupees a month. And I can fulfill my basic needs, like food, shelter, etc etc. But then these days we hear lot about derailment. Refer the case of what happened to the Howrah Kalka mail a few days ago. And so happened to my dreams. My dreams got derailed simply. Now I know that a 15-thousand-rupees-a-month salary is not enough. Time has changed, so has changed the prices of what we call the essential commodities. And as a result, we need to earn money, more than what we thought would be sufficient, a few years ago. And to make provision for hassle free access to essential commodities of life, we ourselves got commoditized in the job. Boss treats us with the same amount of compassion he grants for PC/Printer/Office furniture. They are like accessories that help him in his work. He doesn't allow them to go home, at 6. If he needs to do something till 10 pm, he needs the PC to be on till that time. If he needs the printer to give a print at 7:30 pm in the evening, and the next set at 11:30 pm at night, the printer really cant go off in between. Can it? No, it stays on throughout. So do we. He may ask us to do something, he may not. But the work culture in this city of joy is in conjunction with our ranks as nothing but accessories. And at the end the MNCs are paying these accessories at an excessive rate. Not 15, buddy, you may get 50 thousand bucks, wow! but do you get time to spend that hefty some? No, its more than enough if you get some time to take a sound sleep. You thought you need food, shelter and all. You get it now. Pizzas from Pizzahut, Burgers from MacD. You have a pot belly. You really don't worry for food. But your mind is dead. It's not getting its food - mental pabulum - the food for the hungry mind. You get an air conditioned flat to be in. But strife in job-life balance makes you a hapless kid searching for a shelter of peace. Dream was that, and reality is this. Derailed, dreams are following their ill fate.

It was time when we college students thought that staying awake through whole of the night was fun. Maggi and chai at the nearest dhaba, Surfing free of cost in the air conditioned and less crowded college computer labs, the gossips among hostel mates - add these things to that, and it would be awesome. We believed, night was the best time to stay awake and work. It's not that guys would just pass time and do no real work. We would really work on occasions like the penultimate night before Semester exams. And we dreamt, ek baar paas hone do, fir to job mei masti hi masti. Let's get out of this college, and wonderland is awaiting us in office. But man proposes, God disposes. And we are in that wonderland finally. The first few days are orientation programmes. With a pocket full of money, we start feeling like the real king. And then the corporate ovates us with punch cards, we tag it around our neck as if it's a garland made of 1-kg of gold. The chest heaves in and bulges enormously with a sense of pride felt never before. A few days passes peacefully, the year turns, and the same tag is like a shackle for an en-caged and domesticated pet kept with the corporate. And we do petty things, or we wait for the next order to come. And the clock goes tick-tick-tick. Oh god, we see its quarter to midnight! Now the heart cries to end the day, oops end the night. And the clock goes on tick tick tick. Exhausted, we reminisce the days spent in college and the nights spent sleepless. And we appeal to our ill fate, leave me please, I want to home before the dawn.

Then we thought, we need freedom, we need to get out of college, ASAP. Who wants to study again boss, we need job. Now we need some kind of respect in job that we do. Engineers galore are like scapegoats at the altar of corporate growth and sheer profitability. And they being available in bounty, is no better than accessories we buy by paying an affordable price. We yearn for jobs that gives you dignity, we try to grow bigger, we yearn for an MBA degree to adorn our CV. And we are ready to take up school for that - again - the coveted b-school. We felt like handsome hunks, and wanted gorgeous guls beside us - girlfriends - having one is good, having more is better. And now we see relationships are on the verge of extinction because of the trying jobs. like the count of number of tigers in the country, and we mark the number of days expected to be safe for us to maintain a healthy relation without getting time for date/chat/mere phone call -14 days 11 hours - if you go at a stretch bogged down in job and sparing no time for her, she will be gone.

Life is calling, where are you? Yes, life is indeed calling, we can see life flowing through busy streets down there, if we peep through the glass walls of our 14 storey offices, but our cell phones are jammed by reckless job. Not getting life's call here in this cage. And everything in life is indeed somewhere else. Somewhere far away - like a distant dream. And we don't dream much these days.

Wealth Is Ill Health!

Health is wealth is much heard a saying. In terms of mathematics, if a is equal to b, the reverse is also true, i.e. b = a. But only in special cases, the reverse corollary for the above saying is true. When?

When we say we do work out regularly, that doesn't mean that we go OUT and WORK in our workplaces. Instead, what we mean by working out is exercising to maintain our health. And that is sometimes possible without spending wealth directly. If i go for a jog in the early morning, and shed a few grams of extra fat, do I really spend money for that? No, wealth is not really needed to maintain health, or to gain health from a state of ill health. But is it an absolute estimation of cost for health? No, because, what we forget is time. We do not buy time, but with time, we can create wealth, so time is a raw material for wealth creation, and that's why the other saying goes - Time is money! Now, if time is money, I am spending money when I go for a jog for 15 minutes. May be I am not Mukesh Ambani, or Sachin Tendulkar for whom the newspapers and magazines will print special articles assessing the per second earning of those wealthy souls, but however low it can be my earning per unit time can not be equated to zero. (No I dont mean to say that everytime I am earning, I earn in INR only for the stipulated 8.5 hrs of my job per day and 5 days per week, but that's all about direct earning, if I spend my free time in doing something which will add value to me, that value is also comparable to money, even if there is no known formula that converts value to a physical sum). So my intent in this wordy paragraph is to establish that health is gained only at an expense of money. And this expenditure varies. It's minimum when we do things like jogging, or push ups on floor. But it's maximum in case we go to modern-facilities-provider gyms like Talwalkar's one of whose franchisee is there in my vicinity as well... approx 12000 Rs. a year is what they will charge for the most ordinary scheme of membership there. So, if you can pay the sum, you can gain good health. (obviously, you have to attend it regularly, and do what you need to do there, not that you pay and flee away, and you expect to be a Salman Khan after a year). So, in special cases, we do see, wealth is health.

But the above is in special cases only. So what are the general cases I am pointing to here? Take my case. A guy who intelligently chose to work for a French MNC instead of an Indian private sector steel making company, felt proud about being part of a culture which, until that time, was hallowed as Yem Yen See... Mind it! But the true picture comes clearer as we go ahead and get closer to what we want to see. And when that happened, I truly realized the whole chemistry of outsourcing industry. Be it just the much-abhorred call centre business, or be it a much euphemised engineering out sourcing companies. The moral of the story is same everywhere. They pay you, to make you create things that will sell in higher price than the cost of their creation. In simpler language the profit margin is to be there for the business, like the blood in human body. Its so essential a fluid in the system without which the system wont work. And to make provision for that life-sustaining-fluid, somebody is sucking that of others. Now I sounded a little too harsh on them. No I didnt mean that they are like American Capitalists who had a number of slaves to work day in and day out to fill up their masters' treasury. They are much benevolent and labour friendly in terms of perks and packages they offer to us. And they indeed take care of our hospitality when they send us on tours and trips for trade (read business, it's been long I used an alliteration) or training. None of my family members could imagine when I was born, that this child would grow up and only in his mid twenties would earn a sum that's only a couple of years away from being a 7 digit salary. It's hefty, indeed. Boss, they are paying!

But having said that, the receivables are only quantities, and we over look the quality in this effort. The assessment should be more radical to our souls, not just about the advancement / modernization of our periphery - not about the luxurious coziness that their money can buy us. The point is we do things that do not really require skills of an engineer (not that I am so skillful; today's education system will never make us skillful except making us quantity-oriented. The not-so-hard-earned pass mark is what makes us 'engineers'). We are simply underutilized, and our brain swords that could be honed to cut off iron bars, is just cutting green grass repetitively. Repetitive stress is too annoying, and the westerners invented machines, and parallelly discovered money-seeking-men in the east. And we are running so less than our capacity, that it is simply stealing our capacity to think or to do things, that matter. In a figurative language we are becoming intellectual eunuchs (dont mind, havent talked about our physical transformation so far). Mentally ill is what we are.

Now that mind stays in a body. And a healthy mind stays in a healthy body. And unhealthy one in unhealthy body, of course. No the statement is not logical, pun intended. But the kind of task that we do is stealing our ability to do task as well, physically. The cozy seat of the ergonomic chair that can swivel 360 degrees about an axis aligned parallelly to our spines will ensure safe distance of our eyes from the computer screen and will make right angle at our elbow that will type in the key board crores of illegible codes that only machine can interpret. But that chair will make us stick to it for hours past our stipulated close-of-business time, making a safe distance from our home and family and fun and frolic which adds to good health, both mentally and physically. Not to forget the pot bellies that the pot like cup of the chair (consisting of the concave back rest and gripping arm rest panels sideways) will gift us after only a couple of months. I will give you one more analogy. You know, pitcher plant? The leaves of which will form a pot like shape to attract insect, and when a poor soul falls prey to it, the pot-leaf will suck all its life-blood.

Physically fatigued, mentally exhausted, you come back, with pocket full of wealth and heart full of ill health!

Random Musings #2

D for destiny. D for drudgery as well. And drudgery is what opens the gate of destiny. Desires are long borne. Dreams are dreamt so often. But sometimes this diffidence that kills the man in me. It seems, as if in a big cauldron with hot oil bubbling on fire, like a demon's ire it can burn me down to ash. It seems the wings of mind are castrated. Incapability has jacketed the soul. Termites galore have crawled up my feet, climbed till neck high. Despair and disdain has devoured me down its stomach. Dilemma - Distress - Dejection acute!

They say it's not the end of road, and he said, "miles to go before I sleep", but me? Need a break, exhausted in just 3 years. Life is a deal, and I could not deal with its business. Red marks in PLA, cash flow tending to nadir, balance sheet has lost the balance. It's not easy, and it's like a war, not really a little ambush. And staying alive is not enough, staying long is the motto. Survival is the need of the hour.

It's not fear, it's not greed. It's not the money that buy things many. It's passion, it's a wish that rose long ago, to prove a point, to make it done. Not to prove it to you, and you, and you. The destiny is about proving to own-self. It's about beating one's own record, dreaming new dreams for a destiny-re-designed!