CHAPTER 45 - Life Isn’t All Haa Haa Hee Hee

The likelihood of losing roaming division (of Satyam) to a newly incorporated ‘outside’ company far outweighed the sagacity of our well-set professional goals and career objectives for the sake of a cushy software engineering career in Information Technology. We were beyond help like…sitting ducks. Our chief GG Howdy had seen to it that the end justifies the means, and how! Read on…

Arinvan, Manpreet, Devee, Suraj, Joey, and the Smiling Buddha Dilnawaz Khan instinctually knew that things like these would inevitably take a thorough beating, which has come home to roost and cause riotous problems to all of us. The first casualty would be to down the shutters of roaming division and with that will come to the doing-away of the young guns who proudly manned it daily and did awesome work that has been well rewarded and appreciated – with fine compliments from the clients thrown in. And now, ladies and gentlemen, their wellspring of livelihood was hanging in the balance. So life isn’t all haa haa hee hee! Is it?

Killing the Golden Goose

Needless to say, nobody, just nobody, not even our manager GG Howdy, our culturally-confused, mentally-chaotic, anal-retentive supervisor, had found it necessary to take us on board when this seemingly self-seeking manipulative decision was being taken or mulled over. Of course, we wouldn’t have agreed to such hara-kiri! No point in doing something that takes your job away, right? And no prizes for guessing that the powers-that-be would not try to break open their newly-coffined Golden Goose to seek the mirage of some quick jewels and stuff! Did he ever have the moral capacity to think this through like a true-blue professional busybody? No, he never had. How would he? In the case of a person like GG’s rank and file, he was merely an adjunct to the whole business grab that happened; he doesn’t qualify his mind to get morality kicked in! He had zero moral standing when the matter comes to keeping his job/profession intact and in his words “coming out unscathed.”

He made sure, either by hook or by crook, that he always won by sidelining other peoples’ contributions. Standing atop other peoples’ graves and pulling off some kind of macabre cosmic dance on them was one of his sadistic predilections not many people, except us of course, knew; literally speaking that is.

Why would GG take us into confidence about such an important development/issue that concerns all of us? Why would he bother to do that? Wouldn’t it be OK for him to say: JUST TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT? Yeah, for his kind of ilk that would be just the right thing to do. Else, consider this for a second: Boss as a father figure? Goodness Gracious! Get outta here! Not in this age, not in this era populated with managers who have unrealistic expectations unable to keep a reality check on their greed quotient but are notorious enough to keep pushing their unheard-of company bottom-lines. The golden era of proprietors making profits but sympathetically had long gone. Welcome to the new low in professional life!

That’s precisely what happened: GG – bossy as he always was and one is compelled to believe that he is completely devoid of homespun virtues – never bothered with us as far as this “new development” was concerned. He was cool and casual about it as if no one from Satyam can dare break his determined effort to lay forth his claim for roaming division and extract his pound of flesh. For all his sadistic mannerisms, he never saw it fit to get each contributing member on board with his plan; our beloved roaming division was all set to be ‘taken away’ to a new company outside of Satyam Computers and we were not made as worthy stakeholders of that business resolution/restructuring. Needless to say, all this wrangling about their ‘you-take-yours-I-take-mine’ ownership issues had left a very bad taste in our mouths.

Elvis Has Left the Building!

GG couldn’t care less to get us in the know. He left it to the ignominy of the good offices of other people to do the dirty work for him. He must have thought to himself: Who do they think they are? Just some bunch of hired Satyam employees. So stay in your skins! ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING! GG moved on with a new spring in his step and never looked back since, but just careful enough to throw one last furtive glance as if saying: Now you folks manage the show or whatever is left of it! I just don’t care anymore. Hee-Yah!

From that moment on, things at Tesser Towers began to take a chimerical shape that never abated until Arinvan Maliek had to make up his mind to leave Satyam…forever. But even then he couldn’t bring himself to any sort of personal resolution to put in his papers and leave the place for good, not until after 2 years of vulnerable time in Satyam.

When the new Millennium heralded itself with the first IT problem of the century called “Y2K bug problem,” Revanthi Rakani, Raufia Begum, Neetu Scootywali, and her secret admirer Dopeynath Pundy have all shifted from Tesser Towers to different locations. Turns out, the “Y2K bug problem” was no problem at all, and Satyam Computers was in the forefront of that warfare to squash the bug and it did, gloriously.

In 2001, Manpreet Singh and Gutkha Raju had already put in the papers with Dilnawaz Khan and Shiv Charan Joey reluctantly following up the act. ‘Truck Driver’ Suraj and Sexy Devee moved away to Satyam’s most iconic technology campus STC after weighing all the best options that they could take up there. That leaves Arinvan Maliek; he was the last man standing.

Not long after though, within a couple of months or so, Arinvan Maliek decided that he cannot continue to persevere working on the 5th-floor office of the Tesser Towers and keep mourning his loss of colleagues and the great job profile he had enjoyed up till now. Life is……how would you finish that sentence?

That was perhaps the first time he seriously considered quitting Satyam Computers for good; earlier it was during 1999 not long after Savitha Tandavi’s ‘Big Hand’ exit that he was almost on the verge of giving up on his bad manager the General Zod GG Howdy’s insufferably ridiculous behaviour poisoned with daily barbs of inexcusable antics and his bringing upon us one bloodless coup after another. But, as it turned out, it was hardly possible for him to come face to face with that wretched question of all: Should I quit my job?

Now when the time came to quit (or leave), he thought he will really have to uproot himself from the place of the now-defunct roaming division and look for a new place of work, new office, and a new project that will match up to his career expectations. And then one fine day STC came up for consideration and soon after he found himself packing up things to get there.

(To be continued...)

By Arindam Moulick

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. All incidences, places, and characters portrayed in the story are fictional and entirely imaginary. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental. No similarity to any person either living or dead is intended or should be inferred.