Collected Status Messages - 7

Here is a candid selection of the status messages I posted on a social media website between the months of September and November 2015:

I. On reading 'A Life Long Ago' by Sunanda Sikdar and 'Tagore, The World Voyager' Translated by Sugata Bose:

The weekend that had passed by has been particularly productively used. If time is of the essence in the hustling clamour of the world, then I could have some time off for reading two wonderful books. ‘A Life Long Ago’ by Sunanda Sikdar and ‘Tagore, The World Voyager’ (Translated by Sugata Bose).

‘A Life Long Ago’ is a deeply-felt memoir of the author’s childhood years lived in the 1950s & 60s before Bengal’s partition. The book has been translated from Dayamoyeer Katha (in Bengali) to English by Anchita Ghatak. The original Bengali has been awarded the Lila Puraskar by Calcutta University in 2008 and the Ananda Puraskar in 2010. Partition and post-Partition have been a subject of personal loss and heartburn for decades and some wounds never seem to heal.

‘Tagore, The World Voyager’ is a book of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. All of these Tagore poems are appearing courtesy of a new translation by the renowned professor of history and diplomacy at Harvard University Dr. Sugata Bose.

II. Where Do I Live? - a poem I composed on a whim:

On the sunny side of the street,
By the encroached lake
Whereupon my apartment stands in the light of day,
And under the stars of each night shining down.
There, my friend is my house of over a decade;
Holding sway in the Milky Way.

- Composed on 19 Oct 2015

III. On reading 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair' by Pablo Neruda and 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest' by Stieg Larsson:

'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair' is a collection of amazing love poems by the widely acclaimed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Another book I finished reading is 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest” by the Swedish author Stieg Larsson. 

When I read the first book in the trilogy 'The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo' I knew I was reading an incredible Crime Fiction novel. I was instantly hooked right from the first page. I read the second book and now the final book of the trilogy and it has been a roller-coaster ride with its steep climbs and falls. Reading these books often stunned me emotionally; it caused me to recoil from the graphic nature of the stories.

- 28 Oct 2015

IV. On Writing 'Lost Days of Glory' A Fictional Memoir:

Finishing my fictional memoir LOST DAYS OF GLORY next month. I wrote what I believe to be the final chapter of my memoir (which I’m now calling “CHAPTER 48 – Final Notes” Less of a mouthful and hardly attention-grabbing title. Never mind. But of course, I still have an Epilogue to publish which I am very likely to do after I am done with the final chapter.

I am not at all secure in the belief that this is over, but I think… yeah…it’s all over now!

I nailed it.

I am DONE.

- November 2015

By Arindam Moulick

Pix Courtesy: Internet

CHAPTER 47 - A Professional Hazard

The ‘Financial Couple’

TD Suraj and Sexy Devee kept their jobs nice and easy with their share of Finance profiles at Taikhana and STC branches, respectively, going good.

Their head for Finance was incorrigibly fanatical and they liked keeping it that way without causing any social problem to anyone who interacted with them. Fanatical or not…but these friendly guys were as easy-going as anyone could be, both personally and professionally.

One good thing about them was their personality trait, which was to say that they’d always loved to “be specific,” especially – GG’s left-hand man – TD Suraj who loved revelling in the specifics of things and every so often loved playing the proverbial ball right off the bat too. That part of his plain persona, not unlike Sexy Devee’s, had almost always used to come face to face with GG’s inhuman fury so great that he (Suraj that is) had stopped taking offense altogether and took it all in his stride as a professional hazard thing – or, perhaps, just to be capable enough to live another day at Satyam working as best as he could muster. Just how did he do it? Nobody knows!

(Satyam offered us a great working atmosphere and that was a clincher as far as our fledgling careers were concerned. We favoured Satyam just as it favoured us back. The feelings were undeniably mutual and we loved that.)

‘Truck Driver’ Suraj’s LOGO was POGO, and therefore he liked satiating himself in the maxim he got to invent or supposedly have learned from somewhere: Live today to fight another day! Like they show in Tom and Jerry cartoon show! GG (Tom Cat) running after Suraj (Jerry Rat) and Jerry giving it back to Tom in whatever way he can.

Eventually, Sexy Devee too, like Suraj, had become quite unmindful of our boss’s constant barrage of plaintive cries and hurting jibes. It was a dry "professional hazard thing" no less, that bore on his soul like an impossible reality, either you bear it with a sly grin and make no bones about it or you don’t, or better still get on with it as soon as you can to survive your share of the "professional hazard thing" at the workplace. Still, for a gentlemanly Devee, his profession at Satyam despite being under our boss GG Howdy’s spell of bossy extremities was one big delight of inspiration and success that he supposedly has tasted all right, likewise his partner TD Suraj.

Both these guys have been found jostling along the hard way till the very end of the days when the roaming division was being ‘taken away’ from Satyam and that’s when they wised up to ditch GG Howdy’s employment offer at an organization interestingly named as Cow-Labs his mastermind friend had founded. This ‘financial couple’ continued working at one of Satyam’s numerous finance divisions – firstly at an office nearby Marsh Mellow building – where once upon a time Neetu Scootywali had worked from and Arinvan had made the mistake of meeting her in her professional finery – and finally at STC, Badaourpalli where Devee and TD Suraj continued to work before Arinvan Maliek relocating to Taikhana office branch. Just a few months later TD Suraj was asked to relocate here with Devee left behind in STC.

Two years prior, however, the last employee to leave ‘our’ roaming division at the unforgettable Balsam-hued Tesser Towers on Raj Bhavan Road was Arinvan, before he was put on an IJP (internal job posting) and moved out to STC. Afterward, when STC couldn’t offer what he’d wanted career-wise, he couldn’t help but make strenuous appeals to be shifted to Satyam’s Taikhana center riding one last time on an IJP possibility and get enrolled in a new project assignment there. But little did he know that this too would turn out to be a damp squib.

Taikhana Center: A Damp Squib

Nonetheless, moving to Taikhana (rhymes with the word Paikhana, can’t help to be openly specific about it here!) branch was a BIG mistake; some ghastly misstep of his Fate combined with an inadvertent oversight had brought him up face-to-face with some of the world’s devil-in-the-sheep’s-clothing badasses that were roosting in Taikhana unabated, with no one to put them in their place by letting them know that they are not as worthy as they think they are. Nobody to tell all these unlettered folks that they are mere employees paid to work in a team and so get on with your job guys. One naturally expects one’s manager to bring these unwanted things (and beings) into a sort of resolution but the man came across as a person whose credibility was questionable to carry out a task such as this. So bash on, regardless of whatever happens!

And then there were a few managers who were needlessly edgy about things even as their general conduct at the workplace was found to be far from sympathetically cordial. This was my sole assessment during my time there and I don’t think it is incorrect in any way because I have experienced it firsthand and I know bringing this up as a tale, stale that it sounds now wouldn’t really help anybody or anything but maybe, just for the sake of posterity, I should as well 'pay it forward' this way? These guys were kind of caving in on their own heaps of mental anorexia thanks due to a sense of constant fear and anxiety that never seemed to have abated with them, and mind you it was also not due to some pell-mell work schedules that they thought they could showily brag about all the time while at work; it was most certainly about a constant cacophony of misgivings that brooked no mental peace for them while they were at work. It is, as though, their own ludicrous idiosyncrasies had cast a pall of irreversible gloom on their minds, permanently so. Not that we young guns were wise enough to crack this or surmise to our hearts’ content whatever we felt like about them, but the reality was stark naked in front of us to look and be ill at ease with the uncharitable goings-on. This kind of candid portrayal of our managerial people was pretty natural to come forth like the way it did within our minds’ psyche. But all this is true to the best of our knowledge and our sense of innocent humility and judgment. Amen to that.

Nothing wrong in wanting to “lead from the front” but that’s one ugly guff not worth my time to explore here on these pages, and besides I have several other good things to tend to.

The only thing that kept Arinvan Maliek from completely losing his sanity over his horrible encounters/experiences there, including working among some of the worthless negative cheats in the decrepit cacophonous refuge of a place called Taikhana, was getting the office work done and getting back home and reading Charles Dickens’ seminal novel The Pickwick Papers and Stephen King & Peter Straub’s scary Black House and his short-lived friendship with a certain spend-thrift going by the name of a romantic called Chand.

A Werewolf in Taikhana

Work was happening somehow, but unfortunately not without the unwelcome challenge of keeping the off-putting bunch of individuals at bay. They were the most wretched lots I have encountered in a glamorous company like Satyam. It riled me to think how did these oddballs/fellows have found their way to Satyam? They don’t really deserve to be here. It was kind of odd, very odd.

The decrepit Taikhana was literally teeming with savage wolves and vicious dudes such as a Bat-eared, embryo-sized, permanently stunted queer little nut-case going by the cattle-class wonky name of Langur “bloody” Doggy. The word "bloody" was his favourite expression and he meant it with tooth and nail. This guy – hardly more than 5 feet or even 5 inches (who cares!) from the ground up – had a … err… Werewolfish trait (plus a nasty grin) of committing acts full of mala fide intentions behind your back in connivance with our common P.O.Y. (Person Over You), a Supervisor that is. Unfortunately, the Supervisor we worked under was a retired Services personality type docile to the core, and this chinky-squinty-eyed The Werewolf of Taikhana Langur Doggy had shrewdly (akin to a Mole) turned himself into his go-to protégé of sorts.

(Docile Supervisor? Yeah, that’s on account of freely partaking Services-supplied subsidized beverages from his well-kept always-at-hand regular canteen and becoming a pusillanimous thing – a queer and docile sort of creature that snoozes most part of the day!).

The Docile Supervisor remained largely aloof and sheepish to this slimy squinty-eyed pissed-off lobster’s (Langur Doggy) ratty back-biting machismo. Instead of beating him black and blue to scare the bloody witches out of this fed-on-cunning Langur, the Docile Supervisor preferred to remain in glorious psychosomatic peace and submissive to the menacing reality of the team-destroying evil spirits his so-called protégé brought at our workplace, every day. What ignoble creatures were these P.O.Y. and his sprung-into-boss’-good-books lap-dog going by the crabby name of Langur Doggy, not to forget that his every spoken utterance from his mouth (with no lips, hardly any!) had the muggy word “bloody” bludgeoned into it.

But sadly nothing of the sort you’d automatically expect had happened. Egged on by the Supervisor, the Bat-eared Langoor (Langur!) went on his intimidating missions like a headless chicken on a run, with the proxy Supervisor manning the necessary controls or whatever was left of it in tow! As a result of that horror unfolding, a permanent sort of ill-feeling had begun spreading its slimy tentacles within the collective psyche of the team members sounding the death knell for the business unit we worked for. These two small-minded Geckos were known as the unholy proponents of doom. Absolutely 'bloody' disgusting!

All this nonsense surely has added up to the bad times that had brought the downfall of one of the IT company giants Satyam Computers.

Among the Vicious Lots

No doubt, there were other callous brutes such as an ugly, low-class quarrelsome Vixen who loved to sermonize herself mouthing rowdy cuss words like a**h**e, et al, throwing all docile womanly traits to the winds. Some nameless uncivilized donkeys were there in full attendance; freeloading scandalous badasses with seriously ghettoized decaying mentalities that smack of meanness the moment they open their mealy mouths to talk; constant back-biting and vicious attitude akin to a troop of rabid rampaging monkeys – altogether a spiteful faction of individuals with an insatiable appetite for committing mean acts (jabbing among one another is their favourite pastime) permanently high up on their radar. And this entire circus-like jamboree was headed by one humourless, seriously dark, staid-looking, Services alcohol-funded Head/Supervisor (of our department) whose actual head was supposed to have lost its grip on gravity mainly because it was miles high above the terra firma!

Chand Reading Rand

Before our friendship could develop, Chand took a leap forward, needed to, for a well-deserving new job, and went off to a hoi polloi place called Bangalore to live a life filled with genuine free-thinking good-humoured friends, serious professionals, and meaningful companionships that count. At the end of his association with Satyam, he turned a great deal thoughtful than I ever knew he was. He went and bought two books by Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to mark his much-needed departure from Satyam’s Taikhana branch.

On the last day of his stay at a rented 2nd-floor apartment at Asha Officers’ Colony when he took out these fat books from his blue suitcase to show me, I remember kidding him: “Chand reading Rand!” setting off his gentle gurgle of quiet laughter.

It seems that friendships made in Taikhana don’t last longer than they should. Whatever little friendship we had was like a “Limited Edition” variant that had outlasted its value prematurely. Ours was, still is, perhaps will be, and forever, living proof of that sorry statement about the kind of friendship we had. Saaks yaar! What a pity.

(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.

CHAPTER 46 - The End of the Golden Era

Leaving Tesser Towers

If truth be told, Arinvan felt unable to leave his cubicle, The Beauty Spot, at Tesser Towers office, let alone leaving Satyam altogether post the taking away of roaming division. Leaving Satyam’s Tesser Towers was unthinkable to the extent that he felt he was deeply rooted in the cubicle he shared with his colleagues. It was like the end of everything beautiful that he had come to know and love in his professional life at The Beauty Spot that he couldn’t stop thinking about, being unabashedly nostalgic and all, and move on to some other unknown vistas for work.

Quitting (I didn’t feel right to use this word, but then one doesn’t ‘leave’ office – as they say: one quits) the beloved place was like putting an end to his professional life – an act to him was sacrilegious to even think about it, let alone actually doing it.

Arinvan loved working at Satyam and especially The Beauty Spot on the 5^th floor was his high-brow think-tank – the daily job routine he had there was nothing but a treat; his share of daily tasks and responsibilities were so much fun negotiating; its good-humoured, fun-loving colleagues; and just about anything seemed to flow smoothly. So letting go of the cherished The Beauty Spot, where he worked, day in and day out and considered it to be a privilege to be there in the midst of new things and people, was nothing but infernally heartbreaking for him to deal with in the final days of his life at Satyam.

Satyam’s roaming division was no less than an addiction to Arinvan’s sense of professionalism as it has always brought the best out of him. And what a pleasure it has been for him as well as for others to work and prosper there – albeit all under the hideous reign of the General Zod GG Howdy.

How Not to Quit Your Job

Life was pretty magical despite the fact that we were going through the abject misery of dealing with a horrible boss. We simply blamed our sorry Fate/Kismet (whatever you call it) and moved on without much gumption. How? We just don’t know. I guess we somehow learned to shut out the fascist General Zod GG Howdy, an unfeeling bad-tempered reporting manager by keeping up the good work while also managing to deal with the fascist monster as best as we could. If that was the only way we could handle such a horrible man, we never knew; except that we just did it the way it felt right.

Keeping him out of the periphery of our sanity and understanding became our preferred pastime at work. While he wrangled on in his own uncouth way, we kept our cool and gradually found ourselves totally unwilling to mind his contretemps that we absolutely felt repulsed by.

He wouldn’t allow us to disagree with him anyway, so why bother exerting ourselves too much to make a point or two in the Monday morning meetings we loathed so much. We shared ideas no doubt; made points that were worth making (but hardly ever have they been taken in true spirit). And if that is the way it has always been in his fascist regime for all we know, then so be it. We couldn’t care less. No hard feelings on that score, not yet. Boss is always right when the going gets tough and the tough never gets going! I’ll say it my way.

Of course, “bad” is a relative term to use. What do you do if someone in the rank of your reporting manager gets nonsensically brutal at the workplace and seems hell-bent on something or the other non-issues hitting the fan? Do you ‘manage’ it or ‘whine’ or ‘complain’ about it? Or get the hell out of the place, problem solved? In a critical situation like this, which one will you have chosen to get away from your ruthless boss?

Allow me to offer you the following – We ‘basically managed.’ Just how did we ‘basically manage’? Well, although Arinvan Maliek, (that’s me the storyteller), nearly came to calling it quits, he didn’t. He didn’t have to. Quitting was no solution because the so-called ‘bad people’ could be everywhere, so to speak. Again, people may look ‘bad’ to me but, in the same vein, may not be as ‘bad’ to others, and therefore dealing with them should become a forceful tendency for matured professionals who look for work/challenges at the office and not taking it all personally whenever something turns out of the blue that is not to your liking. Maybe, things rear up not because you were to be blamed for it but – let’s say – because of others? No, I think not. I reckon the mantras of maintaining unwavering professionalism and decorum in the workplace include these and more: Let it go; Be easygoing; Deal with it if you can; Display competence; Demonstrate the core values of professionalism; Listening carefully; Being positive; Just keep up the good work, no matter what.

A Company of Heroes

Manpreet Singh too had felt like quitting many times, and so did all others. But thankfully, the unfamiliar feeling of quitting came and went its way without mortally affecting us.

I think we came a long way knowing that QUITTING THE JOB due to one person was no answer to the question of dealing with a bad boss. It was a lame thing to do. Then what was it that we figured was an answer to that question? Well, we did our best not to come to a sorry state of quitting the job and do something that imperils our career plans; that would be of little use. It wouldn’t help our sense of professionalism and work experience. Bosses, especially like the one we had, are often insecure; yet we felt that the one we have will eventually come to realize your true worth/value and not want to lose you.

For us folks at the workplace, it was like a Thinking Cap we had adorned our pretty heads with that did the trick of continually persevering at the workplace and be just enough inspired to come to the office and work freely. Like a true-blue band of Heroes (and heroines), we kept our cool and took it all in our stride, and worked for our careers to prosper. Come all ye!

(Perhaps, you may even want him to be put in rehab as a last-ditch effort! A quick-fix intervention like that could bring the best behaviour out of him and get him trained to be a better person…and then, voila! he transforms into a better boss and a better human being. No such luck indeed).

It’s just that you don’t lose your sanity or sink to the boss’s level. Therefore, quitting the job by writing a glorious resignation letter was hardly a solution to take recourse in. Otherwise, if you want to see your boss winning in his battle/tug-of-war of meanness and nastiness with you then go ahead quit and have yourself officially known as Quitter! But not us. Because it was his battle, not ours and so we refused to come to daggers drawn with him. We just ensured that we did the best at the job – the best and nothing but the best. Maybe, we worked for the company per se, not for him. That’s like maintaining tact and caution at the workplace and keeping a cool head on our shoulders often always spells no trouble? Chilled out! Aren’t we?

Fortunately, by the time when the roaming division operations was completely shut down, Arinvan's colleagues (he did not know were far more change-savvy than he had ever acknowledged they were) were no longer there to catch a glimpse of him shedding self-gratifying tears day after day in an empty furlong cubicle in the East Flank and sitting tight for an IJP to take place so that he too can be spared from the dismal state of affairs he was suddenly finding himself churned in for no fault of his. Change-savvy? Got to learn that!

His colleagues left one by one because they had to; only he couldn’t make up his mind to leave Satyam and look for other options. A belated internal job posting (IJP) came to his rescue but that story should at best be left out than talked about here, for one is not in the sneering mood of some tacky confessional fiction and that is so beside the point, if you ask me, I am trying to knock together here.

So this is how it turns out when you feel rooted in the job you do daily and love coming back to day after day, year after year. To be sure, the problem with us so-called Nice Guys is that you begin to love your job so very much that you want it to reciprocate in kind. One may luxuriate in that one-off special feeling whatsoever and end up spending days, months, and even years working for the company you like...oh…LOVE, actually. Isn’t that something special? Tell me it is.

If LOVE is rather a strange word to use in the context of one’s profession/ job one keeps then I think we, particularly me, should grow up at once and wise up a little more on that subject while we are at it. A job doesn’t require LOVE. (Does it?). It requires dedication, commitment, and maybe even passion – but not LOVE. LOVE doesn’t happen with a job. LOVE exists elsewhere in other people's hearts, not at a job place certainly. JOB is no LOVE and vice versa. JOB is a JOB. JOB is equal to colleagues and bosses and work, while LOVE equals family, friends, and girlfriend(?) – the way it has always been: the stuff of one’s profession one may have until one is aged between 58 and 60 years.

Yet, during those early days of my vague inexperience, it felt OK thinking that looking for a job elsewhere would tantamount to settling for something less than your worth. I confess I didn’t think through properly enough when I found myself musing about this – I don’t think I will ever find a job I can love that very much again. That sounds true even today. I know old habits die hard, and I still feel none the wiser sometimes when I think back to fragments of those younger days, those wonderful pure moments of joy and longing at Satyam. The point is I can’t say I’ve had enough of those days. Oh if I could only turn back time.

All in all, Fate has inevitably proved that no one can deny his sorrow and suffering. But there’s no denying the fact that Arinvan was too young to handle such emotional pretexts on account of which he shed a copious amount of tears of loss and longing in equal measure.

The End of the Golden Era

Satyam was a great company to work in and that’s one of the reasons it was really difficult to consider leaving/quitting Satyam he had come to revere very much. All he wanted to do was keep working there till his last breath was out and that’s another reason (of belonging to Satyam) why the moment of letting-go came not well until after two hopeless years when he had to finally wake up from his invented dream and make up his mind for the second but last time to resign from Satyam’s most wretched office building: the ever so revolting ghost house Taikhana office branch, before shifting from the beautiful resort-like campus of Satyam Technology Center (STC) located at Badaourpalli.

The end of the golden era…it was what I felt then. The loss of roaming division was like the loss of El Dorado, the legendary mythic city of gold. Never mind the legitimate monetary benefits or perks that came along with it but the glory itself was too great to lose.

Leaving his beloved place of work at Tesser Towers on Raj Bhavan Road was the toughest part he had ever faced in his professional life. Once upon a time, it seemed it was unimaginable for him to let go of the place of work he loved so much and loved coming back to day after day. Roaming division was like a well-earned pheromonal profession not just for Arinvan but practically for everybody else who has been associated with it. It was a people magnet that everybody felt drawn to it in mind body and spirit. Satyam at Tesser Towers was nothing short of an amazing place for people and their talents to flower. Arinvan loved his daily commute to Raj Bhavan Road for work. It was not just another job, it was Life. Heart-breaking though now it is for him to realize that things have come to such a pass that he will, after all, have to leave the place and go away.

Perhaps, all those days will be forgotten sooner or later and there’ll be no one left from among us erstwhile friends to come back to our share of the glorious era to relive those precious moments again. No way it’s possible I know, for no one can go back in time and start living those moments all over again; it’s improbable.

Time is irreversible, irreparable. That’s what it is: one relentless forward march, it ever was and it ever will be. There’s no looking back. No chance. Time wins, always.

(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.