Working at Satyam was a privilege. I still believe that the most remarkable aspect of my five-plus years at Satyam was the wonderful experience of working alongside cheerful, like-minded colleagues such as Devi, Mandeep, Suresh, Renju, Kavitha, and all the wonderfully warm, talented group of delightful people who made every day at the office genuinely special.
Kavitha, Mandeep, and I—all three of us—began our IT journey with Satyam in the Raj Bhavan Road office branch on the same day in August '98. I can still picture it in my mind's eye: We nestled into the blue swivel chairs, participating in our first-day orientation and onboarding session, helmed by Revathy, Rafi, and another colleague to facilitate a seamless transition for continued support.
While Kavitha left the group after a year-long career, Mandeep continued his journey to being a distinguished personality, clocking nearly three long years. Suresh joined a few days later, followed by Devi, who came on board a few months afterward. Both have been with the company for over five years, likely close to eight years or longer. Whereas I have spent over five years there, learning a great deal and growing professionally, as we all did simultaneously, Satyam has been the best part of my professional life; nothing has ever come close to it.
Barring one or two things, working with Satyam was a singularly fulfilling professional experience that fostered positive, if grumpy, leader(GG)-member(us) interactions, which in turn enriched our life satisfaction!
Aside from the new knowledge and learnings I've gained from this exceptional workplace, I also appreciated the whole vibe of working in a revolutionizing new-age Indian IT ecosystem of software and IT services, Satyam—which was well-positioned in the global IT market for software technology and business consulting—excelled in since the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, which was when the multinational technology colossus based out of HYD collapsed deplorably due to the 'creative-accounting' financial implosion.
Co-worker friendships were of the highest marker of my employment with Satyam, and so was the spontaneous interaction among us as we daily swished into our office on the 5th floor, East Wing sometimes, depending on the schedule, at 7am in the morning till 3pm or at 3pm in the afternoon till 11pm — swiped our office cards to enter the hall complete with a sea of high end custom-made spacious cubical office workstations and glass-fronted cabins; intercom phones rang with a gentle electronic ring; yellow Post-it notes uncurled and uncurled themselves: they were pasted on the sides of the computer screens mostly; clicking keyboards; sending out numerous emails before ensuring the intensive, data-specific information that they carry is carefully and meticulously researched and verified; filling the daily time-sheets; the printed daily schedule pinned onto the blue display board; and the tea and coffee, from the instant soluble Nescafe machine, infused into the white paper cups an emotionally brilliant hot coffee topped with a thick, luscious white frothy crema — was significantly, imaginatively, creatively perfect an office setting in earning our living.
In those days, there was no company like Satyam, and if you ask me, there was no need for any; it felt that Satyam was the one and only IT organization that needed to exist in the city — other aspiring companies if there were any, could wait or do something from the introspective corner of sidelines, maybe. Satyam felt eternal: We all loved coming to work, feeling increasingly grateful to be working as we enjoyed our five-day office week and lived a rich professional life while balancing it with a fulfilling personal life. There was ample time, particularly on weekends, to engage in retail therapy with friends at Park Lane or MG Road, an occasional Hot Dog or a Burger at Universal Bakery, pursue one's hobby of writing poetry and other leisurely pursuits, bond with long-time buddies from college days, and spend time within the comfort zone of home reading or writing: it took a month for me to finish reading Leo Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace.
Between the years 2000 and 2003, I focused on reading as many books as could be possible—despite the suffering of more than haranguing humungous ego of our boss who never gets past harsh yelling at the office—by well-known authors such as Barbara Taylor Bradford (Where You Belong), John Grisham (A Time to Kill), James Patterson (Roses Are Red; Violets Are Blue), Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember), and Stephen King (Black House), Nicholas Evans (The Smoke Jumper; The Horse Whisperer), Maeve Haran (The Farmer Wants a Wife), and literary influences in reading, such as Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet), Rabindranath Tagore (The Home and The World; The Wreck), Charkes Dickens (The Pickwick Papers) checking them off my bucket list one after the other. I actively sought out Nicholas Evans's other novels, The Loop and The Brave, but I was unable to find them locally. Luckily, I was able to dive into Evans's compelling storytelling because my brother bought the first two Nicholas Evans novels when he was in Australia.
Working at Satyam was a consistently delightful and distinctly pleasant experience. If you put our boss aside, that is. Never again did such a singular first job experience happen. Most of all, I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work alongside an exceptional team of incredible individuals who were, fortunately, my teammates—starting with Mandeep and Kavitha, then Revathy and Rafi, followed by Devi and Suresh, Renju and Gnana, Shiv and Shahnawaz, and concluding with the grumpy, habitually authoritative, GG and the friendly, harmonically elegant Balaji. Well, GG was an anomaly!
In a relatively short span, we became indispensable to our twisted reporting manager, known by the teeth-gnashing name GG, who was characterized by a notably abrasive demeanour, coupled with a rakish attitude and a tendency to exhibit intentional disrespect. Say what anyone must, we had a boss from hell who'd set the circus cat among the alley pigeons! Given his extensive IT-related experience, a rip-off kind acquired abroad mostly, and an undeniable air of old-world, old-school Info-Tech bravado as corporate sheen, a peculiar acumen of idiosyncratic professionalism that he brought to the table, we found ourselves faced with an unprecedented anomaly of the human spirit that we had to endure beyond the endurable. It was thanks to our ever-adjusting, young, economical mindset—a purity of ethical innocence—that we all survived for so long under his leadership, which was mind-bending atrocious, palliated by tech-fetish hypocrisy, and too crooked to ever fade from our collective memory.
(To suggest that GG was endearing as a reporting manager is beside the boiling point! He was never like that; he meant business and controlled everything with an iron hand, symbolizing the absence of any inkling of friendliness in his nature, even as he permitted no disagreement while demanding unquestioning conformity to his writ—his way or the highway: vetoing every input from us to smithereens. Yet he still expected these contributory inputs to reach him across the table in his cabin at every Monday morning meeting, even though he was not going to take them into account as, at one instant, he'd shout, fume, and typically spell the doom! And at another, he'd affirm, "We have come a long way." That's GG for you. A heaven-sent supervisor? Hell-sent rather: that's more like it. Take it or leave it. Put up or shut up.)
+*+*+*+
Just a thought… The notion of workplace friendship has become an oversold concept, outdated to its core. No one feels as impassioned about it anymore as we used to a long time back, unlike in the past when we attached so much importance to it that the loss of a friend left us debilitated for life, a sense of loss, grief, regret, emotional pain, and despair following a significant end of old connections. We thought deeply about the lost camaraderie and had tears in our eyes as we longed for those who had moved on.
And just what am I getting so upset about here? I know the term "friendship" is less important today and has lost its meaning, practically seen as a misnomer by those who no longer want to attach much significance to it and live with it as if everything is alright. Unfortunately, nothing is the way it used to be. Friendship is a lost cause that no one seems to prefer or favour.
Friendships can change. Old friends leave as though they are moving on to a new world where they can comprehend the truths they have lately encountered or have run out of time. Maybe that's the case, or otherwise, we don’t deserve to know why we drifted apart. We constantly feel like we're getting the short end of the stick. That's how the world operates these days: it preys on your fears because you can't help but feel like you're always falling short, constantly losing yourself in the agony of parting with friends.
Life only happens once, just once. Life is short, so make the most of it by pursuing your dreams—chase after jobs that are not available unrestricted: you have to fight tooth and nail for them, opportunities masquerading as disappointments, which fancy villa or unsustainable neighbourhood to live or die in, the ultimate leveller money: the great middle-class pittance, and, of course, which polluting vehicle to buy and show off in the society were egos clash and prejudices made. There is no point in spending time and energy on hyper-modern, hyper-technological people who no longer harbour any significance in your life than a random stranger. Or they are not important to you anymore in this aged and failed era defined by cataclysmic friendlessness that some of us are sorrowing over the death of friendship. So, don't look for friendship; it's a bother, a flat-tired teetotaller drag. Friendship gayee tel lene. Look for self-sufficient, privacy-conscious, and individualistic aloneness in a society that staunchly (and sadly) favours individualism over collectivism, where the original, nostalgic essence of friendship and intimacy are unpersuadable lost arts. Therefore, in an increasingly hectic world, socially gregarious collectivism is hardly prevailing. It's finished, rather. So don't anticipate which has become obsolete.
While that happens around the, ironically, interconnected world, let me also lead a happy, exilic existence. I'll do my work and let others remain steadfastly aloof of me. Soon, the world, I know, will figure it out for itself while I keep my abundant failures and a modicum of successes, obscured by the clouds of my distant past, away from the searchlight of well-meaning but drolly formulaic worldly concerns.
Friendship is gone for good! Here lies friendship. Long live friendship. Acknowledge the loss, let go, and move forward. Still, I can’t shake the thought that it is otherwise, but posterity will decide, I think, the true extent of what we lost after we left Satyam. Perhaps it is not as significant as I make it seem, but only time will tell. Maybe it did, but we could not accord the importance it deserved. But even time is a deceiver. Because it never looks back.
Smartphones are now our closest friends; apps are the new icons we look up to. Meanwhile, our new AI (Artificial Intelligence) overlords have already started causing job-sized damage, and the day is not far when they are going to take over humans, wholly and completely. What an appy life this is!
On a Devil’s Rollcall
Little surprise, then, that the fact that you often work in an office environment where your boss isn't supposed to like you right from the start is the most hideous fact of your new work life at the office.
One such person was our ex-boss, who bore the jarring, teeth-gnashing name GG. He never did like anyone, anyone at all, did he? Nope, I don't think so. Moreover, I can't honestly claim that he is among the people I think of when reminiscing about my wonderful days at Satyam. But yeah, since he was the bossy chief who liked bruising our naive, self-conscious, sorry-ass, uninitiated souls with his loud, stubborn, growling voice and had the insinuating aptitude for constantly nit-picking you down as you could only be surviving in his fiefdom as just one of his tick-box targets—a mere cog in the great, bustling Satyam office wheel—nothing else ever mattered to this abrasive bully. As the saying goes, “hell hath no fury …” his name, GG, appears to be malapropos at best. “You can call me GG,” GG insisted in the first meeting. Call him like that, or else, …
Hell hath no fury like a GG scorned,
Heaven hath no love like a GG mourned
Rubbish, but true.
GG would be thrilled if we held up as a pinnacle of dependability and reliability. "Came out unscathed," his frequently repeated, self-satisfied analysis, whenever he found himself in a difficult situation due to any persisting issue (usually one that we hadn't caused) but managed to get out of it, emerging unscathed. During the Monday morning meetings, he would recite the aforesaid stock phrase multiple times so everyone could hear loud and clear. That necessarily implied that without him, the whole office would come to a complete standstill, as it would seize up, falter, break apart, crumble, and shatter! Thankfully, that never happened!
Tension would quickly build if you were in the vicinity of our unapproachable boss, GG. His commanding maturity, replete with some serious anger management issues, was enough to make anyone, as a subordinate, feel small about themselves. Occasionally, the aggressive demands of his leadership would weigh heavily on us, even crush our spirits: Kavitha knew it very much, and so did we (both Mandeep and I) have equally tolerated GG's wrath. But thanks to Mandeep's (the 'man' is 'deep') sharp and witty humor back in our cubicle, Renju's soulful companionship and support, and the singularly gracious friendship of Devi and Suresh who too have sometimes encountered GG's fury, we could maintain a sense of joyous optimism regardless.
To GG, we were merely tick-box targets, for he was staggeringly dismissive of whether we were getting unnecessarily worked up over problems or concerns that could impact our young minds while facing the unflattering stresses and strains of working it all out for ourselves. Or if we were in a situation where there was hardly anything to stress about, which was, by all means, rare. We figured it out, as we learned, discussed, and supported one another on the team, how to manage stress, as we thought it was our responsibility anyway, and it was our first job. But GG's lack of avuncular concern did create undeserved mental agony towards the man we referred to, on his express insistence, as GG.
Embittered, I can drone on and on, going viral about this issue.
By Arindam Moulick
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