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.