At work......

Getting humiliated at work is an age old phenomenon and a trauma every individual has to go through at some point of his or her career. I obviously, specially made no exception. What possibly would lay eggs for these words… a recent encounter, on a day which was supposed to be a good day at work. I was full of life and ready to have a beautiful day, more so as it was a day when I would start work at a very ‘human hour’, a luxury denied to us in lieu of many many other perks my job has to offer. But my happiness soon vanished through a terrible introduction with a very senior colleague who perhaps hated the very sight of me so much ( we were meeting for the first time…. ) that he launched on to me like an Al Qaeda missile not deviating from its goal of destroying its target even for a split of a nano second.
I couldn’t believe anyone could be so horrible and judgemental. I gulped down the insults and tried to stay calm. I.e. not cry. Apologizing was out of the question for I hadn’t done nothing let alone anything wrong. Confronting him would mean raising umpteenth complications including my possible temporary suspension from the duty (welcome to Indian bureaucracy )! It didn’t matter that he was an absurd incompetent old fool with an undue revenge policy. So I thought to myself that all I had to do was to let him finish and be as indifferent as possible. I looked straight at him, at times staring out of the window behind him. I think that triggered off some more explosive of bitterness in him since he launched onto another monologue, adding more insults and accusing me of having attitude problem. I had a difficult time controlling my tears later on while my other senior colleagues tried to pacify me, telling me that he had a reputation of being so uncouth and addressing him with a certain not so nice yet suitable adjective starting with a ‘C’!
I started imagining giving it back to him, the same shit that he was throwing at me, if he continued in his negative pursuit. I was ready to walk out of the job on the spot! I could even adopt a reverse psychology, smile at him and ask him how he came to be so bitter in life and tell him there was so much to love in life…. Does he know how he lost it? Lolz. Thank heavens for your imagination. Eventually I avoided him in order to save myself from his unsavory wrath and abandon the thought of quitting the job that I actually don’t hate and love more often, because of some low class under qualified fool. Though it would prick me for a couple of months when I would think about the incident, time would heal my wound and I would soon become indifferent to its memory. In the later part of the day, he treated me as if nothing untoward ever happened between us. He actually told me, ’……. u know many other things annoy me…..’ I guess that’s how close he came to an apology ( the one I shall not grant him ). Given the kind of profile my work has I may not meet him for a really long time or ever for that matter. But everyone may not be this lucky. Facing a mean individual everyday of your life can not only be stressful but also sheer harassment, hindering your normalcy and checking your performance. Well, I say welcome to India where every individual starts his day with a wistful vengeance unparalleled to anybody else’s.

Let's fly.....

Sitting alone on a table at the resto bar of an airport hotel in Hong kong, I couldn’t help but estimate the expenses and worry about my shifting to a smaller place next month back home at the base. The pub is buzzing with conversations. I take a look around and only see white skin, barring mine and of the staff of course. I involuntarily pick up the words floating in the air like passenger, domestic flights, paging et cetra in various accents. Brits to my immediate left and american to my far right. All of them are cabin crew members including me and excluding just a couple dressed in rather formal clothing enjoying their meal. the rest are only drinking. The place has a very american feeling to it with sports screens laid around, random Carlsberg signs flashing and an unattended piano right next to my table. Last time I was here, I enjoyed some amazing international music by absolute local performers with my good friend J.P. I see the singer arrive no sooner then I finish writing this n realize my arrival here has been a bit too early to call it an evening. She greets everyone without being greeted back and finishes her first song and finds everyone to be too busy in chatting to applause or even acknowledge. Not getting disappointed she immediately starts another song without a moment’s delay. That’s when I notice every table has people with vast difference of age. It didn’t matter though. They were colleagues having fun, enjoying a leisurely evening conversing, exploring, making the best of their layover at an unknown exotic land. Then why cant we Indians behave similarly? Why we grew old so early? Why a commitment stopped us from loving life? Why a marriage tied us down? Why cant we freely tell our parents how many drinks we had? Why could I approach strangers? Why my young colleagues talked about buying groceries? But I guess this is where I identified more with the world than just Indians. I was younger at heart and deep down I never want to ‘settle down’ in Indian sense of the phrase. As much as I am scared of behaving old and thus settling down and thus getting married. I am 96% sure that my behaviour would be as immature and as naïve as now. With an eagerness to flirt with a new life everyday and to shop only for myself!
As the evening progresses, I take a small tour of the prayer like silent n cold restrooms with stilettos and hiking boots marked on two different doors to bifurcate. Smaller groups now merge into bigger ones, an attendant offers me a magazine and a newspaper which I politely wave off. Finally a chinkie couple enters followed by another frequent visitors, mr. and mrs. Smith. A beautiful birthday song is cooed for captain Brandon. I move in to have my dinner at a near by café alfianco and notice a brazillian trio dressed rather obscenely and gulab jamuns being called rasogullas. The evening ended rather abruptly with meal…… though at the end I have two questions. Why the two good looking brits looked like gays to me and why…. Why exactly were people staring at me when I entered the bar?

traffic

There is a lot of pollution in this country, undoubtedly and a lot of traffic too. Everyone drives hugging each other, inching closer and closer by seconds slowly. We were waiting at the signal. I was on my way to meet Mr. A at his place in bandra. I heard a firecracker go boom loudly at a distant, startled by the loud noise; my shiver rattled the halting rick on a slope. The rick guy looked up instantly stared at me in the rear view mirror accusingly, I pretended as if nothing had happened and looked away at a distance suppressing a smirk in the farthest corner of my lips. The signal went green and we drove off. Loud siren could be heard from behind for quite some time. Nobody budged or even bothered to see. They never did. This was India. I looked at the people sitting in the car and wondered if they had heard it. Did they think about the urgency of the situation? Somebody could be severe labour pain inside an ambulance perhaps even dying… relatives howling, praying, and begging. After a while the siren stopped. Possibly, the patient was dead by now or a child born, dead or alive. Not so patient of them! But it was a cop car… somebody was at a gunpoint probably, being looted, being raped… but nobody cared. It most certainly was none of their business. And yes, very likely the cops just wanted get pass the traffic! I guess, still nobody cared.

an alien perspective!

While taking a ride home after paying my LIC premium due for a long time, I happened to pass by this square c shaped jewelers with its owners and employees sitting idly, staring at the road perhaps waiting for the customers on such a hot lazy afternoon. It somehow struck me as an odd vision. Wasn’t the whole scenario a little strange? Here were a bunch of people sitting in a constricted constructed place among furniture that took large number of hours and manual labor to be made, trying to sell yellow color shiny metal turned into different intricate shapes! It was this alien perspective, removed from the ordinary that gives a surprise every now and then. We are so settled in our lives, taking concepts and ideas for granted which are handed down to us from generations. But this alien perspective strikes me often n often it gets neglected. Many a times at home, while the bed sheets will be laundered and folded and handed over to me to take it upstairs to my room by mom, I would be astonished to see the pattern of flowers or otherwise! It’s the same bed sheet I have used over the period of time and yet I fail to recognize the pattern. You are likely to find astonishing facts by this alien perspective, let me tell you that! I fell in love more than once. And I failed each time. Blaming it on the circumstances, the lack of dedication of the other person or even God. At times I realized my mistake, at times I refused to compromise, more than once I got fooled and most times I felt betrayed and let down. And this made me wonder if deep down there was another reason for it. It was time to look at it from a different dimension which made me wonder if the fact of matter lied in the idea that I was incapable of love. Is it possible? Is it ever possible that a person cannot love? Is it possible that someone who grew up waiting for ‘the one’, someone who held hands, kissed gently, caressed, made love, whispered sweet nothings, gave surprises, bought gifts, walked the moon lit beach, danced in public without music, repeated those three magical words, exchanged flowers, exchanged juices, felt the heartbeat, engaged in embraces, fought over silly things, made up with fierce love, talked till dawn about nothing, cared for, cajoled every time, pampered, gazed into eyes, dreamt of a wonderful life together, made promises, mourned death when it was over, could this someone be incapable of love? Could people be incapable of love?