Tag! You're IT!

Loyalty at Work

This is not my attempt at starting a comic, though that's been on my mind for long. I never can start a comic because I can write the lines, but I can't draw for peanuts. But hey, if I can Work my ass all day for peanuts, heck I can do anything for peanuts. I have not been writing for a long time. And that's because I was mostly busy being, rightfully put, a Soberman.


I once had this epiphany. I used to live near the beach. So every time I go to the beach, I see the regular hawkers who want to sell their home-made murukku and sundal yelling their hearts out to make a few bucks. Honestly speaking, even the Sundal sellers have a business plan. I call it 'Dwell till you Sell'. It means you dwell long enough around the same person, repeating the same things in the same tone, you disturb their activity, and in turn they will buy something from you just to shoo you off. End result - Product sold! The customers most affected are the poor gaja gaja couples hiding under boats, the oldies who go walking holding the hands of their hot granddaughters, the we-don't-know-if-we're-in-a-relationship-now friends who are arguing over the last 'mistake' they made, and most importantly the sad old husbands who want to take some time off from their nagging wives and come to get some peace. But all they get is 'peas'. Salted and peppered, from the pattani sundal seller.

I digress. Anyway, there was this one time when I was sitting with a bunch of friends and this hawker boy comes by.

'Anna, kadalai vangariya anna? Nalla irukkum na. Please anna, Kadalai vaangunga na. '

You see, that roughly translated means 'Anna, please get some peanuts.  You'll love it. Get some peanuts'.

And I wondered. How much more peanuts can I get? Isn't that all I get at work? Well, I work at this IT company. I don't name it for legal reasons, my scrawny signature on some bond agreements, business relations rules and mostly because my company's name is too long and nodody really gives a damn anyway.

But I should have you know that I don't hate my job. I just want you to understand the following equation clearly.

Employee = Wet Garment.
Work = Water. 
Manager = Dhobi.                                                            

And the job, is to Wring! They wring the work out of you, and as a lucky by product, squeeze the life out of you too. One stone. Two mangoes! Haiya, jolly! What is worse, is that I work at a service company. A 'service company' is just a fancy definition for 'International Slavery'. If you have heard of one those old Persian slave markets in your history books where fat Persian merchants sell poor Asian slaves chained in their necks, imagine the same Persian guy wearing a double breasted suit and a tie instead and the slave wearing an ID card tag for a chain and you're nearly bang on target!

Honestly, I should see them screaming "Brown Indian! Mid 20's! Robust. Twelve hours of code a day. Starting price 3.5 lakhs!", but instead they put it to us in a corporate way by saying 'We have submitted your profile to the client.' That's when it gets worse. It does not require a census and all to conclude that most managers are invariably fat. And their rotten biology teacher must have told them 'Beta, all body parts grow proportionately'. So the manager decides to put it to test, looks down at his belly, then looks up at his brain and thinks 'Tadaa! I must be so brainy!' So he decides to come up with 'ideas' for all round progress.

To put it frankly, he has only one idea in his head - To get his lipstick mark on the client's bum. So he does everything he can to make the client feel at ease. I have no idea how that rotten British accented white man who wants 'resolutions' to his problems, became God. But managers have to worship him, appease his every desire and if not, it gets 'escalated'.

God, how much I hate that word. I have grown to despise that word so much, that if I visit malls these days I mostly take the stairs or the elevator, because the minute I stand on the escalator, the only thought that runs into my head is 'You're being escalated.' and instead of heading to where I'm supposed to, I automatically begin to search for my manager's cabin on the mall floor. And it is not a pleasant sight when you stand outside Pantaloons, push the door open and ask the security inside 'Excuse me Sir. May I come in?'

I've always had half a mind to quit, and just move to the jungle and live on berries and greens. But the problem with the wilderness is, the chicken still clucks and the barley is still barley. For a man who looks at a chicken and imagines the Zinger burger and looks at barley and imagines Carlsberg, I knew it was going to be a torrid time living on berries. So, I let that option fly by.

I decide to move to better horizons soon, but for now, for myself and my fellow IT employees, here's a line of code I wrote for you to ponder over.


IF (Company_type = IT) && (Manager_size = Fat)
{
 DoUntil (Death)
  {
    Work
  }
EndDo
 }
EndIf.

College Chronicles : The Smart, The Fat, The Geek and The Brat.

Discounting the scanty few who either gave up because they had been diagnosed with a perennial case of writer's block, or had their houses ransacked thereby losing their trusted 128MB RAM assembled desktop in the process, or decided that blogging was too much to type regularly and decided to settle for tweeting instead, or plainly lost steam because their respective girlfriends/boyfriends/corporate jobs gave them only just enough time to do the basic everyday needs of brush, bathe, deodorize, eat and sleep, I think I can proudly proclaim myself the most infrequent blogger on this portal. Therefore, I decided to break out of the loop and blog. So, there.

This following is a brutally honest, long pending post that is dedicated to a group of four friends who went to college together; namely The Smart, The Fat, The Geek and The Brat. This might unravel and blatantly state some raw truths that either the referred four or victims of the activities of the referred four might not appreciate, but as one among the four, I don't give a rat's ass and I don't give a rat's ass about the ones who do give a rat's ass. So, Anchors away!

The four of them had met on the very first day in college and as fate had destined it or race/color(as we later classified ourselves) had categorized us, The Geek and The Fat sat together, thereby leaving The Smart and The Brat to help themselves. The bench was for two people and three could just perhaps have adjusted, but with The Geek and The Fat in a bench you could only possibly squeeze in Atom Ant in the middle. (There is so little space that, though small, an ordinary ant will still be squished and therefore it could only be Atom Ant.)

The Geek was mad about technology. He loved phones so much that it was rumored that he spoke more to his phone than on it. I wouldn't entirely call that a liability as his N-gage helped while away the time playing Tony Hawk's on it while the septuagenarian EC professor rambled away about circuits and his divorce. The Geek wore his pants on his chest, which The Fat loved to make fun of but which he hardly could because The Geek was predominantly in the other class for reasons aplenty. The only way you could identify the geek was with his always-planted killer smile and his ample usage of the term 'lol'.

The Brat was a happy-go-lucky fella as his name rightfully states and he had as much interest in attending college as Maneka Gandhi would have had in endorsing for KFC. The SFM professor threw him out on the second day of college and the EG professor had told him that his Engineering Drawing diagrams had so many board pin marks that he began to wonder if he was drawing in Braille! The only subject he loved was English. Sadly, the English Professor, a slightly 'synonym-of-happy' person had as much love for him. The Brat was known to hit on so much as a mannequin that dressed well and looked good. Yet he was found more in other colleges than his, thanks to the multiple cultural fests held in the city.


The Fat loved Subway. He loved Subway so much that he made everyone else in class love Subway. You see, The Fat isn't the kind of fat people you would see on one of those Subway brochures. He is just fatter than the other three, and plus Fat rhymed with Brat which made me helpless but to address him so. The Fat had the cleanliness of a skunk. His hostel room stank so much, that Onyx could have adopted it to use it as a model dumping ground. But it was a great place for us to bunk classes and watch the Fat's collection of devotional films or sit and do all the pending records. Well, the proud fact is The Fat was the only person to have an official relationship with another girl in class, which the other three invariably helped him with by buying or carrying veg puff or cold coffee or both.

The Smart was well, Smart. When the tests loomed, all four slogged just as much and while the three scored nearly around the same region, The Smart always somehow scored more. He had a mysterious past for none of us knew about his past relationships though we knew he did speak to someone over the phone. Yet, he helped the other three and took notes meticulously, so we never really could blame him. The Brat had one note for four years and other two probably had ten for the entire stretch. The Smart had one for each subject. The Smart was known to know it all. Krishna christened him rightfully so. The Smart made up new swear words, but the most favorite was 'Binny ke'.

Yet the four of them invariably hung out together, either to write fake letters and go play snooker or break out through fancy backside paths to go eat the Sub-of-the-day for lunch. Sometimes The Geek decided to stay with the other section and ditch the other three, but hey, he was The Geek okay!

To us, what was not cool was 'gay'. Our favorite phrase was 'Dude! That's gay'. All of us secretly loved the song 'Bubbly' by Colbie Caillat yet made fun of one another when someone was listening to it. Though The Fat thought he was in some way a 'West-coast Nigga from the hood', and The Geek nearly belonged to the other class and The Smart was ever so responsible and The Brat was always attending culturals or judging them, there was something that knitted them together. They were poles apart on so many different levels, yet chose to be one group everywhere. The entire college could identify them, for they stood out in every which way.

The credits though would be,
The Smart - Aadityaa Padmanaabhan. (You could master math by just counting the 'A's in his name)
The Fat - Deepesh Nair. (His bluetooth name was Fat, Black and Balding.)
The Geek - Dheepak Krishnamurthy. (He writes phone reviews now. I think he got married to one.)
Obviously, I am The Brat. I work at an IT firm now. Honestly if my life could suck more, it would have been a Eureka Forbes product.

But I think I survived my college life only because of these three, for their company was all that made me live through college. They helped, shared and stuck around as friends no matter how big a loser I acted as and I don't think anybody could have filled their place. If I could though, I should say thanks. But hey, that would be 'gay'!