The problem is compounded when you are informed of your schedule, peremptorily, by a bunch of men and women who do nothing but laze around in office all day. This week, I took a seminar at an engineering college for three consecutive days. The institute makes half a million (rupees) from such sessions. They are conducted over a week during which we guide students on how to crack the written tests that companies administer for recruitment. This is followed by group discussion and personal interview training.
When the sessions ended, I was frankly surprised that I had been able to withstand the experience. The forced politeness, the detailed presentation and the endless questions. It was dull, prolonged pain, like an undetected angina. 22-year-olds with the intelligence of infants. "Is the CV font size 12 or 14?" "Does the margin look good?" "Is this co-curricular or extracurricular?" I felt like running away in frustration. But hadn't I been just like them at one time, fresh out of engineering college, with a Tata Consultancy Services employment contract to boot? My, how much one changes!
Back to my tale of woe. I expected my employer to consider the long hours I had put in at the seminar and assign me less work for the remainder of the week. If wishes were horses! No sooner had I left the seminar venue on Wednesday evening than I received a message from the scheduler about the next day. Three two-hour sessions, of which two were new batches, which meant extra time for answering queries. Since this was all part of the eight-hour limit, I had no option but to comply.
So far, so bad. The next day recorded Mumbai's heaviest rainfall in the season - the one you read about in the papers. Dadar, where the coaching institute is located, was flooded. As I made my way out of the station, the handle of my umbrella broke.
I messaged the scheduler that I would arrive late. She sent the office boy with a spare umbrella. We waded through knee-deep water under the futile contraption like lovers with a thing for gunk. When I reached the office, I was drenched to the bone. My trousers stank and my T-shirt clung to my back. The material in my bag was wet and my notes stuck to one another.
It was one of those frustrating moments that make you wonder how you got to them in the first place. I am a writer - all I would like to do is sit and contemplate. I had only hoped for a little space to do so. My life had conspired so that I would have the option of doing something basic, like teaching, while also writing. I had sought this freedom, and in a generous mood, was grateful for it. But I had also started believing that I must engage fully with life for my writing to carry meaning.
My writing, I had decided, must emerge from a deeply kind part of me. A part that was generous and patient with the tiny day-to-day tragedies. I felt, without basis, a need to justify my twofold existence - be a wannabe writer with a dip into the edgy, while also being a suited member of the bourgeois who perforce did a day job that sat well with his MBA degree.
As I put down my bag and looked into the expectant eyes of the office staff - "Thank God he made it!" - I saw in slow-growing clarity that this studiously constructed love-for-the-world edifice was a farce. This tendency to give way, to make adjustments, to live but never to claim, to deny the freedom that was my due - all this had made me look at the world soppily, and perpetuated this banal existence that I had wrought for himself.
"Can I leave after the class? I don't feel so well," I said to the scheduler, even as I wished to rush out that very moment, without talking to or informing anyone.
"Let me talk to the boss," she said.
"Yes," I nodded. Everything was procedure, methods, duties.
I went to the front of the class and dismissed the students' questions on my wet state. "Let's begin," I said, appropriately formal. I looked at myself as I wrote the name of the session on the white board. My attire was thoroughly different from the formals I had donned just the day before for the seminar at the engineering college. There, I had pontificated on the pros and cons of a salaried life. I had made presentations on what one must do to achieve "success".
I was despicable to myself.
The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one