**Trumpets Roll**
Yea, I am stepping into the BIG WORLD of adults. I am no longer gonna be a teenager. I turn twenty tomorrow. I am so EXCITED about this entire idea of no longer being a teenager. And yea, I have a birthday bash planned for this day. Luckily, it’s a Saturday, and I plan to take an off from work, as I have already invited my buddies.
People I know are broadly categorized as-
People in my NETWORK: Includes all people I know through my work, random bump-ins, Meet in the metro, friends of friends of friends!
People in my social circle: It includes people who are hang-out buddies. People I go out for coffees, movies, mundane conversations.
Narrow-margin souls: This includes the entire jing-bang of people whom I treasure close to my heart. Friends I know will be there for me, atleast when I want them to be by my side.
On analyzing my entire year, I have 15 odd people in my ‘social circle’ category. Work doesn’t give you enough time to hang around too much with too many people. So, I started to call in and invite them for a house-party. It started with 15 and now the list has come down to 10! Out of these 10 people, I could die for 5 of them, if needed! People I think would be there, COME WHAT MAY!
Me and Avni were to throw the bash together, but she later backed out. I like birthdays when YOU are the cynosure. When all the focus, attention is just on YOU. So, I guess, it was a good thing. We decided that we shall host a summer fling party. Where people would be dressed in beachy clothes, girls with sunflowers on their ear, guys wearing rajnigandha garlands! With a concoction of MEditarrenean, Oriental and Italian cuisine. With La Bamba in the background! People holding blue curacao mocktails. (Mocktails cuz I don’t consume alcohol, so alcohol won’t come into my house either!)
But once she told me that she was backing out, all the responsibility was on my shoulder. I spoke to my ex and he was willing to cook for all of us. (Mummy, I need to learn how to cook!). I have bought all crazy things for my bedroom. Curtains, bedspreads, Lampshades, u name it and I must have bought it.
Yesterday was grocery shopping day. I was tired of working all day, checking out of work at 6, and then running around in local markets to fetch flowers, decorative showpieces for my house. My ex wasn’t willing to drive me down as he is busy losing weight in the evenings: D So, I persuaded Daddy darling to reserve an evening and drive me down the countryside and keep his fingers on his lips, while he did that!
And what I mistake that was. We went grocery shopping at La Marté and freaking shit! It was SOO expensive. I thought, dad was around and I picked up the best of the best and my basket was filled with foreign brands. Mayonaisse which costs 65 bucks otherwise, costed me a whopping 250 bucks. Curacao Syrup for freaking 425 bucks! An eeny-meeny bottle looked like a shot of tequila. But I readily picked it up thinking dad would foot the bill. After billing my items, I asked dad to bung the money out and he says, that he was the driver for the day, not the cash-bearer. Arghh, I got SOOO pissed! For picking up items and heavily getting rolled up for it! We went to the pastry shop, and I was so annoyed that I ordered the cake myself, and paid up for it and sat into the car while he was searching all around the place.
As we were driving back home, I asked him to drop me by the ATM and I could rope in some cash and shop the rest of my stuff. I strictly warned him that he better not call me before 9:30 cuz I wont be coming home till the time I don’t wrap up my shopping! Dad looking out on one side of the window, and me on the other side. We didn’t see each other and our driver was quietly driving us around. I hastily asked dad to drop me RIGHT THERE and as I opened the door of the car, BHAM! I hit a motorcyclist! And that guy toppled on the road with his bike over him. The doors of the car received a dent. I got down the car and started apologizing to that man.
And he was screaming on TOP of his voice. My dad walked down to intervene and very politely stated that if there is any expenditure to be incurred, he shall readily pay for it. That man was throwing a drama act. He was FINDING for scratches in his body so that he could squeeze some bucks out! A couple of young boys gathered around, who helped the biker get up as they saw my flooded eyes. (After thought, they might have just helped him out, to watch a sexy chic smile back at them! He he!)
Next, when dad asked him to check his bike. When the biker started his bike, it didn’t start. When others did it, the bike started! Poor luck! Dad also apologized, and then the biker and dad exchanged business cards at the accident spot! That was so funny.
And I heavily scurried out of the scene and rushed to the ATM to draw my money. Haven’t confronted dad since then!
I asked my parents to let me be home-alone with my friends. Hope dad doesn’t play party-pooper and spoil my wonderful plan!
Tomorrow will be the D-Day! I am really EXCITED! Would feed in more details after the part is ova!
Keep the trumpets ROLLING!
Tadan!
Happy Birthday To Me!
Ideas bottled between four walls, in one cubicle!
Work Woe1: I think my BIG BOSS is really TOO sweet. Seriously. I HAVE to quit work, but he is just SOOO sweet to me, that I dont know how I would say that I dont want to continue anymore. Not because the work environment is not good. But because,
A. I want to sit down for two months and study religiously and crack atleast one of the J-Schools.
B. This is NOT what I want to do. I wanted to be a JOURNALIST. Someone who goes out, sees the world around her and comes back to tell that very world what the ‘world’ is like.
I have been planning to resign for the past ONE month, but all in vain. I just post-pone my plan every week.
Work Woe2: I just HATE it, when my team doesnt understand what I am trying to convey. Just because I am the juniormost in the hierarchy doesnt mean that I am not entitled to have a viewpoint. Stubbornity pisses me off bigtime. And even more anooying is the fact, that you hear someone out and still feel that YOUR opinion, still holds true.
This is my first JOB, as in a JOB! I have never worked full-time before this. I guess, this is a wonderful platform, with extremely co-operative teammates. Just that my department, the content side, works from Bangalore and I am the only one working from here. Which makes things very difficult. I have never seen my department boss. Just Gtalk conversations and telephonic conferences are not enough to hold a TEAM.
Working gives you a high. My BIG BOSS, oh man! I really wish I had a relative like him. Like my foster-father or something. I think, his kids would be damn lucky to have a daddy like him. He is smart, funny and has RESPECT for opinions, even if it doesnt match with his own ideas. I guess, that the kind of people I want to be around. Who would have ideas which might not match with mine; but respect my idea as much as their own.
Every week, I keep pestering dad to write a resignation letter for me. I dont KNOW what to write in resignation letters. This job is really special for me, cuz this is where I earned my first REAL cheque. This was an amazing platform for an amateur like me. The work environment is very different from regular media organisations. This place is not pro-smoking, its a 10-6, with educated classy people who have their own tastes and ideologies. I am the youngest in the lot from the small group of people, and I feel so much like home.
Start-up companies need a lot of push in the beginning. I remember making tea, washing my own plates for a few days in the beginning. Inspite of being the youngest, I address all the others by their first names. No sir, or no mister. Last week, I took three offs because I wanted to complete a college project and following my leaves, I have been coming to work at 2 in the afternoon, because I had to go to college. And my BIG BOSS didnt even complain.
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Pep-up talk by BOSS: As I was writing this post, by BIG BOSS called me to his cabin for some pep-talk. So, now we shall divulge from my original story.
Because my team head, wasnt understanding what I want to say, tears started to trickle down my cheek. As I stated in Work Woe2, I get really emotional about everything, very soon.
He started to explain as to how you should NEVER get personal about work. Being OBJECTIVE is the safest bet whenever you work in an organisation. There are emotional over-heads in every organisation. In this organisation, no-one thinks of you as an employee, everyone thinks of you as a kid! And they are very protective about this kid. One of my colleagues saved the last slice of pizza for me when I was out of work. Some of my colleagues are very protective of me.
He says that there are only three things that should keep you driving in an organisation. One is learning. You should come to work only when you think you are learning something out of the process. There should never be a level of stagnancy. Second point is contribution. Only when you contribute, do you get feedback. And feedback is very necessary. The third thing is having fun. If you are not having fun at work, you are not working for the love of work; but for the heck of it.
You should always be so confident about yourself, that even when your are on the brink, you should be able to stand up for yourself and get a new job. The capability of someone is judged when they are hired in my company. They were the best of the best, and that is why they were in there. When they come into an organisation, I have to drive them to be better than their best. But I cant keep HONKING all the while. You are good, and you dont need anyone else to judge that.
As Narayan Murthy said it, ‘The best way to be successful is to surround yourself with successful people. Seeing their sucess, you shall automatically push yourself harder.’ Mediocrity always perpetuates mediocrity. You will never grow, if you dont learn to get outside your shoes and outbeat your ownself.
Remember, never to get personal about work. You could cry for your family, cry for your friends, cry because your dog got hurt, but never cry for work. Work should never be a reason for tears. You should never get sentimental about work. Sentimental about targets and outputs is alright, but because we are in a knowledge economy, clashes in ideologies are evident.
Clashes in ideologies mean THREE things-
1.Either the other person is actually wrong.
2.Or you are so engrossed in proving your own point, that you dont understand the other person’s perspective.
3. You may be right, but you are not able to communicate your point well.
Give all these points a consideration. This organisation is your first job. It might not even be your career, when all you want to be is a journalist with some top-notch organisation. But this is your learning platform. Here, atleast you have flexible colleagues, who give you an ear. But big-wigs are too engrossed in their own things to care about opinion. A good manager is the one who gives a rat’s ass about seniority and just goes with productive ideas. Specially in a creative field like ours, ideas are not reflected by seniority.
There are times, when we have to rub our shoes and climb the ladder. We might also have to convince people on the ladder to believe in what we are saying. But, you never know, YOU might be the ladder someday. Just treat people the way you want them to treat you. Always remember, at any given point of time in your life, there will always be TWO choices- the right one will always be the MOST difficult one. When you know what the difficult choice is, you will automatically be able to know what the RIGHT choice is.
You can fight for your family, fight for your friends, but never fight in case of work. There is no point. Once you ring the door-bell of your house, you should bundle up all work worries and get into home like a content person. Taking work back home is the WORST thing to do.
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All of the above was the talk inside the cabin. I was so impressed by him. I really dont think I could work under a better person than him. He was talking about something personal, where these few lines popped up:
Remember, you only fight for things, when you feel for them. But after you F-I-G-H-T for them, you start to feel detached!
After this entire thing, me wanting to resign is all the more difficult. But if I go by all that he says, quitting work is the first thing, I should be doing. For one, it is the most DIFFICULT thing to do, so it must be right. The three pin-points of learning, contribution and fun no longer hold true. Honestly, when I started working, I didnt work because I wanted to work. Glorified pocket money is not the driving force. I wanted to always be a cut above the rest of the kids of my age. I have a LOT of energy in me. I just wanted to invest my time and energy into something that is fruitful. Where I could learn something.
I have learnt a lot of things with this organisation. I learnt how 9-6 desk jobs are like. I learnt to station myself in front of a desktop and stare at the screen endlessly. I learnt how to make tea in a microwave. I learnt one new word everyday. I learnt how to google smartly. I learnt what it is to be with intelligent, yet geeky people. I learnt that there are organisations which respect ideas inspite of hierarchical seniority. I have changed a lot since I started to work. I have become serious in a very funny way. I have grown confident in a way. I have learnt to live in my own cocoon and live with or without anything/anyone.
All this is good. But I end this post with the same question I had in my mind, before I started to right this. Should I resign?
Jab We Net!
This post got triggered as I was in conversation with one of my school pals. ‘Hey chic! I suggest you put your blog into the dead journal.
Me perplexed, ‘What is that?’
‘It is a website where people come and pour their thoughts of how life is a misery, life is a pain! Who think that life is wretched!’
And I burst into laughter! My life is not sad. My life is not boring. Its just that I don’t write, when I am happy. I don’t KNOW what to write when you are happy. When we are sad, there is an amount of depth attached to your feelings. But when you are happy, you are HAPPY. For heaven’s sake, why would one make note of their happiness.
I also realized, that my creativity is provoked only when I am feeling low. When I feel like no-one would understand what I mean to say. That’s when I come and throw my rant on my blog. No-one has the time and patience to listen to what I have got to say, when I am struck with melancholy. I act like a sorrowful mourner when I am depressed, so this is the best place to dump the negativity. And that is why, this space is filled with SAD stuff.
[PLUG-IN: I started to write something, and left my seat to eat chicken momos with a glass of appyfizz, and when I came back to my seat, a new set of thoughts stormed me and I started to scribble something else, and the shape of the post completely changed! So, u will not be able to relate to the part written above and the part written below. So, this plug-in is like a commercial advertisement! Please bear with the inconvenience.]
Rewind back tape: I started to know a guy through the internet like a month back. Sadly, no more details about him, people 
Our messages on a community of a social networking site, turned into one-line scraps. Transformed into e-mails. Longer e-mails. Never heard his voice. Never seen him. But that one-week of communication was really eccentric! The first thing I did once I got up, was check my mail. The last thing I did before going to sleep was to chat with him. He perfectly filled the momentary void. And one fine day, we just stopped talking. I don’t know why? Was it is something I did? Something I didn’t? Something I said?
But my pride, wouldn’t allow me to go and find out what went wrong. I am the make-the-first-move-only-if-it-is-worth-it kinda girl. I don’t mind making the first move, but I don’t like to accept failure specially, when the issue doesn’t bother me too much. On giving a second-thought to a second thought, I guess, I must have pushed it too much too soon.
But the time, I knew him was fun. Mush enhanced to the peak. The sweet-nothings. It was kinda funny. The unpredictable spins the conundrum. He could be a self-obsessed, cleft-tongued sex maniac, wanting to kidnap pretty girls for a ransom; or some bald, ugly, squint-eyed freak! But those are things you don’t bother about, while structuring conversations.
The grey part: Internet friendship is very funny. You don’t know that person, but you know so much about him. The sad part about such ‘friendships’ (if they could be called friendship) is that one could mask a LOT about oneself. Even I could be a buck-teeth chic, who is has a skeleton frame with dark ugly elephant skin with black moles all over my face! I could say that I am some hi-fi girl working with a job-profile that makes me eat, sleep and breathe money. You just tell what YOU want to tell. So, the person on the other end would only get to know that part of you that you presumably reveal. But all is not grey, my friend.
Some of the best friends I have met, were through the internet. Because, we had to have similar interests to pursue our conversations that reach the sms, fone-calls and meetings routine. I believe, the more difficult the medium, the more interesting are the conversations. Things get REAL boring, after we meet-up. There is no mystery to chase!
The black part: When I was just outta school, there was this time when I met this MAN (I call him a man, because I was 17 and he was 29!) just after my school life came to a halt. I had taken a friend along for company. And a bunch of guy pals were standing at the corner of McDonalds to see nothing goes wrong! My friends were very protective of me, that ways. And then, there was this big-sister friend, who SMS’d me after every 15 minutes to know if I was alright.
This MAN was very witty, maybe age rubs in a lot of humor. He asked me to recognize the man in the brick red shirt. Me dressed like a little doll, with my braided hair and green cargos and a black shirt and I soon recognized him. He came closer. He was bald, and whatever hair he had on his scalp was white! He smiled. I saw the gutka-stained teeth. He just didn’t fit the image of the person who spoke to me over the phone. He started to talk. The red-teeth shone on him! Looks don’t matter, presentability does.
After he met me, we still exchanged messages. He said that he liked me. I freaked! There was NO WAY I was going to like him. I feel fetters and manacles when someone expresses the more-than-friendship liking for me. I don’t know how to handle it!
Since then, I have been VERY picky about people whom I talk to. Again, age tells you a lot of things. Now, I am sensible enough to not even converse with some I know I wudnt click.
The white part: But I still say, some of the closest friends, I have in my life, were known through the medium of internet. Anonymous, but genuine people. We got acquainted and had a HUGE group of internet friends.
My Yahoo Messenger days. Aah! We(the huge jing-bang of net buddies) all used to come online at 11 ‘o’ clock. As soon as my dad went to sleep, I would sneak to switch on my system and log onto YM. I used to be the little kiddo hanging around girls and guys of 24. we used to pull all those dick-heads from chatrooms and trip on them! Great fun. I used to bribe myself. If I would finish the chapter on ‘thermodynamics’, I could chat for an hour! And it used to work. Greed is man’s best friend and his biggest enemy too.
I met my dodo ex through the internet. And our friendship has blossomed all the while we have known each other. And I am really lucky to have him in my life. We may not make a good couple, but we do share an awesome chemistry as friends.
Internet friendship is like a global neighbourhood. It just shrinks the world. It is great, but you must need some people to be with you, when you are not in hanging out in the ‘virtual world’. It might kill your boredom. It might engage you with people of similar interests. But there is a lot of difference between face-to-face interactions and chatbox-to-chatbox interactions.
The web is a nice place to crawl around; just make sure you don’t get eaten by the spiders!
That is my SHE!
There she stations herself at one end of the lawn
Her crisp short hair falling on her face.
The wind caressing her neckline.
Staring helplessly at the sun-bathed garden
Watching from a lonely corner, the world around her
Everybody fighting their way through.
The dogs fighting for the last crumbs of bread
The girls fighting to be the prettiest amongst the rest
The Nescafe’ wala fighting to earn his butter
Everybody is running IN life
And she is running ‘away’ from life.
She sits in vain.
She watches them abstractly.
She is blind, but can see the unseen.
She is deaf, but can hear the unheard.
She is dumb, but can convey the unspoken.
She is my muse.
She is my prose.
That is my SHE!
