When You Start Earning

It's the 17th of March 2012. I am already into the sixth month of my professional life. Today out of the blue, I felt like writing about things that I have been through in these five months of my job.


The eighty odd days of training that I underwent with my company gave me glimpses of all moods of life. I was ecstatic one day- when I witnessed several of my college buddies staying in and around my abode; I was very happy on one particular day- when I was put in the highest category for my oral competency; I was moderately happy on a special day- when I greedily devoured on crispy KFC with my pals doing the same around me; I felt deep satisfaction on one occasion- when I was in visible limelight in my learning group and I received considerable attention; I felt mundane on one gloomy day- when, after working for about ten days in a week, the day was still a Thursday; I was displeased. Oh yes I was- when I lost a tie gifted by a very close friend; I was grieved- when I realized I had accidentally broken my guitar; I suffered excruciating pain- when my cough persisted through a month and a half; And I felt homesick a lot many times too. There were many more things that I felt. But this should suffice for now.


The journey through things said above and even more was clearly not a smooth sail. Although I was happy for the greater part, I did see days when I struggled to smile, let alone laugh and make merry. A JOB is a test that evaluates you on whether you are a 'Jackass Or Brave' kind of person. And this test is neither supposed to end on any fortunate day and nor does it keep yielding the same result for a particular person throughout. And the blood-sucking employers out there who have the reputation of providing employment at large are more interested when you turn out to be a jackass in their eyes- so that they can push you to lows from where you can never come up, but whilst showing that they are actually trying to motivate you to climb the ladder of success. By 'success', well, they mean the stage where your pain nerves become dumb and unresponsive to any further magnitude of agony and you start accepting the same as part of a mundane lifestyle.


Being in a job is so fittingly different from being those smart lads back in days of college. There are things that you must have hardly bothered about, being students. A job, however, demands all those things from you and you eventually end up doing them anyhow. Sometimes, with a great deal of scorn. I will enlist some of them for my readers:

1. Absenteeism: Who wouldn't have enjoyed those amazing mass-bunks back in college? It used to be such fun to bunk classes and spend time elsewhere. But a job hardly gives you that opportunity. You are expected to come and serve on all working days and furnish a proper reason if you happen to disobey.

2. Procrastination: One thing that your supervisor or boss wouldn't want you to do the slightest is to procrastinate. You do all your work at the right time and your superior feels he has had a lucky day at office.

3. Punctuality: You are expected to be punctual enough to be in your office before the arrival of your superiors. Leaving at close of day, however, doesn't normally demand your punctuality. The more late you leave, generally the better.

4. Multitasking: If you thought multitasking is when you sip your coffee while watching an interesting game of cricket and simultaneously chatting with pals over internet, you'd be an object of jest in your job premises. You are expected to do your work with brilliance whilst monitoring whether your team member has encountered some problem, whether someone somewhere or anywhere inside the office building has an issue you could help with, whether your superior is in need of something and s/he is expecting someone to get that for her/him, whether the ceiling above leaks, whether the current Government should topple, whether Israel and Iran should call it a day, whether people on earth should really consider staying on Mars a better option and anything and everything.

5. Two Distinct Sexes: A female employee has the privilege of leaving early because of the simple reason that she is female. A male employee, on the other hand, might be asked to do the leftover work of a female colleague and might not be permitted to demand an explanation for the same. Two employees of different sexes cannot suck from two straws that go into the same glass of juice or for that matter do anything of this sort inside the office premises, what with the known fact that they are buddies right from Kindergarten. This again for the simple reason that, there are two distinct sexes on earth.
At least, you wouldn't have bothered in your college had someone pointed out but now you might as well stop talking to the other person fearing your job's in jeopardy.

How easy it is in this world to become a parasite on another being and continue getting all nourishment from the latter without really bothering about your life beyond that! But when you 'stand on your own feet', you have to disengage yourself from your parasitic parent and make yourself fit for a similar parasite. You start realizing your responsibilities and setting up goals in life. Not all of them are met though. And though your life is actually not finished when you start earning (and in some cases, it just begins), yet when you look back at the days when you were students, you invariably feel like saying: 'those were the days, I was perhaps in heaven'.

Notwithstanding blues of working, a job is indeed something mandatory in life. It's nature's way of pointing out 'you are solely responsible for your sustenance'. So complaining is never the solution. You have to keep moving on. Godspeed.

Disclaimer: - These are my views on how a job generally appears to a grad fresh out of college. I won't mind or take offence if you tend to differ.

A Thing About Thinking

There are things that never leave your thoughts. It's like however you try to focus on things away from such thoughts, they invariably come back again and again to either haunt or please or worry you depending upon their type.

These thoughts usually are of varied nature and contexts. Some might actually keep you happy when they peep your mind which, most often than not, means that you will stay gladly distracted from your work. Yet another type would give you pain and agony and you would always wish you had better have any other thing going on in your mind than that one yet you succumb to the same every time.

There is one more type that, when it comes, takes you to a different world- possible or impossible, real or fantasy, future or sci-fi- and you start seeing yourself and/or people related to you in a separate universe with whatever you had ever imagined about you or them, coming visibly true. Such thoughts are variously called as dreams or daydreams or imaginations or fantasies depending upon how possible or impossible is that 'universe'. It is safe to assert that our thinker, prior to thinking anything, assumes the age old saying of 'nothing is impossible'.

There is a category of erotic thoughts that normally juveniles fall prey to. Such thoughts are known to disturb the hormonal levels within the body. And so these thoughts, so deep rooted into the physiology, give adolescents an unknown pleasure and an urge to see the imagined things coming true.

Thoughts of revenge or avenge are a dangerous type. Sometimes way too dangerous to comprehend. These thoughts have the might to take over a man's conscience and drive him to do things that he wouldn't have done under all levels of sanity. The person, a victim of this type, is always disturbed in his thoughts, trying to think of possible ways-plans, plots, conspiracies, you name it- to get his/her enemy annihilated to some self-assumed-extreme extent and trying  to be happy/contented later at the thought of success.

I really don't know what is poetic thinking. Should I say it's a separate category altogether? Because I have personally never been able to comprehend the thought process of an acclaimed poet. By acclaimed poet I mean someone who indeed writes poetic verses and not someone like me who can very well choose rhyming sentences and club a couple of them up together and call it a poem. So what do poets think of when they are idle? Do they ever sit idle at all? You answer these questions for me. Poets have their own way of thinking, even though the same falls into any said category.

Now coming to the writers category. This is the category where I more or less place myself and feel some pride in doing so. It's like if this category is a nation then I am an island floating in the international waters bordering the country that, in cases of dispute, can be proved to belong to the particular nation. Pardon my poor imagery. I will elaborate this thought type a bit more. This is an interesting type (yeah, I am prejudiced). Say for instance, I have to describe one incident that had really been amusing and the audience had literally rolled on the floor laughing. Then a writer not only thinks of the entire scenario that had occurred but also thinks of possible ways by which s/he can put the entire thing in writing so that the amusing part doesn't get withered the slightest. Thus, the different touch in a writer's thinking lies invariably in the word 'readers'. Writers always have their readers in mind while writing on anything. Anything that doesn't interest the readers is a waste even though it is one of the writer's masterpieces.

Nerds and geeks and philosophers have their own niche in this thinking world. On one hand where nerds and geeks think of devising some formula, algorithm or principle that, after several phases of debates; tests; amends; more debates; more tests; more amends, is finally approved and the effect of which is realized some twenty five years later when the name of the person appears in the 'Who invented/discovered what' chapter of General Knowledge books, on the other hand, philosophers rake their brains trying to find out solutions to problems of mankind that prevail at large and eventually come out with one. Some get lucky when their thoughts and philosophies travel wide and they get national to international recognition for their work whilst others go so far as reading their names in books as "Tom and Dick were strong opponents of this ideology but ultimately they had to give way to Harry's widely accepted law".

Both the types of people I mentioned above, however, think of changing the world in some way or the other. And sooner or later, these people are referred to as revolutionaries. I don't have any problem with such people. So if you are one of them, I don't intend to offend you. In fact, it is because of such people that the world is worth living at present.

So what am I thinking now? Am I thinking about thinkers? My readers must have felt by now that I have become so weary of this world that I didn't get anything to think about and waving aside all the things that I said earlier about readers being first priority, I have now started to bore them with some ugly piece of essay. Well, it's only that I am in my office library now and I obviously have nothing to do. So going by instincts, I brought out a sheet of paper and started putting words onto it. Because this has always been something that has helped me while my time away. And if you intend to know why I chose such a topic to write, it's because there is this one thought that I am unable to get off my mind. Nothing very significant though. It's about one particular scene in an American series that I have started watching recently. A prisoner is threatened to disclose certain vital information and when he doesn't acknowledge, the villain, a fellow prisoner, cuts off three fingers from his left foot with a garden cutter. I am not being able to stop myself from brooding about the amount of pain that a person would feel if such a thing were to happen with him.

So amidst my deep ponders I don't know when this thought ended up becoming the writer's type!

Thanks for your patience readers. You are welcome to share your 'thoughts' on this :-)

-Originally hand written on Monday, January 23 2012