Tuesday 10 March 2015

Road less travelled.....

When I went through the draft of the coffee table book  my organisation decided to come up with, I took not more than three odd minutes to flip through and keep it down. It's the same amount of time I may spend on other banal things like the news paper, the Swagat magazine of Air India so on and so forth.So, when I was asked to contribute some article to it , I again went through the articles which were already a part of the document, to understand what was expected of me. To say the least , I was horrified. The discussions in all the articles were of a very serious nature of international or may be intergalactic ramifications.

Am I in the wrong organisation? The question popped in my mind. I dismissed the thought with disgust. What in the heavens is wrong with me, I thought to myself. Organisations are never wrong, my mind reprimanded.

While I seriously contemplated over which topic to write about, it occurred to me that I was not the kind of a person who will sit and study to come up with an article. As a matter of principle, I believe that I have wasted enough of my life studying for the civil services. Moreover I have, in my seven years of service not used an iota of knowledge, I acquired during that period. The government jobs are invariably the most non creative jobs where initiative is killed. The whole story is about sending timely reports. The reports which are numerous, repetitive, relevant only to the extent that they have been sent timely, clerical in nature and they can be all kinds monthly, fortnightly, weekly, daily, even hourly. I have studied some Public Administration, and believe me Weber could not be more correct about bureaucracy.

So, the question remains the same, what should I write about? Why don't I write about what strikes you most about this organisation? (Apart from the reports). Take a guess. I bet you can't be thinking what first struck my mind. It's the TERMINAL!!

I don't know how many of you have seen this movie called 'The terminal', but I have often felt like Tom Hanks in the movie, except that i never met Catherine Zeta Jones. Unlike the others, I have a very small number of  family members who call me, but they soon pointed out after a few months I joined this organisation, that whenever they call me , i am either checking in or checking out or in transit. I realised how bad it had got when I found myself fumbling for the seat belt even when I was cozily sleeping in my bed in my room. So frequent are the trips that I am now well conversant with the Hindi and English versions of the safety procedure read and enacted by the air hostess, I may need a few more international flights ( for domestic travel only) to learn the procedure for the deaf and dumb though. Also I can open an emergency exit and put an oxygen mask (if it ever came down the cabinet) even in my sleep.

I am wondering if I should change the topic from ' the road less travelled' to 'more air borne' or something.The topic I gave to my musings above( hardly an article), is only a reflection of daring to write something so non serious as opposed to very sincere and serious articles....