by Kunal Sharma
A Whiff of the Alluring
The next morning, a jingle on Nakul's phone reminded him that he needed to be in early for work. He felt better about the day before. He was a banker, after all, and the stress is reasonable and expected.
“Let’s just go with the flow and see where life takes me tomorrow,” he thought as he got dressed.
Factoring in the rush hour traffic in Bandra, he better get going. Today he needed to be on the road in 15 minutes, which is doable, his efficiency being one of the few skills he owed to the corporate lifestyle, the “be in office at 9” imposition, that is. Just as he locked his apartment door, he saw Aisha down the walkway. Funny thing is he noticed her trousers first, and how they hug her waist then caress her long winding legs. She gave her trademark glance at Nakul and walked towards the lift. Nakul let her get in the lift first as he executed the drill...tummy in, shoulders out and no staring at the starables. He was already very conscious of his new borne fat, a consequence of all the stress eating he had subject himself to, lately.
“It’s been 3 whole months that I’ve seen her,” thought Nakul. Though, he knew that he didn't have to try very hard to be out of her sight, given that he came back at 10 every night these days.
“There’s no way she even knows anything about me.”
At one of the loser sessions that Nakul sometimes holds with his friends, Juggi had sipped on beer obliged on him by friends and said “Nothing is more desirable to men than pretty young things in high heels with an air about them.” Nakul had wondered why, for all of Juggi’s intellect, was he still jobless. He might be so out of choice, thought Nakul. Anyways, he had never dared to ask.
Juggi had also mentioned the correlation between the libido of men and their material wealth. Nakul had not bothered to carry out further research on this topic but Aisha did make him feel like he wanted to be driven-he wanted to be known as the guy who makes big money, if that’s what it would take to grab her attention. Her long tresses and the way she placed her manicured fingers around her waist completed the formula for his kryptonite.
Nakul stood in the lift with Aisha, and stared at the closing door. He decided to talk to her today, he couldn't vouch for a similar opportunity in future.
“Hi,” croaked Nakul, trying to sound sensitive and business-like at the same time.
“Hi,” Aisha twitched the corner of her mouth.
“Not too hot for a summer day,” said Nakul.
The twitch gave way to a smile as Aisha acknowledged, “I hope it stays that way, I hate heat! I was in Pune last weekend and it’s much nicer there.”
All right! Nakul wanted to shift to second gear. He said, “So do you belong to Pune, do you go there often?” Oops, Nakul was unsure for a moment, if this came out as a little desperate.
“No, I had gone for a wedding.”
As the metallic sliding door opened up thanklessly, the precious little personal time was over. Nakul took half a step back to try and exhibit some chivalry. Aisha walked briskly by as Nakul caught a whiff of her fragrance.
Nakul said “Bye” and Aisha just smiled. The tete-a-tete had excited Nakul, made him feel more alive than he had felt at any time in the past month. As he walked towards the main road, he let his tummy out and gestured for a rickshaw to stop.
Suffering the Grind
Nakul wrote off the first month as a case of newbie getting the surf right on the rough waters of the vast ocean of the money-making business. Typically, the first few days should mostly be themed around settling down in the office. Still, he wasn’t exactly feeling elated even after a few days into the second month. Today morning, like a drill, Nakul and Prashar were summoned to Rohtaj’s cabin.
“I want you to show charts depicting the microchip sales, give it a look and include some charts, look at the flow, and show this to me in the next couple of hours.” Nakul immediately set about to work on the slides. He verified the numbers, industry growth, driving factors, etc. He added a few more charts corresponding to some of the text in the slides. Prashar was simultaneously making sure all formatting was perfect. As they approached Rohtaj's cabin about a couple of hours later, they heard him talking to someone over the phone. Sometime around evening, Nakul's phone rang “Let me have a look tomorrow morning, alright?” said Rohtaj and Nakul saw him leave the office.
Prashar loosened up almost immediately. The nodding faded. There was relief in some other faces around the hall too, especially because some of the other senior management had also left for the day. Nakul turned to Prashar, “So what’s the deal with this guy?” and almost felt he shouldn’t have forgotten that he was a Senior Associate and sending negative vibes out about his bosses didn’t really make for a positive workplace attitude.
“Papa is worse,” said Prashar.
“Papa who?”
“Our CEO…and don’t get me started on his wife, the ‘owner’ of us all,” said Prashar.
“What? Where did I get myself into,” blurted out Nakul.
“Hahaha,” Nakul saw one of their other colleagues, Neel, join them.
“Sorry that shouldn’t have come out loud,” said Nakul as one of the other Associates within earshot, Keshav, shifted his gaze away from the group and to the ceiling. Funny thing to do, thought Nakul as he construed the amicable and round Keshav to be one of the guys who took extra effort to mix with everyone and be part of any conversation. Strangely, Keshav seemed to edge away from them.
Nakul felt he was getting introduced to his colleagues for the first time. Prashar was the heavy guy, his amicable team mate, who acted his normal clumsy self when the top bosses were not around. Nakul felt that he and Prashar had already developed a cordial bond by working under the difficult Rohtaj. Neel was the Associate in Hirani’s team who never shied from helping Nakul and Prashar with numbers or graphs whenever they were running short of time, which was, incidentally, quite frequent. Keshav, the Associate in Mehta’s team, was a strange one. He perhaps walked around the office the most, as if playing spook to his colleagues. Nakul had still not formed an opinion of him.
Prashar paused for a moment then said “No, you spoke for all of us. These guys hired us as freshers a couple of months back. There have been promises of a more sensitive and warm workplace and better policies and what not but nothings done yet. Rohtaj keeps abusing, Hirani keeps talking stupid, we are still on laptops about a century old and the only ones that seem to get some work done here are the flies who, clearly, are having a field day.”
“Worse, no one ever seems to close a deal!” said Neel.
“C’mon, I was told there was this deal that closed in Chennai and the CEO didn’t want to disclose . . .” Nakul started, wanting to point out the little information he had manage to gather about PanAsia.
“…Ah and we have learnt the hard way that lies are a good business ethic here, you can lie all you want as long as it makes the company look good…kind of like how they do it in North Korea,” said Prashar.
“I see…didn’t you find out more about this place before you signed up?”
“They all made sure to dress up and present themselves as a company with a new vision, when they visited the campus. Obviously, the company that was introduced to us was seemingly very professional and on high growth trajectory but in our excitement to get into IB we ignored one small little detail...the company hadn’t grown in strength from about 15 employees since it started almost 10 years back.”
“I should have thought of it too,” said Nakul.
“And you know what? That’s typical of front companies,” said Neel.
“So you think…hmmm…interesting but kind of hard to buy into…” said Nakul.
“Ok, I am letting you in on something that people normally realize only after a couple of years in this skithole: The underworld is funding this front company to get a piece of the global corporate action…” said Prashar.
“Man, you’ve had a tough day…” said Nakul.
“Laugh all you want bro, you are going to se
e someday…” said Prashar, “Anyways, let take a cab before tomorrow comes in early.”
Nakul had worked hard over the slides today, since he felt he needed to push himself harder and he wanted to justify his position and absolve himself of any guilt of not doing his part. He didn’t think much about the chat with Prashar but he was grateful his colleagues were opening up with him. Soon he’d want to get a few drinks with them.
He got to his apartment before midnight. After lying in bed for an hour, kind of paralyzed, much like the crocs they show on TV who bask under the sun before throttling towards the water and into the safe abode of marshland. Switched on the TV. Some reality show was on. A couple of teenagers were being shouted at for being directionless and egoistical by a guy in his 40s. Another evidence of mindless noise that our world is made up of. It seemed amusing to Nakul though-The bald guy was shouting at a kid less than half his age. Millions were watching this on TV. Nakul could see that it was the bald guy losing battle with sanity, the kid was...well...just a kid. This is what entertainment has got to-enjoying the ridicule belted out to a juvenile. The noise though, helped Nakul escape from his situation.
He decided to call up Talukdar, the college philosopher. They hadn’t spoken for years.
“Talukdar, how are you, babaji?”
“Good good...so did you get married yet?” said Talukdar in his patent style, never quite having learnt the wasteful art of small talk.
Talukdar had taken up a job in the DRDO, the defense research wing of the Indian Government, which was quite a surprise for many as he was among the top 5 in the graduating class. He had said that turning down offers from Texas Instruments and Qualcomm was probably the hardest part of his engineering since he wanted to work with the latest in chip making technology. He finally decided to turn the offers down because he was not sure if he would be able to fend off the temptations of staying back in the comfortable environs of the western world. Many a patriot had gone never to come back. They always come back after 20 years with a camera in their hands, shooting videos of the pitiable state that our country is in-the broken walls in college, the potholes, and the wild traffic-cycles, autos and cars alike, fighting to reclaim road space. They then take this evidence back to their newfound friends in the western world and used this to add credibility to the harshness they overcame to be one of them. Talukdar somehow saw all of this nonchalantly, “All amounts to nothing, it is a zero sum game, but let’s leave that for another day.”
Today Nakul wanted to talk to Talukdar about the whirlpool that he had found himself in. He felt as if he was exaggerating things when he was talking about the first month as a banker. Talukdar assessed his situation thus: “Give this another month or so, you are new to not only the firm but also the industry.”
Nakul did feel a tad bit that maybe he had been shitting himself for nothing. Talukdar hadn’t taken a second to diagnose the issue. It was still too early to judge the workplace. Nakul was a banker after all...just a handful of batch mates could boast the same status. Nakul decided to work hard this time in his life-he will grab the bull by its horns so to say, give his new job his best shot.
As he put down the phone, Nakul looked at the bald guy on TV-he may have good reasons to shout at the kid after all. The kid should cross his heart and figure out what must be done to deserve a spot among the elite. Nakul was ever determined to run faster in the runway of the career of his choice, “Let me get this sorted, no pain, no gain,” he figured.
A couple of days later though, Nakul leaned across his desk with his face in his hands. He didn’t feel great about the fact that not only was his work deemed unacceptable repeatedly, it was also frequently incomplete and full of mistakes. Nakul didn’t think that things moved forward even a bit in PanAsia. He and Prashar were on some slides for at least a week now and he had carefully examined the slides again and could not find any mistakes. Everyday he worked on the stupid slides and tweaked them here and there, as if they were a sculpture that one of those good Italian guys did. Looked like other teams echoed his dilemma. More and more each day it became clear that Viraj, Mehta, Hirani and Rohtaj were not serious at all about actually getting out there and getting in some business. All they wanted was to play ‘office’ with their subordinates.
By the following weekend, much had changed about the way Nakul felt about life in general. He was supposed to be happy and proud of being a banker, instead he was lurking in dejection and uncertainty.
“So how is it going, son?” asked Orly, another of Nakul’s chum from a previous company. They had planned to catch up over a few drinks near Orls’ office. Orly was another guy who, just like Nakul, got the ‘yours is a strange name’ comment from almost everyone he was introduced to.
“It’s great, I am working on certain really important deals,” said Nakul, thinking if he could have done anything to avert this topic.
“Great! This is what you always wanted,” Orls said, a statement that left Nakul the most in doubt.
“Man, I need to get some rest...but lets catch up next weekend, ok?” said Nakul as got up to leave.
Ordinarily, Orly would have objected to Nakul’s premature end to the evening. But they were close friends: Orls had known Nakul for a very long time. He understood that Nakul was not happy with his job and he let him be for the time being. They had joined Stark IT Systems together fresh out of college and Orls had stayed back when Nakul wanted to ride the MBA wave in an attempt to get closer to the good life.