Overcoming Bitterness

This post is sort of a pep talk for myself. So feel free to completely ignore it. I have begun to realise that if I actually write any conflicts I have, I usually feel a cathartic calm descending over me. Anyway, I started writing this post on Monday but never managed to finish it because of the pain or what I can describe aptly with a Marathi word “satvik santap” I have been feeling.

I have been waxing eloquent about my job woes here and here. So the update on these posts is that I have decided to stay put within my organisation but will be taking up a different role, in a different team soon. The main reason being that as impressed as I was with the other organisation, they could only offer a contract-to-hire for now, which I didn’t think was the wisest thing to doing knowing myself and how I am in the face of uncertainty.

So yes, I am where I am with a slight ray of hope of at least starting a fresh in a completely new team with an almost clean slate. But while I wait for that, I’m left with no choice but to keep doing what has been quite painful for the next couple of weeks. Plus I am left out of a training that would do me so good. I would be able to understand the very core of how content works right from taxonomy and chunking to publishing various versions. What hurts be terribly is that I have been owning ALL the content for which the training is scheduled, since the last 2 years. I have created it from scratch, maintained it thus far, have put up a brave face while defending it before several teams (although in the inside I wanted to run away to a corner and cry). I know everything about it inside out. And when it was time for me to take it up a notch and learn more about it and about how I can create a strategy for it in the future, I was conveniently left out.

To top it all, my colleague who was sent for the training is asked to have daily calls with me to give me updates on his learning. They couldn’t have found a better way to rub the episode in my face. I have no problems with the colleague by the way. He is the best work-partner ever. We totally rock our team of two and he is more than just a colleague. He is like a big brother always looking out for me. He is himself a deserving candidate and there is NO question about why he was sent. The questions is why I wasn’t sent. And this is something that both of us are confused about. Neither of us has any clue how suddenly he came to be in the loop to be trained on something he has barely worked on. Every single day he mentions that I’d have loved it there.

Anyway, I have been dwelling on this since Monday and now I am D.O.N.E. I have to finish this post now, but now I am wondering if this was even worth caring enough to write about it. I have no control over this, I cannot and do not want to get into a whole argument mode and ask for answers to questions like why? but why? and the likes. This is one incident of being left out unfairly without having any and I mean ANY valid reason. There will be many. I really really need to grow up and learn to block things out. I have always had a problem of not being able to deal with the present and completing being taken over by negative thoughts, resentment and bitterness. These all in turn spiral into me going into a sad mode of constantly asking existential questions, then going into a deeper rut because what you are thinking and what you are actually experiencing do not match.

And since it’s all about survival of the fittest, I need to be fit. Meaning: Always remember that nothing at work, and I mean nothing, is important enough to actually go through so much trouble and analysis. Then internalizing the basic premise: the world is unfair. Then making it very very clear to myself that this job and any job in general is NOT my life. If it gets too unbearable, quitting is in my control. And quitting one job and not being able to find one is a pretty scary situation, but it’s nothing in the larger scheme of things. I mean there has to be more to life than one fucking job. What do you think?

2013 in retrospect is the year

1. I completed a year of professional life
2. I got my body back to a healthy if not ideal weight
3. I started doing 60 suryanamaskars effortlessly
4. I started pickling
5. I got a facial for the first time ever
6. I got married
7. I went to a resort with my partner/husband for the first time in our 9 years of being together
8. I moved to Bangalore
9. I started blogging
10. I got an almost professional oven
11. I baked more bread than ever before
12. I watched more new series than ever before: Mildred Pierce, Game of Thrones, Episodes, Girls, Breaking Bad, How I met your mother, Lipstick Jungle and Dexter (still watching)
13. I got a Kindle e-reader
14. I read a lot more than in 2012. I guess I read just 2-3 books in all of 2012. Shameful!!
15. Is the year I started hating my first job

White Walks

My mind keeps going back to an unexpectedly solitary walk I happened to take on one snowy day of December 2011.

I was studying in Sheffield then. A beautiful town in north Yorkshire, surrounded by trees and hillocks everywhere. I had to interview someone who was supposed to meet me at Novotel. It had snowed heavily the night before and it was freezing. I still managed to throw on some super warm furry coat and walked out with my recorder. I was in my own sweet musing world when I realized that there was not a soul anywhere in sight but just heaps of delicate, fresh snow wherever the eye could see. There were no vehicles, no people, no animals, no sounds; even the air seemed to be non-existent before the very noticeable snow-covered everything. It didn’t strike me then that the trams were also closed which probably meant that everything was closed for business. I was really sincere back then and walked 4 kilometres with my legs digging deep in the soft snow with every step I took. It didn’t even strike me to cancel the appointment. I just kept walking happily.

I had never experienced anything like it before. The feeling of being lucky enough to take first steps into the fresh snow. It’s not the same as walking on the snow that has slightly off-white shoe prints. It was the feeling of walking on an unexplored virgin territory. It was the feeling that the world just happened to end and you were the only one to be left behind–the owner of your time, your destiny, your steps.

When I reached Novotel, I was obviously told that there would be no interview. Al though I was sincere, I wasn’t stupid to be disappointed with this. The cancellation just meant that I had all the day to myself and a couple of hours before people started coming out of their houses to play snow games. I realised that I had my camera but the snow had killed the battery. But as luck would have it, I managed to get some in a pound store next to Debenhams. The snow was so magical that it made every mundane thing, like a shop you saw everyday, look celestial. Yes, even Debenhams!

I randomly walked about taking pictures of snow covered reindeer meant for Xmas, just vast expanses of snow, snow on roof tops, snow in parks, snow on the sidewalk and snow decorating the church window. I walked all the way back home, taking every detour possible and just take in all the snow and the peace that came with it. There were no people, there was nothing but snow really…but it was not scary. It was surprisingly calming. The coolness even slightly kissed your eyelids and took all the weariness away. I walked through the park and was hyponitsed by the view. A still lake, surrounded my snow covered lawn, with an outer ring of dense snow flecked trees. It was heavenly.

I never felt this way again. I don’t have to. This was a special series of coincidences with very limited or no likelihood of recurrence. But I seem to drift back to this day on a particularly boring day or at a time when everything is just too much and nothing seems to convincing or justifiable. I guess beauty of such magnitude is so timelessly effective  that it will soothe you if not convince you of anything.

With age comes respect. Does it really?

As Indians, we are led to believe that age is something that HAS to be respected. You don’t argue with elders. You don’t look at them with defiance. You don’t contest their decisions, that they made for YOU. And if you manage to touch their feet at every opportunity there is, you are a winner. I don’t subscribe to this kind of assumed, obligatory respect.

I was at the pharmacy today just browsing through for some random stuff and waiting to be attended to. There was a girl right before me, whose temper seemed to be rising by the second. There was an elderly person who there giving you stuff and making bills. It’s very important to mention that it was a typical Ayurvedic pharmacy cum treatment centre. This should give a fair idea that the elderly person was also a typical one who expected respect from anyone younger and more so from a younger girl. The girl who had been waiting since long time suddenly couldn’t take it any longer and started telling the elderly guy, “Uncle, I have been waiting here since the last 2 hours and I can’t take it any longer. I need my money. I am not from here I need to go back to Hyderabad”. The uncle was taken aback of course. How could a girl talk to him like that? She said, “No I won’t take cheque. I want my money and I got stuff from here only because you promised the last time that I’d be immediately refunded if I had to return it for some reason.” And to my utter shock, the elderly uncle shouted, “Chup baith tu!” I went blank for a second. How could anyone possibly talk to someone they didn’t know like that…and to a customer, at that? The old man suddenly got defensive and started saying he didn’t have money in the morning. I totally understood the girl’s point which was it wasn’t morning for one and that it wasn’t her problem. And then the drama got more interesting. There was another middle-aged woman there who started telling the girl’s mother who till then was just sitting there not knowing what to do. The woman actually asked the mother to convince her daughter to let go because he was an elderly and very respectable person. She started telling how the man would absolutely return the money since he was such an old and honest human being. The whole discussion just turned around at this point and the girl was made to look like the bad guy. At this point the doctor came out and asked the girl to keep it low as the other patients were getting disturbed. She chose to completely ignore the older man who was yelling and creating quite a ruckus. The man also started telling the sympathetic middle-aged woman in Malayalam how the girl shouldn’t have yelled. Everyone just started cornering the girl. To the point that even her mother started convincing her to come back in the evening. The girl retorted, “why didn’t you tell this to me before. Why did you make me wait for 2 hours? Why should I believe you? and what if you make me wait for 2 hours again?” All of these were very valid points but the girl still had to back out and reluctantly agree to come back in the evening.

I don’t understand this. Where is it written that you HAVE to respect older people? And even if it was, just because it’s written doesn’t make it right or valid. Wouldn’t people like to earn respect instead of claim it for age which is just a number and needs no contribution  whatsoever from them? I am surprised how the expectation of respect from a person is directly proportional to their gender. If you are a woman, you HAVE to respect anything. I also fail to understand the irrational importance attached to touching people’s feet. Okay, I get it that it’s a sign of respect and acceptance of someone’s power. But what has age got anything to do with it. It’s very unfortunate that even today, when girls do everything that only boy’s traditionally did, this meaningless gesture is still the yardstick of a girl’s character a.k.a her docility and readiness to submit to authority.I hated touching people’s feet even as a child. I felt I was being dishonest to myself every time I touched my grandmother’s feet. Why I was being dishonest to her too. She didn’t have any quality that to me defines a person worth respecting. She disrespected and mistreated her daughter-in-law, she demanded respect, never commanded it. When I couldn’t take it any longer I stopped doing it as often as I did it earlier. But due to the embedded need to show if not have respect for someone, I still did it occasionally. It’s funny how I’d feel guilty when I didn’t. And it felt guilty even when I did because there was no emotion behind the physical activity of bowing down.

I don’t believe in numbers when it comes to respect. I have respect for anyone who has respect for other’s point of view and for other’s right to have an opinion and express it. It’s high time we started questioning meaningless gestures we routinely do without any feeling. What do you think?

With unapologies

There are some things that I hate so much that despite trying to cajole myself into trying to ignore them; some things just bypass my annoyance filter anyway.

I hate:

1. people becoming extremely comfortable with me and acting like soul mates.
2. nosy people riding the moral high horse.
3. forced and assumed friendships.
4. unsolicited advice especially from people who hardly know me. And especially about topics like love, relationships, babies.
5. people insisting that I should like what they like.
6. people who try to be funny and crack jokes that are plain racist, sexist, unfunny or offensive in general.
7. women who yell at the top of their voices. This point stems from the fact that there is a woman in office who has no idea how loud and horrific she sounds. She’ll put Rani Mukherji to shame with her hoarseness. Plus I know even know her favorite music and her bank account number in just one day.
8. girls walking in twos and threes completely oblivious to the fact that they are blocking the way for others. Plus, these girls are there just to torture you. They keep chattering, they look at you, they see that you are stuck between them and are in a hurry but still keep doing what they are dumbly.
9. people with no sense of a person’s physical space. I’ve seen specimens who come so close as they talk that you need to squint.
10. people who touch your hand and cheeks and hair as they talk even when they hardly know you.
11. women who are blissfully unaware of their stupidity.
12. unbearably girly girls who act like they need to be rescued by men.
13. men who feel that they are meant to provide for women.
14. men displaying classic signs of chivalry like holding doors for women, entering only after women, pulling seats for women. I agree some are genuine and feel the need to do this but most are just showoffs and sexually frustrated men trying to impress women for an easy lay.
15. women who can make you uncomfortable just by looking at you head to toe.
16. Idiotically positive people. It’s just plain irritating and depressing.