Musings from the Land of Blue Hills and Red Rivers

Since currently i am living a "not much happening" life, the only time pass which is happening is with friends. Quality TP indeed and varied experiences too. So while was getting bossed around in office, which is not uncommon given that you are the rung just above the dirt, i lost myself to the recent good times i have had enjoyed . The common thread was they were all with somebody or some bodies .
"Friends" rang out a holy voice in the back of my mind. Momentarily for the loud u r sh*t monologue was still haranguing my senses. But that was enough. Like a drowning man clutches at straw, I went retrospected on this aspect of my long life. Friends of all shades and colors of characters. So I decided to do some productive work, which for me turns out to be doing something thoroughly useless. "Friends" will vouch for that and drink to that too if i pick up the tab.
Dissertations Initiated <>
1. Good friends - Office Variety - Very common in today's world. Fills most of the void. In some cases the only option. From cribbing about the bad pay and sad job environment to relieving stress and cracking jokes to going out for lunches they are your main stay in life. Some go on and get promoted to real friends category. Generally they get replaced / out of touch when they or you change your job.
2. Friends - Hi hello variety - They exists but you dont really get along with them. You run into them in the office corridor or in the local market. Some common link like same office or locality or college. But you do share a cup of tea sometimes and call them your friends in discussions with other ppl. You always promise those ppl "Lets meet up for lunch next weekend"
3. Friends - Over telephone - Friends produced by new age tech. A single meeting in a train or concert or seminar and gtalk and mobile keeps u in touch with them. Good TP for 1 hour every month.
4. Old Friends - Colony where you grew up, school where you studied, similarly college ... places where we have spent considerable amount of time and honed relationships. However future studies/ transfers/ careers have taken us away from them. its a pleasure to meet them anytime even after years. After the initial introduction and hugging is over, old memories and tales takes over. When 2 such friends meet, its total entertainment for the third party present. Many secrets sometimes are revealed to partners by the old friend. You feel good and refreshed when you meet one of these type of friends
5. Last yet not the least - Lifelines - They were part of your gang, maybe you met them at the bar and got to know slowly, but slowly they have become your backbone. They will help you even if you contact them after a lapse of years. Silence speaks for them. Maybe good news might not be shared with them, but come hale and storm you will run to them. In front of them you are your fat ugly uncouth self. No formalities. Even if you have 5 of these friends collected over your lat 20-30 years you are very lucky.
Dissertation Over and Out <>

Wishing you to be surrounded by friends and never a lonely moment may haunt you. Sayonara

# posted by Angshuman Goswami @ 2:44 AM 1 comments

Shifted to Gurgaon .. for a special project.. now it seems I will here for another 6 months.. exciting stuff happening on the Rural front.. special content for rural consumers.. Poor chaps crave to contact the outside world and the only way is to travel to the nearest feeder town. Hopefully I can change that. Fingers crossed.

Life has been pretty good after my shift to Delhi. Went out on various trips

1. 3 day tour of Udaipur, Chittorgarh and Jaipur in christmas hols
   
2. New Year in mumbai
3. bihu in guwahati (thats the assames fest in place of makar sakranti/pongal)
4. a surprise trip to jaipur to catch up on some of the places i had missed

In all the above, my friend circles were different. SOme I were meeting after 2 and a 1/2 years.

Also in office I have a few good friends. They are yet to be tested under fire but i believe atleast 1 of them will come through. Answers a question can you have a good friend at work? I think you just might. I didn't think so earlier.

Unlike Siliguri stint, here i can catch up on movies and weekends means some visit to a friends place.

PS: For an earlier post i didnt complete. I will leave it like that. Still enjoyed siliguri. the postpaid sales team was a bachelor group. So we used to freak out and roam the streets till 1 am seeing probable outlets. Learning was immense. Also saw how closeness to powerful clients affect good ppl. Best part was a feed back from my ex CEO that the distributor with whom i worked was interested in doing business and was lamenting my transfer. For the last 2 years he had only cribbed. Had gone home from there on diwali and durga puja after 5 years. Ya i miss that feeling of a team. here at HQ its a diff story altogether. High society ppl. Diff life style and poorer working / relating skills. Here in the midst of all the ppl in the company sometimes i feel lonely. Outside it life is gr8 :))

Sales - Siliguri - Upcountry location - Postpaid - Retail channel

<under construction :D>

Am back from a nice break from my home. Enjoyed staying there and getting the attention of being the newest bread winner in the family now. But am now back in my rented flat in Salt Lake Kolkata. I have started liking it and making it more personalised with each passing day. Now I cook my own food. A good thing about Salt Lake area is that you get maids (bai's in local lingo) in abundance. Their charges are also very low. Rs 300-500 depending on whether they only clean your floor or even cook your food. So you get a life of "aaram".

When we had taken the flat, we had started looking around for a Bai. First three we got knew only Bengali, no Hindi. We couldn't communicate to each other what we wanted. Worst negotiations ever in my life. (Later i would face the same problem with retailers in remote corners of Bengal). We had given ourselves up of availing the help of Bais'. Then came Anjali

She knew quite a bit of Hindi. Broken though it was, she seemed liked a god given gift. Not only did she understand us, her timings were perfect. Morning 8am we fixed her time. She will clean and wipe the floor, wash our clothes and also dust our furniture. After the initial negotiations she could have become just another domestic help. She would come, do her work, go away and we would crib about how shabbily she cleaned the house. The normal routine.

But there were a few differences. She does her work with a smile on her face. No grumpiness or indifference as you see on other maids faces. With a smile. And its a genuine one. It has never wavered in the last 4 months. She cleans very well. No corners left, the floor underneath the beds are swept too and even out long staircase. And consistent performance. There were a few days when she stooped to normal Bai level. But very few.

The behaviour has got me puzzled. So i thought about it.

Perhaps it was her monthly payout. All friends had advised us that for the amount of work she was doing for us MAX 300 bucks. She asked 500. We pushed it down to 400. But we didnt go further, which was what she had expected.

We take 3 newspapers in our house, a different one for each of us. So we have a untidy heap of them at the end of the month. We could sell them for 60 bucks. Not much for guys who go to INOX and wear Peter England. But lots to a Bai. So we gave them to her to sell. When we told her she could keep the money from it, the smile of gratitude which she gave made us feel like kings. The process has been standardised. We are on our way to heaven. Its so easy.

We ask her help in other things. E.g. What do we call the household things around us in Bengali? Some announcements made in Bengali on loud speakers is translated by her to us. We take her advice on how to manage the house better. We talk to her with proper respect.

She had asked for a Durga Puja bonus. Others, we found out gave a MAX of 50. We gave her 150 coz we could afford it and we wanted to thank her for her work. Again she didn't expect it.

Maybe i will dare go on to suggest maybe she likes (I wont say loves) her job. A rarity, but not an impossibility. Butlers, drivers, cleaners are known to love their chores which we term as low level manual work. But even these require diligence and concentration.

So the question is: Any real benefits from all this?

We sleep without a care in the world while she cleans the room. Till date nothing has been lost. Infact money from our pant pockets and from below the bed is found back on top of our table when we wake up. Its such an advantage that its enough to being good to her.

When I had gone home, a junior of mine from REC had come and slept in my room. I came back to see my bedsheets and pillowcase washed and laid out on my bed. Customer delight. Speechless??

I just have to tell her to clean something and she does it promptly and well. Our clothes are cleaned very well. No dirt left on collar corners or cuffs.

Perhaps its the little bit of extra money which is the root cause. Definately money is a factor. And why not? It matters to us. But I believe its more than just money. How do you explain her behaviour, her attitude, her consistency, her SMILE? Does our salary alone make us happy? Dont we love it when our boss and colleagues treat us fairly and with respect. It makes our job enjoyable. I hope our behaviour is the cause of her behaviour. Its also an exercise of trusting a class of workers we have been historically been taught to be beware off. If she is genuine, future theifery from other maids will not destroy my faith in the labour class.

I pray that all these thoughts of mine are true. For if they are, it means I am, atlast becoming a HUMAN.

A hearty Puja wish to one and all. May you all have the power and courage to fight all the ills in your lives. Enjoy the next few days.

I will be going home for Puja after 5 years. After 1st year in engg, this is my 2nd time after i have left home. Have bought Kurtas and bengali cotton (TANT) sarees for relatives. A pair of titan watches for parents + darjeeling tea + a pair of bronze teal from tibet called lima metal in tibetan lingo.

Gotta rush. Will complete it later. A few things to wrap up before i leave... bye.

I am joining the new age male race. The male of the Indian middle class who is in touch with his more softer side. A race hailed by lifestyle magazines to marketing gurus to retail chains to cosmetic companies to agony aunts. Except for the fact that they dont have periods or cant bear kids they are no different than the fairer sex. Before you shout bullshit, i do agree there are differences, but these differences lie in insignificant details. A girl goes for scooty, a guy goes for pulsar, but point is that both enjoy the freedom of riding a two wheeler. A Getz and a Scorpio. A menz section and a womenz section in a store. A fair and lovely and a fair and handsome. A HR/FIN/IT/MKT head (leave sales and high technical field out of it). Army and priests are domains where both excel perhaps in slightly different roles. From pubbing to bowling to hanging out to "having a nice time" to shopping, the patterns of both the sexes are same. And here starts my story. Shopping.

There was a time when I hated the word shopping. Still do, but the prefix window shopping has got added. Otherwise I love the colors, textures, models and new offerings. The reasons are simple. It's the flow of money now that I have a job. It's the free time I have on weekends with nothing to do. It's the new malls offering all those tempting goodies. It's the desire to look smart. It's with the whole package of movies + food + shopping in one place.

I hate to look around just for the sake of it. I go mostly when i know what i want. Sometimes I go and buy on impulse. This impulse thing means I am changing.

So i decided to analyse my own behaviour. Came out with these. Girls you are free to disagree with my definations.

1. Traditional: You go in the role of principal bread earner. You wrinkle your nose at the fussy way your wife/GF/friend/relative is going about as if she owns the store. You just pay and go away or rather carry the packets. You can never take this role away from any guy. This mindset will always exist.

2. Enthusiastic: You want a shirt. You are hell bent on getting one. You might visit one or maybe 10 stores (common all guys are not same) but what is common is that he will have his shirt and wear it that same day. Generally this buyer sticks to his preferred tastes and doesn't experiment. The taste can be plain cotton shirt or a cargoes with lots of pockets. That taste defines the guy.

3. Adventurous: He goes because he wants to experiment. Perhaps he doesn't have anything to go with his new ponytail or he wants to change his party wear. Perhaps he wants a office wear with bolder designs or colors. Perhaps he can just afford new styles of clothing or gizmos. However he wants he opinions of near and dear ones before he would adopt this new style.

4. Impulse: This is what makes the guys same as girls now. You go around gawking at girls or gossiping about the new action flick when suddenly you see that belt which makes your mind goes blank. Or you feel the sudden itch to check the new line of giordino watches. Whatever be the initiator you end up with a package which leaves you with a feeling of contentment.

THE GUYS HAVE ARRIVED!

PS: Special thanx to an old friend in bangalore who mailed me and asked what have I bought in the last few days? voila all of a sudden i was thinking about shopping and why it has got us guys hooked without even us realising it.

Disclaimer: I am 100% hetero and as macho as guys come.