I left home and therefore Bihar when I was really tiny. Six years old. And surely a lot of who I am now, comes from the next 12 years that I spent in Naini Tal.
Or does it?
I can’t say. It’s always difficult for me to say exactly who I am; also I have very faint recollections of school.
No. No. There’s absolutely no deliberate attempt at novelty-existentialism there.
I think nobody can answer such questions. First off, who really has the time to think of it? And second, even if you do (strange person!) what can you say. We are all such different people from one day to another and definitely from one year to the next.
Plus can you even begin to go to the next one – why we are the way we are.
Anyway!!
Two years ago I returned home and therefore to Bihar. I’d hardly expected work to take me there, and was given little time to prepare and no choice at all.
Everybody told me it was a great move, the place had great lineage (a continuous string of great managers had worked and emerged from Bihar) and it would offer fabulous opportunities for quick and thorough understanding of my work.
For some reason I was suspicious. Not that the people were lying, what they said was all true, but then it was ALSO BIHAR!!!
Funnily, I was no social butterfly in Delhi. In my last two years I avoided almost everyone there, mostly because I was too busy surviving Delhi School but also because I was becoming an antisocial bastard. But there was always this comfortable option of stepping out and doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.
And then suddenly, in August 2007, I found myself in Patna.
In the beginning it was crazy, to say the least.
Living together with my parents after 17 years was fairly tough. I wasn’t used to being told what to do and they didn’t know what exactly to do with me. For the first few months there was nothing we did other than fight and yell at each other.
At work I got this sinking feeling of being immediately written off. With good reason, too! Everyone thought I was just a little bit too soft for a career in sales and especially a stint in Bihar. Plus I was pegged as being too anglicised!
And I was.
In the first week itself, I muttered, “What stupidity is this?” to one of the people who worked for me.
He thought I called him, STUPID. This apparently is horrible, because it was in English. What followed was the most embarrassing face off between me and the organisation; they simply refused to listen to anything I’d say.
I remember sitting in my office with rainwater leaking onto my table; all these people I barely knew sat huddled in the adjacent room. They were not cooperating with me and definitely didn’t have nice things to say about me.
I felt stupid, helpless and like a 23 year old bullied boy. (They were all old married men. With moustaches…)
Of course I hit back and really hard too, said some of the most awful things ever to all of the people. Even made a few of them cry!! It was a real childish thing to do, like blowing up a building to put off the fire.
I think the scientific term for it is ‘dick move.’
Well the people started to behave (and fear me); but they hated me more than anyone else on the planet.
Worse still, the floods came in by late August and business came to a total halt!!
Aaaaaaaargh.
The thing with being antisocial is that it’s a highly efficient way of getting people to be curious about you. However the curiosity soon mutates into mild annoyance and then, briefly, significant hatred.
But the end state is always indifference. Yep, eventually no one will care. At all.
Of course, I found this not in the Book of ALL Rules (And Tips on Winning over Sexy Ladies, or Men: Bonus Edition) we should definitely be born with, but through bitter experience.
Years of neglecting friends, friendships, a relationship and all the other people who cared finally took a toll. So there I was, suddenly caught in a bad place, in a wholly screwed up situation and nobody really bothered
Yeah man, those were bad times.
And then exhibiting a lot of character I decided to face all of my problems. Like a man!
By regularly drowning myself in much Old Monk and filling my lungs with a lot of smoke. It was brilliant fun and led to some fairly memorable times, like breaking into an uncontrollable fit of laughter outside the Sun Temple in Puri, which almost got us arrested.
Of course it was also fairly disgraceful and pathetic. And one winter night in Delhi as I puked onto the lawn at India Gate it finally hit me. “What the hell was I doing here?”
I got back into the car, and this friend of mine I have fancied for the longest time was there. She just rubbed my back and behaved like nothing happened. For some reason it felt like hitting rock bottom. I wish she had just slapped me. I don’t think I have felt more ashamed in my life.
I’m not going to tell you what exactly I did over the following months. I don’t really remember.
But I’ll tell you what happened. I invested time into a friendship at work I think I cherish more than any I have ever had, painstakingly won back the trust of the organisation, convinced them that I wasn’t really the Devil, and made peace with the folks, got back in touch with a few old friends, returned to watching films, found some wonderful music, started writing here, played endlessly with my dog, grew a french beard for a little while, (and looked horrendous.)
I understood my work, and started to enjoy it, and did well there. Which given the challenges, was one of the most satisfying things I have ever done. Oh and I cooked and cooked and cooked. I also, inadvertently, broke someone's heart, for which I am going to hell one of these days!
In my second year I faced some of the roughest times at work because of the worst flooding the state had seen. I rode through that. I had a million cups of the most horrible tea at office and travelled all over Bihar on the worst roads possible, at the oddest hours and stayed in the most obnoxious hotels. I personally sold our products in the market AND really enjoyed doing that.
Much of what I am today is because of the last two years.
Or is it?
I guess it is. Again it’s difficult to say what it is that I am now, and how that’s different from what I was two years ago. I guess it’s like when you are 12 or 13 and you can’t tell how much height you’ve gained because it happens slowly and you look at yourself every day. But then over a year you grow by a foot.
So even though I don’t feel it, I can safely assume much has changed. And now all this must end. And from next month on I’m going to be working in the NCR.
I had always imagined being jubilant and excited about leaving this place and especially for Delhi. Strangely I am not. I’m going to miss bugging my mother, and going for a swim with my father, I’ll miss cooking on Sundays, and having Cookie sleep between my legs or on my pillow, curled around my head. Oh I’ll miss most the efficient laundry and food service at home. I’ll miss knowing and being around Anil, Gopal, Randhir, Rakesh, Avinash and all the other guys at work.
But then I must move out, because there is much to be done and seen beyond here. And if I stay any longer I’ll start to get too comfortable.
Hmm. So as I read back, most of this can be passed off as fairly mundane stuff. Little lives make for small stories. But within those lives these are puffed up to be such epics.
And someday if I get around to making the movies I want to and send the protagonist back to his village for a while only to return stronger and with wisdom pouring out of his nose and ears, they are going to say – THE DIRECTOR OBVIOUSLY DREW ON HIS OWN LIFE TO ADD DEPTH TO HIS HERO.
Man, these journalists, can they not sound so corny?
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