Initial Impressions!

A week that started on a rotten note ended with me " putting my feet up" as Ricky Ponting would put it. Though it has been a couple of weeks with my first employers, my weeks still run from Monday to Sunday (for the uninitiated, weeks in office run from.....Oops! I forgot what they told me during my induction. Good riddance!).

Roger lost; India lost and worst of all, I had to wake up at 7 in the morning after spending a weekend with customary rainy-season blues. Though Indian cricket has ceased to captivate me ever since the Dravid-Chappell era, my jingoism and misplaced sense of national duty make me want India to win every time they play. But I would still take an Indian defeat for a Federer slam! How can somebody not like Roger? His equanimity, confidence, humility and class have meant that my support for him has always been unequivocal. Besides, I have always found Nadal's physique repulsive and obnoxious.

Getting sacked by your first firm within two weeks of joining wouldn't necessarily constitute a "peak in your career" and being a firm believer in journalistic propriety, I shall stay away from that. So what about India's greatest paradox, Mumbai? The standard organizational answer for that seems to be the "place where the slum-dwellers and the millionaire co-exist". I have found Mumbai to be a pathetic city to be honest with deplorable representation in the IPL. I am still to comprehend the fascination for this city that seems to be omnipresent amongst creed of our kind. I bet that there would be no other city in the world where you would require a train, a two-wheeler, a four-wheeler and a boat to really feel comfortable about moving around.

It is a city with messy traffic jams; gargantuan property valuations and uncomfortable pollution levels so much so that I reckon it won't be long before slums start constituting a reasonable bedroom, hall and kitchen integrated 1 BHK. The positives would be the pubs, the malls and of course the ubiquitous opposite sex. I wonder if girls have a similar priority list too! The only thing that has really elicited a chuckle out of me would have to be the cops. All cops look eerily similar; have greying moustaches the length of which would have given Veerappan a run for his money; have those big tummies with a book in hand and an Enfield for support and keep chewing something or the other. They would indeed make good brand ambassadors for the pan/ghutka firms though I may be naive in assuming that they have not yet shifted to friendlier confectioneries.

All these inconvenient truths about Mumbai reminded me about the 'trinity of books' that V.S. Naipaul -guess I have to call him Sir but again I am in an organisation which is extremely flat and discourages such practices; just to prove I wasn't sleeping all along during my induction- wrote about India which I unsuccessfully tried to complete during my vacations. The innate pessimism and inherent negativity about India made me give up finally. Vidya Naipaul might have praised by the sycophantic Indian media for the positive specks that he might have thrown out but I find it hard to reason why we seem to be ever so keen to embrace him as Indian. I consider him to be as much of an Indian as I consider Shobaa De to stand for the whole of humanity. Her penchant for female chauvinism would come a close second to the Left's China posturing as far as cliches go in Indian society.

Talking of which, I am really starting to get worried about the high rates of inflation and the economic recession for the first time in my life. I have got a pay coming up and have got a decent list of necessities, comforts and luxuries to procure. Most of my friends have already felt the pinch after a couple of dinners with their girlfriends - one of my luxuries by the way- and have already started anticipating their next pay. Some of my friends are also in the pursuit of trying to figure out which job would suit them best and are in the process of shifting already. Choosing the best place to work has all of of a sudden become as complex as solving Schrodinger's wave equation or understanding with certainty, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. You can carefully examine all options at hand and get confused; you can pick one out of those at random and still get confused after you start working or you can pick the one that pays you most and still get confused about the intricacies of the pay package. Maybe one of those IITians working should think of doing some research on how to solve this conundrum and come up with a mathematical equation . The very words 'higher studies' should only serve to add to his confusion.

Thus passes an uneventful life! Got to sleep now or I might well end up emptying the coffee-vending machine at office in my attempts to stay awake.