Sayonara

2000
I passed out of Class X, to join a different building (same school and friends) across the road for Class XI.
On farewell day, I cried.

2002
I passed out of Class XII. I was very happy to ‘escape the jail’ and looked forward to going to some place as fancy as college!!
On farewell day, I cried.

2006
I passed out of Engineering, and was so happily looking forward to joining B School that I rejoiced and partied for days together.
On farewell day, I cried.

2007
I finished a short internship (2 months) in Mumbai and was heading back home. I know it sounds weird to the reader, but…
On my way back, I cried.

2008
I passed out of B School. I was inconsolable for days together before the farewell.
On farewell day, I shamelessly wailed.

2009
I am moving away from Mumbai, my favorite city till date. My farewell was scheduled for last week; a few people called me up to say that they would not be able to make it to the farewell due to work. That evening, I was not able to make it to my own farewell due to the same reason. Even if I had been able to, I would not have cried.
My colleagues have been congratulating me left, right and center for moving out of here, as work – life balance is expected to be better in any other city compared to this one. But, that is not the reason I would not have cried. According to me, TIN* balance OTM. So, I am not gleefully looking forward to the move, frankly. Nor am I disillusioned and tearful at leaving my favorite city. I am not counting down, I have not begun saying my goodbyes yet, I am not even packing up (well.. that’s just because I have outsourced it to, or rather, it has been forcibly taken over by Mom :)).
I feel like am going on a short break, like any other holiday. When the break is over, I might not be back here, but go elsewhere. I like this randomness, this absolute peace with not being too attached to a ‘farewell’ anymore.
And that is why I have termed this post ‘Sayonara’ and not ‘Adieu’ or ‘Goodbye’. Somehow, Sayonara to me sounds like a short nap, a siesta, nothing permanent.

* TIN xx OTM is a simple, short and effective way of saying “There is No” xx “Outside The Mind” :D

What 'Brand Identity' do you choose?

Slightly non – standard disclaimer or rather, 'claimer': I have not written this post out of frustration or irritation. I am just wondering out aloud what I have been wondering within myself for more than a year now.

What is it with the C* word that gets people obsessed with it? Why do people find so much self satisfaction in proclaiming themselves to be Cs, whether they say it in a proud tone or in a cribby tone? Why do normal, really normal people, whom I have known as normal people for ages now, suddenly find the urge to identify themselves as Cs rather than as the normal people they have been?

Now that the initial flurry of questions is out of my head, let me explain myself.
I am a C, like many, many people I know. I envisage and strategize sometimes, and I ‘Excel’, PowerPoint’ (please, please let’s make them verbs) and document at other times. I attend meetings 80% of my time at work, I do multiple projects under different lines of business at times, and so on.
I might write all this in a better, ‘pseud’er language in my resume. ‘Cos I think all this is part of my work. That’s it. I don’t let it spill over in to my personal life.
I agree that sometimes I do consciously try avoiding work influences in my personal life. Trying not to write a blog post like an official document is a case in point. At other times, I very unconsciously am not influenced by my work personally. I talk the same way I have talked for ages and I think the same way I have thought for ages.
In essence, I don’t find myself having changed as a person because of the work I have been doing for a year or so. I don’t find the necessity to re – define my brand identity in sync with my career because I firmly believe that the career one ends up with in the long term will inevitably resonate the kind of person one is.

So, I find it really hilarious when people say things like “I am a C, so I will always look at the business case even when I am not ‘Cing’ and try to optimize the way it runs blah blah”. First up, I don’t think one needs to be a C to check out how efficiently a business can be run. Forget it, one does not even need to have a business heritage to think that way. One just needs to take a keen interest in the thing (venture or business or whatever) that they see. Rather, one needs to be interested enough to take notice of the thing, not just see it, with or without a C’s eyes.
I find it even funnier when some Cs think that everything should be compulsorily fitted in to a 2 * 2 matrix so as to make it meaningful. Maybe, I am being a disgrace to the C community here, but, no, I don’t think the world runs on 2 * 2s. Even when ‘Cing’, force fitting everything in to a 2 * 2 is humanely impossible and totally nonsensical, in my opinion. And, am not too sure pages and pages of 2 * 2s go too well with the client.

But, most of all, I find it appalling (that's perhaps a strong word) when some Cs constantly attribute the way they talk and think to being a C. My personal take: I 'globe' because I 'globe'. My 'globe' cannot exponentially increase because I am a C. It applies to other ways of talking and thinking.

Correct me if I am wrong, I do not have any survey to prove my point, but I do not think that people in other professions really get so drunk and drowned in it that they cannot function beyond it. For instance, I have not heard of my techie friends talking tech talk (Wow! That’s an alliteration :) ) all the time. If they did, I might have branded them ‘nerds’, never to talk to them again in my life. Nor have I heard my marketing friends talk all the time about brand value, brand recall, brand positioning, STP, consumer needs etc. If we did that, we might have bored each other to death so much that we would not be friends any longer.

Why does it happen in this profession alone? Is it that some Cs are just too proud of having become Cs and want to show off? Or is it that they are insecure about someone demeaning them with a, “Oh! You are a C! That’s why you are talking this way!” when the Cs offer an opinion and so want to preempt that comment through some kind of self - proclamation.
Maybe, I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but whether I were a C or not, I would have felt quite bad about people around me losing their heads and their identities, or perhaps, their identities and their heads (am not able to decide the order) over a C – level issue.

* - Abbreviated so as to protect the identity of the profession ;)

Of rains, dogs, tattoos and many more

The other day, S and I met for dinner when we were caught in the middle of a mad, windy downpour, as if even the heavens could not tolerate the fact that I had finally not exercised one of my excuses (as S puts it) and made it to the meeting.

I digress. We were caught in the middle of this downpour and it looked like my umbrella would be snatched away by the wind (I wanted to sound poetic and all that here but it turned out to be quite a common place sentence :( ). So, we sought shelter outside a shop – not just some kirana store or something, but a tattoo shop!!

From my excitement, you can well understand that it was my first time in such close contact with something as exotic as a tattoo shop. With little else to do except look at an old, tired dog trying to huddle on a mattress outside the shop, we started examining the display window.

Apologies, but I must digress here to give some footage to the dog. I was, as usual, in my paranoid way, getting scared of the dog as I am of anything on four legs, when S gave me a real ‘look down upon’ look. To save my face, I tentatively suggested, “Yeah.. Shouldn’t be scared of this dog.. Looks really old and tired”, to which she promptly replied, “Uh! Don’t know how it gets tired without doing anything all through the day!” Have we moved beyond leading even ‘a dog’s life’, as the phrase goes, that we are jealous of dogs too?!

Getting back to talking about the display window, it was quite a peculiar one. There were rows and rows of insect models, in different shapes and sizes. We were wondering why one would display models of insects in a tattoo shop when I seized upon this extremely innovative idea that perhaps people liked tattooing these shapes on their bodies or why else would they be up there wasting display space in one of Mumbai’s most expensive areas.

If my manager heard that, she would say, “Isn’t that plain common sense? I don’t understand why you all even wonder about such things!”

I know I am digressing quite freely and frequently on this post, but, if you read the title again, you would realize that I did warn you about ‘many more’.

In order to give the display window some much deserved attention, let me get in to some more specifics. Rank number 1 went to bizarre insects in 3 – D shapes. S wondered why they should necessarily have been put in 3 – D, wouldn’t a 2 – D picture have sufficed. Rank number 2 was bagged by bikes. I guess that is also hot ‘tattooable’ property. Rank number 3 was taken by superhuman figures. When I say that, I am not referring to a SuperMan or a SpiderMan, for I guess kids are not amongst the target segments of tattoo shops. These figures were more HeMan level – large, monstrous and other synonyms of these two words.

The wind had died down by then, and having got bored of enough and more analyses of the tattoo shop’s display window, we left in search of better things to do.