More Ordinary than the Common Most

 

Do you still remember that guy in The Broken Dream?!

Well, he was now trying to forge an identity on the anvil of the corporate sector with the crude and heavy hammer of hard work, little realising that this was urban India, polished, smart, suave, not his countryside where things were as they appeared on the face value, good or bad. Here it was all about smartness: a shrewd, clever mentality and attitude that you naturally acquire when part of a massive crowd struggling to survive in cramped spaces and always falling short opportunities. And naturally you take fellow human beings as rivals only; it is difficult to think otherwise. There is cut-throat competition and you need smart, light, sharp chisels hidden in your pocket to work less and plan and strategise more. Here you have to wear the mask of extreme politeness to prove your education and civilised status, even though that very moment the second layer of your skin might be demonically on fire. However, true to his straightforward convictions he spent much of the times on his desk, from dawn to dusk, lost in the perseverance of the soul, while many suspicious eyes took breaks to look over his back, their eyes full of insecurity and mistrust.

Having slipped from the summit where he was just about to put his triumphant flag when the strong uncontrollable blizzard just saw him toppling down the treacherous slope, he had somehow managed to hold onto this tree jutting out the precipice. It was just instinctive reaction to survive. He knew he had to earn his bread and butter and of course there were many eyes on him still trying to find out how he would act now. When he started his climb again, already on the wrong side of age to build up a career in academic publishing, he saw many already in senior managerial positions even though they must not have read and experienced even a quarter of what he had learnt from both in books and the overall open book of life. And wherever he landed up with his ambitionless self carried by unassuming persona, full of cemented ideas and many brimming convictions, his heart full of the miseries, and mind stuck up to just the job, he left a mark, and his presence was felt a bit more disturbingly than  it should to ensure a safe journey through the corporate corridors.    

After his selection to the state civil services he was once happily packing his common stuff to join the duties of Subdivisional Magistrate when the Congress Chief Minister of Haryana had got loose motions over this tiny 'coming to power' and used all his majestic powers to piss at the hard work of all his poor batchmates. They had every reason to take themselves to be the first-hand witness to all the ‘Congreslike’ corrupt ways, as they termed it suffering in helpless cynicism, of judicial manipulation. With the pieces of his broken dream in his pocket, he had then come to Delhi to earn his livelihood in the ruff-and-gruff of the private sector. He had started to drink, to create that hallucinated reality wherein the things which really pinch otherwise took a backseat and many pseudo-realities came to the forefront with their trivial convenience, to stop the time at a juncture where the past’s pines, present’s pinches and future’s insecurities melted into a strange ennui. He would continuously blabber, ‘Lo! Hee…hee Gandhi-Nehru geenies would not leave me in peace!’ A common man wants to have extraordinary reasons for his downfall. If defeat be, let it be at the hands of the strong and the mighty. It still somehow gives him a pat on the back gesticulating that it was no common fight, it was a good one and you were pitted against the strong and the mighty.

Even though it was pretty coincidental, but it affected him a lot, taking a flake off the purple crust of his wound. His hard innings in the publishing office had just started, leaving him just a small time, nameless, powerless slogger on the editing desk. He literally cried once during the weekend drinking binge, ‘They have robbed me of my soul’s labour of ten years...these...ugh...Congress pimps of criminality!’ And somebody whom he did not know, and not having anything to do particularly, having a Congress flag on his office and house nearby where he had taken his rented accommodation, had turned out to be his enemy, as if the latter had heard his outpours. Why did this stranger whom he had not even seen turn out to be his enemy? He was his landlord's enemy yaar! So the influential Congressite took revenges by forcing down nails into the new tyres of his old car. He got it done to anybody and anything that was apparently related positively to the enemy. It was quite individual, general level action, reaction or whatever, but he as the oversensitive victim took it personally, and very-very particularly. ‘...Congress....you just make a staunch anti-national element in me! Guys please throw these goons out of power because if they get another chance, I fear this law-abiding common citizen of India will end up as a terrorist! So save country, save humanity and save this common man! Pleeeeaaasssseee!!’ After all the new tyres from an editor’s salary are more precious than they actually should, but that’s how it was and it took him into a furnace of rage.

He was trying his level best to come to the terms of a reality that he had not even considered as the worst case scenario; his worst case scene having been the PCS if not the IAS. An editor on the other hand is almost nameless and faceless among the tomes of proofs and manuscripts at various stages. On top of that it is like walking on the razor’s edge, you just cannot afford not to make a mistake. The world is yet to see the first perfect editor. On top of that it was academic publishing, the crazy professors taking slingshots and still it paid like pocket money. The world was changing very fast around him. People were getting unimaginably high salaries around him, and these were the students who had looked up to him as inspiration. He had even instructed them proudly so many times. It looked a still bigger failure, or fall rather, against the background of these pinching facts. Bigger fall, he read bigger causes. Oofs look at the frustrated common man’s cynicism born of little-little defeats and falls that he pours out ineffectively from the little personal stage, namelessly and facelessly. Psst just storms in the tea cups! 

Corporate career is great. It keeps you on the razor's edge. He liked the innings to begin with. He worked harder than required in fact. He felt the pleasure of learning as he was forced to grow his skills at all levels. But it’s dissipating as well. It saps you in the long run. He felt this dissipation while coming back at the end of a tiresome day in office. ‘So it’s always advisable to slowly built an alternate pedestal in the medium term--say for the next 5 to 10 years--so that when things get too hot in your present position you can easily jump onto that one.’ Given the heat and attrition felt in the smouldering issues he was already having some inhibitions about the long-term survival in such an environment, especially if one is just equipped with simply one visible weapon, the hard work. He had the faint idea what it can be about. ‘This new platform can be based on the real passion.’ So while he was toiling it out against his real interests, he avoided getting frustrated with the solacing thought that it was just a temporary effort to create a bit more stable platform to jump bigger into the space that would justify his talents, skills, sincerity and calibre.

He had to convince himself to stay on the mundane path, slogging at a job that was almost incomparable to what he had achieved in the PCS. He forced himself to forget that his magisterial chair had been unjustifiably snatched away and he had been made to sit on a chair where anybody decently educated to the postgraduate level could have sit without all the hard work he himself had gone through. He forced himself to take it as a sort of investment for the future. He was trying his level best to cling to his dream; to keep it alive; to slowly and systematically chalk out a medium term plan; to invest time and money in moderate amounts and when the things were ripe jump onto the platform that he deserved. All this was easier said than done. His father who always supported all his actions, ranging from follies to the best ones, felt the pinch of seeing him slogging it out at a level where he would have reached in any case even without all the penance he had done. His father’s health was falling and so the necessity was even more to stay in the job. The more he worked, the more number of projects he accomplished, almost mechanically, trying to forget his identity, just the work like any other pettily self-absorbed happy colleague around him, the more would cynicism strike back. Still he had to work. He had to forget that he would have been a red-beaconed officer, if not for that debacle, and again he would grumble from the safe hideout in his rented room. 

Having burnt and baked well in the furnace of knowledge and experience he spoke and acted impressively and that would instantly create ripples in the senior’s mind because in his flashes of brilliance he very much appeared like a replacement for the senior position. A talented junior having the conviction that he is surviving in the job on the basis of hard work not the senior’s goodwill, very easily becomes an eyesore to the boss. Of all the sectors in the private industry, publishing is lucky or unlucky to have all the highly qualified, educated, bookish-type big-dream-holders of the past who carry a bitter cynicism in their wounded selves, having failed to achieve their dreams. When you re-build your innings from the scattered pieces of the original dream, having full knowledge that the new one is going to be just a mundane dream like any other lying unrecognised in the society, almost of the level achieved by even those commonest souls who in fact never had the urge to build any dream but still reached that milestone just like it was the most natural thing for somebody human, from the mere status of being human, you feel the pinch man. You still try to justify your struggle, you still want to fight to forge a bit less common identity and having failed to do even that, a cynicism creeps in you. The very same happens to this class of highly educated people forced to survive in the editorial departments. Editing is very rarely the first career option for any young soul. It is mostly a fall back, almost a contingency plan, an effort to carve out bread and butter when all other options given your educations and skills are spent. So the people in the editorial departments are the wounded soldiers. They have the mind and education still nudging and aggravating the bitterness forcing them to almost misuse it to pamper their distrust and slain ego and cut any bud of a prospective rivalry to their hard-fought managership.

Across all the companies he worked for he found himself surrounded by insecure colleagues who more so pampered the boss as more and more of their deficiencies would come to surface in comparison to his soul-absorbed hard work. He was after all from an educated peasant family, and hence hard work came naturally to him. But considering their natural right to be more educated, well-mannered and better polished they parroted their excellence in terms of smart work in comparison to his mere hard work. Now he could never find out the riddle of this smart work. If there is a script full of errors needing corrections at many levels more than one to just make it a decent book, where you just have to follow the basics, if doing even that comes to be counted as hard work only, then he always spat hell on the so called smart work. Smart work to him came to be this: Appearing far more sophisticated than you actually are; appearing to be more busy than you actually accomplish; managing things in a politically correct way not to create insecurity in the erring boss; instead of taking the project to a smooth finish, creating issues that would apparently need extraordinary solutions, taking more time and projecting light on you that you did a very tough project; to manage to appear a not-so-smart subordinate who appears to survive on the superior’s kindness not the hard work, etc., etc. What the hell, where do all these gems of smart work help in turning a horribly messed up piece of writing to a presentable book. He would just give his best shot in accomplishing the worst of projects without allowing it to be taken as a tough project because there were no issues in it and of course it would naturally come to be counted a very common-type project. In any case he kept on hopping from one publishing house to another, hoping to find a better, less politicised environment, where there would be better bosses and colleagues. But it would never be because the same set of people staffed the offices in publishing. Go anywhere. All this while the feeling of what he could have been ...if not for ‘that’ debacle...kept on pinching him with bigger force.  

 

In one company he came across a brown-eyed human machine. A kashmiri pandit. He always told him ‘think more feel less’. A very practical advice but not for someone like him whose wound was a bit deeper leaving him oversensitive regarding his hardened convictions. Like any other oversensitive person trying to be the Phoenix he used to write poetry and to get into good books of the educated superior he showed it to the manager sometimes. The great practical man who had won a great career fight to emerge as victorious far away from guns in the valley told him that poetry is nothing but malady for the mind.

There was a very long-pending chemistry project. Many editors had got cold feet looking at the thousands of handwritten classroom type jottings with beetle nut and gutka spots sent by the eccentric professor. The manager smartly pampered his Jat ego, called him a Jat many times, to inflate the legendary pride that this community pumps up after being addressed as such. The Jat editor thus got ready to sacrifice his editorial blood for the Kashmiri manager, like many of his kinsmen were doing as real soldiers in the valley. For almost one year life meant just that project to him in all its forms. There were big stakes financially. It was for the IIT entrance exams and there were advance orders. Everybody knew something big was coming and even the CEO acknowledged the tireless worker sometime during the lunch hour. But then the group of smart workers was getting exposed in the light of such soulful, hard-worked assault on the editorial desk. There must have been many rounds of smart works involving poisoning ears. As he neared the finish line braving across the pining sands, the manager turned colours like a chameleon. He and the smart workers were pitted against the hard worker. More poisoning of ears by the cool arse, farting otherwise on the chairs. The manager hissed venomously like a kobra. He knew how to bite...instinctively like all the slithery reptiles of the species.

There was a new entrant, a friend and colleague of his from the previous company. A brilliant editor but extremely poor in selling his skills in the recruitment test involving verbal and the written sections. He even facilitated the answers to the questions that they asked in the recruitment process to enable his entry in the company. He just wanted a friend as his colleague again to make it more tolerable for him in the killing monotony of the work. Since his applicant friend did not have the capacity to present his skills smarty, he as the over-excited friend even talked many times to the manager to turn the tables in his friend’s favour. He was a friend indeed. He knew his friend was a peerless editor, but just for that little deficit in not being extrovert enough to sell it he needed this help. Great news, the friend was selected, even though just a year back he had been rejected in the previous attempt. This friend of his turned out to be smarter than he thought and pitched his loyalty for the manager and bargained his friendship to get long-term benefits for his family. Well, pardonable, no issues and no grudges! Basically we ought to think for the benefit of our own family first. Just to be human man! The manager must be having super-smartness to make him think more about a bright career and feel less about losing a friend.

As the manager played cat and mouse with him to draw him to the exit gate he wondered it was just impossible to come across a more spiteful person. In his weekend drunken outpours he forgot about the erring Congress now and had his helpless revenge in indoor cries, ‘You swine...It was simply my folly to expect a friendly kiss from a snake...the helpless creature is bound to bite only.’ He was so grossly mistreated by the said Kashmiri man that, well, he thought in his nightmares, if a community could give birth to even a single such human being then it’s better that Kashmiri pandits left Kashmir valley because it is too heavenly for such vindictive people. A wound direct to our own individual self can turn us against others’ collective wound. His typical Indian mind bound by parochial limits reacted like it does often times: we react and spit venom on the religious, caste and regional basis after getting hit in our individual man to man skirmishes. It’s so easy to generalise! Burning with anger and lynched with helpless agony, his year-long penance gone down the drain, he even nursed sympathy for the militants in Kashmir. ‘Kashmir valley is better without pandits!’ he tried to have his raging revenge by thinking as badly as possible. Almost all of us can be demons in thoughts, and we seek reasons for such demonic thoughts. He was such presently, all because of this man and his smart managership!

A Machiavellian manager believes in the principle 'the end justifies the means'. Very smartly such an individual follows the principle: 'I will do anything necessary to achieve my objectives.' Such a manager runs after this credo like fish swimming in the waters. With every breath he inhales the tendency to manipulate others and force them to perceive things in his terms. Utterly self-serving and duplicitous, the Machiavellian manager is made for success during these not-so-good times. The cold hard steely rationality in him reaches a peak to become almost amoral. Ever driven by these tendencies such a manager engages in more political behaviour than anyone around. The mind is always ticking to plan such schemes as will allow him to take advantage of others. Well, he could verify it from his personal experience. Each and every bit of this definition bespoke a thorough lynching by the Machiavellian hunter.

So this particular Machiavellian hunter was inherently spiteful, at least to him, simply because the junior did not seem appropriate for a peaceful future. Possibly he himself had the nastiest of communal experience in the valley when he had to leave home and hearth and rise like a Phoenix in Delhi again far away from the heaven here in the rut and grit of the maddening crowd. Whatever might have been the experiences, our experiences cannot overhaul the instinctive basics of life. All of us are good and bad as per our convenience. The manager must have had one million justifications for his actions that literally drove someone to madness. But full credit to his capabilities; his designs were just meant to achieve certain objectives like a computer.

As he gave him cuts after cuts, the poor to-be-slaughtered lamb wondered, ‘There is not the least bit of human element!’ Haa...haaa just visualise the keema being made of a soft flesh like him by such a heartless, stony juggernaut! Buddies, just count your stars lucky that there was just one such hunter playing all his cards in the basement corridors of the company where he had finally decided to retire from come whatever may. To the now gone numb guillotined editor, the superior’s eyes glinted with inhuman, brown, snaky predatorship. Those eyes now seemed to just monitoring the basement to strike poisonously at anything not matching his designs. God, this man's mind was ticking 24 hours a day to plot, plan and do away with everything to his dislike like weeds in a farm. Well, well, well... the manner this modern pseudo-chanakya was torturing the hapless editor and was plotting with such insidious finesse that the poor academic worm would have dropped his corrective pen to pick up a killing gun and join the jehadis in Kashmir! More than that such an individual might force you to pick up guns against the real you...the real good self...pump bullets into you softer flesh to become better equipped in surviving in the mud. After countless tortured days and endless gloomy nights while he futilely fought to save his job, working harder than ever, he was rapidly losing the last bits of confidence still fuelling his fight for bread and butter. If such a strong-willed person is hell bent upon pulling you down, it becomes a mere countdown leading to your crash in the gutters and it happened.

That feeling of victimisation, that pain of unjustified punishment, that fundamentally unreasonable logic of all the hard work going into the drain, and more importantly those who were already having a nice time, now getting even better enjoying the cool rewards of the project accomplished within a fortnight of his exit, all this and more drove him literally to insanity. Even what had happened to him in the civil services appeared nothing in comparison to this. There he was just a vague, faceless victim of the far bigger system; here he was direct victim of somebody’s ambition. For almost a month he was bedridden in a delirium, burning with impotent rage and resentment. It was a real loss. He felt like a goat killed in that halaal way, slowly-slowly put to death, to give more pain, for the taste and sadistic pleasure.

All of us would very much like to shoot off to glory like Phoenix from the ashes. But then we have our limitations. All of us cannot be heroes; otherwise the concept of heroism will become redundant and this ordinary world will have too many heroes. He was far commoner now than he was earlier. As the fever ebbed out to give him a semblance of normalcy, he again had to work, to earn his bread and butter and mind you it was no extraordinary situation, everybody else in Delhi was doing it. It involved thousands more capable than him and possibly in worse conditions still. That was the only solace and he picked up his corrective pen again.

 

It was a supposedly better publishing house this time but here the daggers were drawn along different lines. The plush interiors were suffused with richly clad, profusely scented and overenthusiastic vanity about the empowered women and girls. He had decided to keep a very low profile; not to get highlighted either for the good or the bad. With his simple countryside brain this was all he could strategise. It was all that smartness meant to him. In their pleasant narcissism bright, attractive, cultured females are no less in bitching and jealousy against their own replicas than the illiterate peasant women. In fact here the situation might get even worse given a brighter platform and more awareness. There were so many young girls and women, all of them good looking, all of them from good families, all of them ultra modern, and all of them bitching and jealous of each other. He had to maintain a balance; no animosity, no friendship; and distribute his attention and loyalty to all of them, that literally meant to none of them, without making them realise any particularity and consequently unleashing their anger. 

Of all the always-expected happenings and mishaps in an environment that is suffused with so many educated, good looking, narcissism-lorn young ladies, one particular issue was raising its head. There was a Hindu princess and there was a Muslim princess. Both were popular and in demand in their own ways. Both had their share of male adulations and attention. But then such exclusive popularity and being in demand among the same set of people can very rarely go smooth. There are bound to be edges of attrition. They had their own delicate touches in the form of unique looks, sense of fashion and what not. They were on an equal footing in all the elements of this rivalry to be more influential and popular except in one sense that the Muslim princess had a bigger clout having being there in the company for a longer time. The Hindu princess was a fresh lotus in the pond and basically on account of being a fresh gust of breeze was creating ripples that was much resented by the Muslim princess who got insecure that she might lose her footing.

Having a bigger history and deeper clout with that particular company the Muslim princess took front-footed shots at the subtle charming deliveries of the Hindu princess. It started just as a skirmish between two individuals but it had all the propensity of acquiring very particular sharp edges running into religion, personal lives and even the affiliations of those around. These personal skirmishes were smouldering in the form of many so called official project related issues, as they say it, but is it possible to keep personal prejudices, likes and dislikes away from the professional issues? So others were also getting drawn into the quagmire. To him it appeared to happen repeatedly, unjustifiably, without any professional reasons and without any provocation by the poor Hindu princess. That was the impression carried by the appearance and strengthened by the more aggressive, loud-mouthed minority princess who looked a tormentor and the other one just a meek sufferer after some time. The reasons of catfights became plainly personal after a point.

The minority princess had definitely a bigger clout. The Hindu holy cow was seen shedding tears many times. It would bring a few men almost on the verge of fighting for her cause. But the offended princess would bite back with more ferocity even though almost teary eyed on the surface. If the Hindu holy cow raised an issue, other educated Hindu lambs eating the grass of hypothetical secularism ran to defend the Muslim princess. After all religion was a main issue and nobody wanted to sound communal by siding with the princess from the majority clan. She had this minority shield. Caught in a difficult situation, she was even heard shouting the plaintive tales of Muslim sufferings in India. She had numerous tales of army atrocities in Kashmir to share while the sheepish colleagues appeared excusing themselves for the majority’s tyranny. She was educated enough to know this secular conscience in educated Hindus and never missed a chance to be pampered in office like a real princess. Under the bombardment of her endless tales of Hindu atrocities against Muslims, the secular bread earners, the educated chicken-hearted Hindus, were ever so eager to prove they had read enough books to turn a blind eye to anything done by her to assure her that they loved and cared for her. Many would run with hankies to wipe her tears and mutter against their own religion and curse the Hindu princess who was not letting her in peace so far away from her home in the valley.

Earlier during the build-up of the Modi wave that catapulted him to the PM chair, she was always splattering venom against Modi and was casting Nazi type holocaust forecast of Muslims in India if he came to power. It was here that he lost with her. To him the Congress was the main enemy and since enemy’s enemy is your friend by default, he was pitching all out in Modi support as a revenge for his little debacle from power during the Congress rule. Once during the course of her endless anti-Modi tirade during the lunch hour, he lost it and asked her, ‘Do you think the Muslim population of India would be sent to gas chambers if he comes to power?’ It was scandalous, not expected among educated, law-abiding, educated, secular people. It was a communal remark. She had many tears to shed to the higher management and he was severely reprimanded. In fact would have almost lost his job had not he shown that uncharacteristic silence during the reprimanding session.  

The educated Hindus enlightened by the hypothetical lines of secularism now clearly allowed the Hindu cow and the bull by default to be bitten and smothered by the victimised princess. This falling out with the minority princess put him in a light where he clearly came to be perceived supporting the cause of the Hindu princess. Very easily there were rumours that he was having an affair with her and that is why he had splurged communal venom on the helpless suffering minority princess. The males smouldered in the fire of jealousy for having missed what he achieved. During his drunk forgetfulness he was now shouting ‘Kudos to Hindu secularism!’ as much as he shouted of the helpless pain in that meeting where she had again shed tears to turn the tables in her favour and he had been reprimanded by the well-meaning bosses for being so savage to think communally and that too in a publishing house among the most enlightened gentry in India. He cried aloud, ‘Is there any overenthusiastic RSS or Bajrang Dal guy who can issue Hindu version of fatwa against this woman!?’

He had lost his right to professional excellence with the blot of the communal issue on his editing face. The more he worked, the more difficult they became. They even jibed that with that type of mentality he better fitted the khaki-shorts and stick-holding gang. The more he worked, the more were the rumours of his liaison with the Hindu princess. The more was the noise by the ever-crying minority soul in the company, who had seas of tears to shed for the atrocities on Muslims, about Modi’s genocidal plans against them, etc., so more was the effort on part of the enlightened Hindus to prove their secular credentials. They were now outrightly supporting her despite nightmarish professional blunders of late. To save the soul of the Indian constitution they had to help her in the job come whatever may. These enlightened Hindus thought that they were the last hope for a secular India, and he being the chief enemy to their clean motives with his scandalous affair with the Hindu princess. With maximum number of projects under his belt, but with communal slur on his face, bearing the tag of the tormentor of a helpless minority princess, he came out of the increment review meeting, the revised figures of his take-home in his hand. He had got an increment of just 500 rupees equal to the oldest employees in the company, old Ram Swarup, the peon who was working for the last two decades. It was sheer insult. But rightly so, he was just a hardworker and not smart enough to be called a secular person, the stamp and authenticity of being really educated. They said he is hardworking, does the maximum number of toughest projects but that does not save him from being an uncouth peasant. He is just not smart enough. With his 500 rupees increment, feeling almost a year-long work gone waste, he yelled, of course after getting drunk, ‘God knows when bigger plotters would join this particular publishing company and dismantle the hideous rein of that poor bitchy minority princess ruling over those gayish, half-woman secular subordinates!’ His soul drenched in misery, he was lecturing a much younger boy from Varanasi, who had rented a room in the same block and listened to him with particular attention. He tried to brainwash the young man, taking it as his revenge against the secular class.

 

'Educated Hindus', read it as synonym of 'pseudo secularists', consider it their Bhagwan-ordained duty to criticise any type of Hindu cultural pro-activity. They press the panic button if Hindu consciousness takes slightest political path. They start croaking in large numbers, putting their knowledge and linguistic skills to the best of their abilities. Haa haa funny species!! They end up creating more insecurity in the minority community. This type of hypothetical lip service also qualifies as a form of communalism. The world will be a far better place if these champions of secularism try to bring down paranoid insecurity prevailing archaically in the minds of the minority community.

Well so much for the debate! Pseudo secularists have made it endless to keep their language skills sharp. Away from this world, a Hindu khaki-shorts clad man was heard lamenting: 'The worst of a Hindu will still be less aggressive and more accommodating than the best of a Muslim!'

His every mistake being counted as a blunder, and the minority queen’s blunders passing of as inconsequential slip-ups, life was getting worse. How do we change this world for the better with such differentials? Secularists of all genres pounced upon this class enemy. There were many more issues with the minority princess. Using her clout and being in the best books of the superiors she would never miss an opportunity to pull him down, his hard work lying scattered around him, being struck down by her smart strikes. Getting mistreated like this he was being again pulled out from his drunk, hypothetical support to the Jehadis in Kashmir. She was also from Kashmir. When he would come back after a frustrated day, he would reflect in a rabidly communal manner. His drunken revolts now targeted the minority community she belonged to. Not being able to take particular targets, he as a petty Indian took generalised pot-shots. He was truly a big mocking fan of Hindu leniency! He had read history as one of the optional subjects during his civil services preparations and knew enough facts about the medieval period to fuel his tongue during the drunken sprees.

Hindu pliancy flows even swifter than the Ganges in Monsoon torrents. Fastly carried by the forget and forgive dharma, the educated Hindus would prefer to just flip over gory pages in Indian history--such as Taimur Lung wiping out the entire Kaafir population of Delhi and thousands of desecrations of Hindu temples and idols to build mosques having gates upon Hindu idols so that the true species of Allah could walk over them--and gloatingly stuck at pages of Hindu tyranny like semi-aggressive acts of naked Sadhus breaking a mosque to just commemorate the birthplace of Ram Lalla! Hindus can afford to be better students of History!  

Things got so bad and he just on the point of being asked to go that he cursed her now by her religion not as a wrong-doing individual. During the final build-up to his smartly managed exit, even at their worst they had not anything to say against his performance. He had finished more projects than anybody around and that too the intentionally given toughest ones to land him in a soup.

He was getting stubborn now, even more obstinate than the roofless street urchins. Vowing to focus on being smarter and less of a hardworker he again entered another publishing house. He had turned very snobbish by now. Being smart was not just his cup of tea. He was technically almost peerless in his editorial work, but being smart was just not his cup of tea. Possibly, more than a better edited book they need smarter, more convenient people. In the bookish, stuffy, insecure interiors, infested with poor little clerically educated funny Indians of this new publishing multinational company—that’s how he termed people and the interiors now—a farty, gayish, woman-bodied poor man—that’s how he looked at his boss now—was sticking to his chair for almost a decade! His eligibility and skills: poisoning the ears of a bigger, smarter female who herself had God knows what means used to reach that departmental head position; giving negative feedbacks about his talented juniors; nurturing a servile intern because new joiners are not a threat to his position; etc. Only one thing was clear to him now, and this he jotted in his journal without drinking, in full sense and using his bugged, injured logic:

The academic publishing sector in India is infested with bottom-licking, non-creative, semi-skilled managers who are the products of a very poor system of education that just puts clerical eligibility in their little poor Indian brains. With severe leadership and team-building limitations, these insecure funny middle level managers, just think 24 hour a day to plot and scheme and strategise against any potential threat to their position. Unluckily Indian corporate is infested with semi-skilled insecure bosses who stink with their poor ass in their positions just by swiping away the careers of real hard-working subordinates.

All his efforts at being a smart worker went haywire again. This particular poor little creature who could torture him with such an aloof and cold smile that he appeared worse than a butcher. He termed him as barely a man in a woman-type body: A terribly vindictive poor little demon in his indirectly lethal ways. His superior managed by gratifying the ego of a just-saved from spinsterhood, ageing boss. The latter was yet another perfect example of a vicious, vindictive, scheming modern ageing single woman who knows her strengths to serve her professional utility. ‘Just like any other poorly informed Indian, this gang of people with severe technical and editorial limitations pay hypothetical lip service to smartness, coolness, polished manners. But does it help in making a rubbish script into a nice book?’ he would question. He knew he was a dumb hardworking donkey who could just pull the worst laden cart full with unresolvable papers to the safety. Forget about smartness. He can just bray without being smart. 

Every time he left a company, he would hope for a better system staffed with better people who would just not swipe his hard work with their smart broom. But it would not happen. Only God knew what was to become of him.