whataworld
I am at the end of my tether. Nothing has worked for me. Why ME? When every other chap has a job and a pay, decent or indecent, why am I denied employment? An Arts graduate is not offered earth-shattering choices of career, I know, and certainly not those obscene pay packets – or are they rackets – of engineers. The brightest ones get themselves, tie and all, splashed in the front page of newspapers, if not national, at least regional ones, for the ransom companies pay to hire them. Don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely nothing against those guys, nor against their parents, who are the teeth-gritting, whip-lashing single-minded drivers behind them. As for the medicos, they are a scam apart from the rest. They have the whole sick world at their mercy and they have a contingent, yes, a whole army of chaps to collude with and wring out their capitation fees from the coughing, spluttering lot in no time. The heirs to business magnates, girls who look so like each other in their business suits and guys who put on fake modest looks for covers of business magazines do not deserve much thought. Silver spoons in a god-forsaken country, where even five fingers have nothing to dig out of an earthen bowl, are simple obscenities. No, no, I have nothing against any of the above. Right now I am in a deadly introspective mood.
With a naked B Com degree in hand, I have joined the vast ocean of Indian youth in search of a job. Everyone, from the fruit-seller’s studied-in-the-streetlight son to the class V government officer’s mediocre, unmotivated son, is a graduate on a job hunt, as clueless as an ocean wave. I sometimes envy the plumbers, carpenters and electricians whose mobile phones are forever ringing when they are at work in our house and whose numbers come switched off when we nearly die for their attention. But would I dare to train myself under one of them? I may be banished from home, if and when I do find the courage to declare the building plumber my guru! And honestly, dirty loos make me throw up. Things electrical are great when they work but they are shockingly lethal when leaky or plain scrap when out of their sockets. The din of the carpenter’s saw irritates me no end and sawdust makes me sneeze. No, I cannot aspire to any of these vocations (thankfully).
My attention has shifted from myself to that all-important yet perfectly useless piece of paper called the degree certificate. It is a key with nothing to unlock any more. An MBA is master key but by acquiring it I will only be joining yet another ocean of a slightly superior band of unemployed. I might as well save up the money and instead wish for some magic spell to breathe life into my birthday-suit degree and my good for nothing horoscope. If I could marry a tycoon’s congenitally morose daughter by making her laugh, I would have a life to live. But for that you need a caring, sponsoring father like the king in the fairy tale. Today’s tycoon could himself do with a dose of free laughter. There are those who make a stampede for computer classes, and change the course of their life like a damm(n)ed river. Many of my classmates have ended up in BPOs, with their biological clocks running anticlockwise. They have a ghostly pallor under their stubbles, unsightly paunches and dark Saturnine rings under their eyes and zilch personality of their own. I would rather sell veggies on the pavement than become a BPO zombie. Vegetable seller…hmm. The old stick-like lady whose son owns a vegetable shop is forever driving away cows and vegetable lifters. Yes, they do exist, if you did not know. She has to dispose off withered carrots at half price and balance the loss by overpricing elsewhere. Guess one is born with special crafty genes to do this kind of a juggling for survival. Blame my parents for not endowing me with those. Those who juggle jobs, landing one, losing another and eyeing a third are a modern mutated subspecies of homosapiens. I wonder how they put up with so many HR guys, those perpetual troublemakers who get trained to turn and twist your wits inside out. I would truly prefer to keep those devils at arm’s length.
I cannot philosophise on all the jobs of the world which my bare-beauty B.Com will not get me. On the other hand, I am also in an enviable vacuum where I can simply rave and rant about the unfairness of the job market, as it is called, with me fitting in nowhere. What about those umpteen possibilities you may ask…door-to-door selling, telemarketing, insurance selling and the like, ideal turf for us in the grey zone of the professional world. I once almost kicked out an encyclopedia seller who came banging on my door bang in the middle of my siesta. Marketing leaves me cold, if not frozen like a week old chicken in the freezer. Trying to stuff a product down another’s throat is a gagging crime, that’s what I feel. Those loan sharks-or are they leeches- who get hold of mobile phone numbers as if they were gold nuggets and get on a pestering exercice are horrors. If a man needs insurance cover or a loan, what the heck, he has to do the needful to get there. Like one buys himself an umbrella when it rains.
I notice with a tinge of envy the next door auntie and her husband, both former bankers, doing brisk business from home. Their clients do not ask for their degree certificates. What started as a simple help to a neighbour by way of a small lunch pack has grown into a bustling catering service. At all hours, auntie is busy washing, chopping, peeling veggies and her husband delivering lunch/dinner boxes on his motorcycle. By their own admission their profits are huge and their plans for the future as varied as their biryanis and salads. Now that’s what I call an appetizing career. When you are wanted for your service and goods, and not for your god dam certificate microscopically scanned by HR and PR and what not.
Of course I don’t picture myself in their shoes, not because there is no Midas touch auntie in the picture, but because I don’t see myself making all those countless delivery trips. Unhappy clients could raise a stinker like rotting fish which I would not like. This is the drawback of word-of-mouth advertisement. An unsatisfied palate could splutter the wrong words and scramble up a promising career.
All this brainstorming leaves me going in depressing, concentric circles. I may end up throttled when all options spiral away. It is very frustrating. I dress up and decide to go on a long drive to freshen up.
A little on the outskirts, I notice a small bright yellow house with a hand written board saying ‘astrologer’. The simplicity of the board is appealing. I decide to check it out for myself. Maybe for a tenner I could get that invisible horoscope of mine get a cosmetic make-over. Even if his predictions are as threadbare as his signboard, I can at least see how he runs his business solo. He would be dhoti clad with a simple towel by way of upper garment. He could be sporting a big red tilak on his forehead to enhance his persona. Maybe he has a caged parrot which will pick up a card for me with some prediction. As l(e)ast a creature who will not rinse my intellect and chew my brains out with questions. Why not? When Octopus Paul can predict which way football matches will go, why can’t a parrot inform me about my future? I decide to enter the place with reverence and faith. Why not try out what he prescribes? I notice a couple of other vehicles parked nearby. There is a tea stall next to the astrologer’s and that explains their presence.
As I gingerly make my way into the small entrance of the house, I am surprised to see a good number of footwear in the anteroom, if the small sit-out can be so named. A man asks me to remove mine. There is a second sit-out, or a true sit-in, where some ten people are sitting on chairs, waiting for their turns. I am asked whether I would want to communicate in English or in the vernacular. There are different waiting rooms for them.
Now I have not reckoned with so much complication. As the waiting gets desperately long, I eavesdrop on fellow-nail-gnawers. There are those who want to know if/when their daughters will get married, those racked by chronic illness and relatives of the terminally ill seeking relief from/for both, and then, my own kind, the career-disoriented. From the hushed tones it looks as if the astrologer is renowned. I may as well slog it out and see it for myself.
When my name is announced, I enter the third room. I am in for a surprise. The guy I was seeking out is a woman! A well clad, sexy, middle aged woman, with short streaked hair seated on a plush swivel chair. There is a computer before her. The sudden gust of cold makes the presence of the split-AC felt. No, she has neither a halo around her head nor a spiritual aura. On the contrary, her sharp look across her rimless glasses announce a keen business acumen. She has a male assistant with a laptop who enters my details proficiently, professionally. After hearing my job woes, the astrologeress asks me to deposit Rs 500 with the guy in a side room and to come back. She and her laptop assistant have juggled with the details I gave them about myself and when I come back for the august hearing, she says my good days are not THAT far away. I may face a few hurdles as in rejections by company HRs in the first few attempts but I should not lose hope. I should keep knocking on unresponsive doors. No, self-employment is not my calling, she has found out. And for the next three years, Saturn in a wrong inter-planetary seating arrangement blocks any possible short-cuts to prosperity like a sweepstake win. My horoscope has congenital deformities, correcting which could be possible-for a fee of course. Seeing the look of despair on my face, she nods at another assistant. He brings me a pamphlet. These are companies I could try in, she says. Tie-ups? If none of this works, she says with extra softness, do come back for the needful. Incidentally, this is a branch. For bigger woes, a visit to head-office is recommended. She will be present there tomorrow at 11 am. Can her P.A. make the appointment for me? I can deposit the fee here now itself.
As I look at her in disbelief and face her unflinching eyes, I catch sight of a prominent name-board on the opposite wall which says: Dr. Lakshmi MBA (London).
With a naked B Com degree in hand, I have joined the vast ocean of Indian youth in search of a job. Everyone, from the fruit-seller’s studied-in-the-streetlight son to the class V government officer’s mediocre, unmotivated son, is a graduate on a job hunt, as clueless as an ocean wave. I sometimes envy the plumbers, carpenters and electricians whose mobile phones are forever ringing when they are at work in our house and whose numbers come switched off when we nearly die for their attention. But would I dare to train myself under one of them? I may be banished from home, if and when I do find the courage to declare the building plumber my guru! And honestly, dirty loos make me throw up. Things electrical are great when they work but they are shockingly lethal when leaky or plain scrap when out of their sockets. The din of the carpenter’s saw irritates me no end and sawdust makes me sneeze. No, I cannot aspire to any of these vocations (thankfully).
My attention has shifted from myself to that all-important yet perfectly useless piece of paper called the degree certificate. It is a key with nothing to unlock any more. An MBA is master key but by acquiring it I will only be joining yet another ocean of a slightly superior band of unemployed. I might as well save up the money and instead wish for some magic spell to breathe life into my birthday-suit degree and my good for nothing horoscope. If I could marry a tycoon’s congenitally morose daughter by making her laugh, I would have a life to live. But for that you need a caring, sponsoring father like the king in the fairy tale. Today’s tycoon could himself do with a dose of free laughter. There are those who make a stampede for computer classes, and change the course of their life like a damm(n)ed river. Many of my classmates have ended up in BPOs, with their biological clocks running anticlockwise. They have a ghostly pallor under their stubbles, unsightly paunches and dark Saturnine rings under their eyes and zilch personality of their own. I would rather sell veggies on the pavement than become a BPO zombie. Vegetable seller…hmm. The old stick-like lady whose son owns a vegetable shop is forever driving away cows and vegetable lifters. Yes, they do exist, if you did not know. She has to dispose off withered carrots at half price and balance the loss by overpricing elsewhere. Guess one is born with special crafty genes to do this kind of a juggling for survival. Blame my parents for not endowing me with those. Those who juggle jobs, landing one, losing another and eyeing a third are a modern mutated subspecies of homosapiens. I wonder how they put up with so many HR guys, those perpetual troublemakers who get trained to turn and twist your wits inside out. I would truly prefer to keep those devils at arm’s length.
I cannot philosophise on all the jobs of the world which my bare-beauty B.Com will not get me. On the other hand, I am also in an enviable vacuum where I can simply rave and rant about the unfairness of the job market, as it is called, with me fitting in nowhere. What about those umpteen possibilities you may ask…door-to-door selling, telemarketing, insurance selling and the like, ideal turf for us in the grey zone of the professional world. I once almost kicked out an encyclopedia seller who came banging on my door bang in the middle of my siesta. Marketing leaves me cold, if not frozen like a week old chicken in the freezer. Trying to stuff a product down another’s throat is a gagging crime, that’s what I feel. Those loan sharks-or are they leeches- who get hold of mobile phone numbers as if they were gold nuggets and get on a pestering exercice are horrors. If a man needs insurance cover or a loan, what the heck, he has to do the needful to get there. Like one buys himself an umbrella when it rains.
I notice with a tinge of envy the next door auntie and her husband, both former bankers, doing brisk business from home. Their clients do not ask for their degree certificates. What started as a simple help to a neighbour by way of a small lunch pack has grown into a bustling catering service. At all hours, auntie is busy washing, chopping, peeling veggies and her husband delivering lunch/dinner boxes on his motorcycle. By their own admission their profits are huge and their plans for the future as varied as their biryanis and salads. Now that’s what I call an appetizing career. When you are wanted for your service and goods, and not for your god dam certificate microscopically scanned by HR and PR and what not.
Of course I don’t picture myself in their shoes, not because there is no Midas touch auntie in the picture, but because I don’t see myself making all those countless delivery trips. Unhappy clients could raise a stinker like rotting fish which I would not like. This is the drawback of word-of-mouth advertisement. An unsatisfied palate could splutter the wrong words and scramble up a promising career.
All this brainstorming leaves me going in depressing, concentric circles. I may end up throttled when all options spiral away. It is very frustrating. I dress up and decide to go on a long drive to freshen up.
A little on the outskirts, I notice a small bright yellow house with a hand written board saying ‘astrologer’. The simplicity of the board is appealing. I decide to check it out for myself. Maybe for a tenner I could get that invisible horoscope of mine get a cosmetic make-over. Even if his predictions are as threadbare as his signboard, I can at least see how he runs his business solo. He would be dhoti clad with a simple towel by way of upper garment. He could be sporting a big red tilak on his forehead to enhance his persona. Maybe he has a caged parrot which will pick up a card for me with some prediction. As l(e)ast a creature who will not rinse my intellect and chew my brains out with questions. Why not? When Octopus Paul can predict which way football matches will go, why can’t a parrot inform me about my future? I decide to enter the place with reverence and faith. Why not try out what he prescribes? I notice a couple of other vehicles parked nearby. There is a tea stall next to the astrologer’s and that explains their presence.
As I gingerly make my way into the small entrance of the house, I am surprised to see a good number of footwear in the anteroom, if the small sit-out can be so named. A man asks me to remove mine. There is a second sit-out, or a true sit-in, where some ten people are sitting on chairs, waiting for their turns. I am asked whether I would want to communicate in English or in the vernacular. There are different waiting rooms for them.
Now I have not reckoned with so much complication. As the waiting gets desperately long, I eavesdrop on fellow-nail-gnawers. There are those who want to know if/when their daughters will get married, those racked by chronic illness and relatives of the terminally ill seeking relief from/for both, and then, my own kind, the career-disoriented. From the hushed tones it looks as if the astrologer is renowned. I may as well slog it out and see it for myself.
When my name is announced, I enter the third room. I am in for a surprise. The guy I was seeking out is a woman! A well clad, sexy, middle aged woman, with short streaked hair seated on a plush swivel chair. There is a computer before her. The sudden gust of cold makes the presence of the split-AC felt. No, she has neither a halo around her head nor a spiritual aura. On the contrary, her sharp look across her rimless glasses announce a keen business acumen. She has a male assistant with a laptop who enters my details proficiently, professionally. After hearing my job woes, the astrologeress asks me to deposit Rs 500 with the guy in a side room and to come back. She and her laptop assistant have juggled with the details I gave them about myself and when I come back for the august hearing, she says my good days are not THAT far away. I may face a few hurdles as in rejections by company HRs in the first few attempts but I should not lose hope. I should keep knocking on unresponsive doors. No, self-employment is not my calling, she has found out. And for the next three years, Saturn in a wrong inter-planetary seating arrangement blocks any possible short-cuts to prosperity like a sweepstake win. My horoscope has congenital deformities, correcting which could be possible-for a fee of course. Seeing the look of despair on my face, she nods at another assistant. He brings me a pamphlet. These are companies I could try in, she says. Tie-ups? If none of this works, she says with extra softness, do come back for the needful. Incidentally, this is a branch. For bigger woes, a visit to head-office is recommended. She will be present there tomorrow at 11 am. Can her P.A. make the appointment for me? I can deposit the fee here now itself.
As I look at her in disbelief and face her unflinching eyes, I catch sight of a prominent name-board on the opposite wall which says: Dr. Lakshmi MBA (London).
posted by meera @ 9:43 AM
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