The average office goers today spend a minimum of 10 hours at their workplace; sometimes even more than that. This is the age of competition & success-stories. Boys & girls, graduates, Post graduates, MBA’s, MBBS…running day in & day out in pursuit of being better than themselves (or sadly sometimes, better than their peers) at their work place, in their worldly possessions & even when it comes to weekend partying venues to beat the work blues! There is an amazing ‘stickiness’ to the phenomena. It clings on even more fastidiously more one tries to move away from it.People study for jobs & run helter-skelter one week before placements looking for answers as to why they chose to go in for an MBA. Cooked, marinated, stewed answers are then served on platters…fresh flavours intact & 10 people successfully sit in front of the same panel answering the same question packaged in a different set of words. At least some degree of personalization is maintained!
Someone once rightly told me…go & speak there what you think, I won’t give you a readymade answer. It sounded very mean then, but come to look at it…if my prospective employer does not respect me for what I am, should I be working for him in the first place? Believe me, the attitude helps.
In whatever way…everyone ends up in the rat-race. You ahead of me, I of X and so on…& yes, rest assured, ultimately the rat wins! Was thinking on all these lines, maybe lack of interesting work has made a thinker out of me, when it struck me…Boys & Girls, all of us who have just started working, at least majority of those who I know, go back to cooked food back at our places of residence (no, I won’t call it home) Be it the guest house, the hotel, the ubiquitous dabba-walla. One barely has time to eat before one hits bed…obviously the long phone calls & the chat sessions are not counted. Contrast this with our childhood, when our parents were home by 5, helped with our homework, made sure our uniforms were proper before we went to school, saw our test papers, and had meals with us.
Was misplaced in a party of fresh teen girls this time when I went home…almost choked of the smell of generation gap that was rising mingled with the fumes from the sizzlers…I realized I was growing up…I cannot make a value judgment on that group of kids. But yes, the world changes every few years…maybe in the years to come the rat race is gonna burrow its way down under the age ladder…where little girls and boys will stand competing with each other in issues of social intelligence & maturity. I hope I am wrong. Maybe innocence is harder to lose…
