Work

A piece dedicated to my colleagues in my lab. A bit of sarcasm and a lot of masala used, which in no way reduces the respect I have to my Professor, a very respected and knowledgeable person. Some day if I become anywhere near where he stands right now, I'd take no better testimony than something written about me on a sense as much or more sarcastic as this.
And as this had been penned over a few evenings after getting back to room, on a frame of mind I'd not exactly term as one fit for writing. I guarantee this piece of prose to have an inferior quality when compared to a lot of other articles of mine......




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Crap. But I just thought I had pressed the Snooze button in my mobile under thirty seconds ago. How awesome it’d have been if I could freeze time now. Would give a fortune for that. Fortune…ha!


As the legendary Swaminathan in R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days opines, so very truly, Monday mornings are undoubtedly the worst part of the week. Coming just following the ephemeral weekend. (God, why did you make only one weekend a week….) With words of appreciation for Swaminathan and with enough gaalis to the Sun to make the appearance over this metropoiltan area this early, my hands moved in an error-free naturally-imbibed, instinctive course to the snooze button of my mobile alarm. As if sensing my mentality, which it nowadays seems to do very predictably, my mobile too resumes its slumber….for another few minutes till the “snooze” module in its code gets interrupted all over again. Bless thy, who invented the concept of snooze…. And God, do send me the name of thy who invented alarms…. I’ll do the rest.


Interrupting my chain of thoughts for the infinite-th time already in the hardly 8 – hour old day, the alarm module in my phone starts its cacophony all over again. At last the negligibly sliver conscious part of my mind triggers to active mode from sleep mode and the nervous system in my body generate the signals to my seemingly (maybe, a tad hopefully !!!) hands and legs, “Wake up idiots, you go to go for WORK !!!!”


At last, the physique starts to succumb to the perennial reality. One part of the body votes, “Lo bhai…ab toh uth jao. Jaana hai....” But the ruling party, which still holds the majority vetoes it, “Five more minutes....just five. No more than thazzzzzzzZZ zzz….”


By the time the no-confidence motion is brought into picture, the whole part of the body stirs up in a jolt. The same mouth utters the two sentences in sequence, “S**t, its already nearing 9...How is that I daily end up getting as late as this? ” and “Damn the guy who invented the snooze option...”


With a visit to the washroom as brief as it can get ( I do keep telling myself, “Yaar time nahi, time nahi....got to go fast..”), after a handful of minutes, I find myself cycling ahead to the harsh realities of my lab. The ethos they call research. I don’t care even if an asteroid is right now plummeting directly towards me from the heavens, with an estimated impact in T minus 30 seconds. Because any day, I’ll prefer a crashing asteroid to a bashing Professor, errr...my boss, to speak.


As ever I am infallibly greeted with scornful visages. God, you created men, you created women…both of those are manageable. Need you had created bosses, at least in hindsight....? I try to display the little amount of Colgate that hopefully is still present in my demeanor…. too old ploy. And with the sthaayi bhaav, the resigned expression, I settle down to my “workstation.”


The day…just began.


I sure will not blame a person for expecting stuff that change the world from me every alternate hour I spent in front of my whitish command prompt, grinning at me from inside the depths of my laptop machine. But I only can pity with someone who expects the same from me a couple of weeks after he’s seen me work.


After a couple of hours staring at my laptop, trying to contribute whatever little I can to bug enormous Anaconda level codes, I am stirred back to the world outside computers when I hear a sound from behind, “Chalo chalo....lunch time !!!!” Looking at my watch, I realize that its break time at work time – lunch time....


A sixty minute break covering the sojourn to and from one of the canteens in the campus, which (in)conveniently is located a little far from my department is a very refreshing part of the day. Topics of varying degrees make the cut - from Linux kernel to dressing sense of modern girls, from engineering technology to weekend movie at the Gymkhana. Well, anything under the sun. Or over it, for the matter. And by the time we return, the Omnipresent (ohh no…it ain’t construed as the God anymore….that title was recently handed over to the person they call boss…) is standing at the gate, reminding me of the chowkidaar at my village. The countenance says it all – somebody is not too very happy as the timer set for our lunch break had expired nearly an hour ago.


Again life. Sorry....work. The midday sun beating through the window fall is so attractive that it almost invariably lures one or the other guys to sleep. There are some things a coffee can’t prevent. If you ever care to doubt it, send an insomniac to my department.... I swear I’ll get him to sleep like a baby within a week.


Around the time the Big Ben announces mid day in London, Bengaluru, five and a half hours ahead, slips into yet another of its romantic evenings. And the pristine surroundings at the campus add so unique a charm to the setting sun that people, who once you thought could hardly think of stuff beyond header files and pointers, start giving you philosophical lectures on Shakespearean concept of romance and Wordsworth school of poetic thought. Its chai time and the next hop is the bakery near to my department. I ruefully make a trade-off of the rich blended canteen coffee and the evergreen helping of Bhel Puri for the extra overhead incurred in terms of the time taken for a shuttle to and from the canteen.


Back from the chai break is when the janta decides to unwind. The wireless network of the institute gets a little busy as people from our labs start their networking on the social front. Facebook, G Mail, Orkut, Picasa…. Thus opens the cloud, often accompanied by visages ranging from guffaws courtesy a Facebook video or a gentle smile, courtesy a picture of college days.


There is this day of the week where there is a weekly meeting, where Professors (Goddd, I thought singular form itself was too hard to handle…. You invented plural…) sweep down on we, the “engineers” like vultures closing in on their prey. The whole spectacle starts off with a musical chair contest – who occupies the seat farthest from the table. I really admire those Professors who perfectly know what I do not know, because they never ever ask me something I know. One of these days I really got to conduct a sting operation video of the meeting and send it over to the National Human Rights Commission. Let them know what is happening.....


Thankfully, this just one day of the week….


As the clock moves further in the direction in which it has traditionally kept moving since its inception, the thought of dinner and home sweet home start corrupting the minds of the peers. But the big hurdle still remains – send the day’s work update to the Boss. Oh shit…. Surely I can’t write about the afternoon discussion we had on the merits and demerits of Bru and Nescafe coffee…. Or the evening chat we had on the various flower trees that adorned the Gulmohar Marg. This is when the Dan Brown-ish element in each of us kick in. Literary merits are stretched to their limits as (farzi !!!) pedants discuss elaborately at length and at last compose vintage mails, the curtain-downing act of the day. And with the eternal satisfaction of having done something revolutionary, the expedition back home begins, least bothered about the repercussions of the sent mail which is sure going to reverberate in my inbox first thing tomorrow morning.


All that tomorrow. All that after a real good night’s sleep…..


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Uhh oh… guess I missed out to add the while(1), which should’ve been the opening line of this post…..