A DATE WITH SELF!

I thoroughly enjoyed a luxurious, five hours reading on a wet Sunday morning with a hot mug of coffee. Just finished reading the book “Married but Available” by Abhijit Bhaduri, the second book of M-B-A series.

It is a story of a Bengali guy who has just passed out from a business school, and narrates his life after his campus placement, and the challenges he faces in his personal and professional life. What I like most about the book is the “aam aadmi” lifestyle, it deals with. A family of four, with parents, and the two siblings including a young sister, and the son has to sustain his family, meets the challenges in his short married life and frustrations of the HR job early in his career.
Some ideas, pick-up lines, beliefs, and perspective brought out in the book and enumerated below gave me good material to ponder on.

• On a professional front, something which I have also realized in my six months old job- “Importance of designations". It is evident that designations have no standardization in the industry, and hence the conflict. It is the business card that becomes ones identity in a work-life. Personally, when I get a call from banks offering visiting cards, the first question that pops up-“Mam, what is your designation in the Company?” I merely end up saying-“I am just six months old here, and I seriously, do not need a credit card.” Apart from this, when I go for meeting with a Manager or a Vice-President, I find it fruitless to even share my visiting card. Not that I find myself any inferior to my boss, but, evidently, the receiver would not be acknowledge much. However, the book talks about the lead character, Abbey’s dilemma with his inferior designation compared to his working girl friend, and later his wife, and those of his other friends from the same business school, who have climbed to better designations. Quite mundane, but relevant.


• “Why are people paid so lowly at the start of their career, when, it is at this time that they need the money the most-to buy a car, a house, or sustain a family? Later in life, at the time of retirement, it is more of cholesterol monitoring that happens. Truly, life is unfair!


• Problems can never be solved. They can only be resolved, dissolved or absolved! I am still not clear with its meaning.


• Think yourself as actors in a play. Your lines are important, but what is more important is that the play is successful.


• Life a beach or a bitch? As a friend believes, we should not live our lives in extremes. Life is not mere black or white, it moves in shades of grey!


• The power equations keep changing. So, be nice to people on your way.


• Life has no time for sentiments. Atleast, holds for the work-life and to a certain extent in personal life too.


• “Nihil Ultra” or nothing is beyond. And, as Bhagwat Gita says-Do your best and do not worry about the results.


• Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.


• In India, there is a separate definition for friends and colleagues. Friends can be colleagues, but colleagues can never be friends?


• In Life, we try to change the course of the river, we are sailing with. The river will not change its course. We can only row the boat through our actions. Life will go on, we have to flow with it.


• Importance of being non-judgmental about people. And, I am seriously working on it.


• The hardest thing is to fear the changing nature of relationships. Barter should not become the nature of relationships. And egos should never come its way!


• If we cannot change a situation, it means that life is challenging you to change ourselves.


• To be free from all fears, attachments and insecurities is the best way to discover one’s soul. And to remain detached is the hardest thing to do.


• One’s career will have its share of disappointments. We should ask ourselves, what we are disappointed with. Are we disappointed with ourselves, our abilities or with others? And if the latter is the answer, it means that we are taking our business cards too seriously. If we want success, we should think about ourselves. If we want happiness, we should think about others.


• “What matters is not what we expected from life, but what life expected from you?”

It is the story about the guilt Abbey goes through when as a HR professional, he had to device a VRS policy for laying-off thousands of employees as a cost cutting measure, including himself. Is it equally painful to lay-off than been laid off? As Narayan Murthy rightly said: "Love your job but never fall in love with your Company. Who knows when the Company stops loving you".