Office doldrums

Sitting idle without work can be the most exhausting thing. However, there are a few who would metaphorically describe the workless days at office as the 'Honeymoon period'. These are either the uninitiated types that are fresh out of college and are for the first time experiencing the luxury of earn-without-work or the self proclaimed happy souls who could gauge that life was one tedious rat race of ambition and so intelligently opted out even before the starting salvo was fired. Let me add some detail here for the sake of clarity. Whereas the former category is more a beneficiary of ignorance, the later choose to behave so for a variety of reasons. Some use this facade of perennial contentment to mask under-the-cover activities like alternative Job hunt while a few others are just happy to find free time which can then be purposefully employed to resurrect old relationships or building new ones or both. I (and most other practical ones) though have long lived with the realisation that Honeymoons are almost always illusionary little happy periods preceeding monotonous and often disastrous marriages and as such to be seen as harbingers of lifelong damnation. Anyways lets return to the topic and what better than with an example.

Now come to think of it -You leave your home all decked up carrying an air of significance as if you are going to deliberate the signings of the most important business deals or make the most crucial decisions that shall clinch that proverbial deal with the client and all you end up with is either surfing the most useless sites and not to forget the so called social networking sites on the internet or on some really lucky days playing Table Tennis in the ever so busy and brimming-with-activity recreation centre of the office. Though i lay no special claims to being an uptight and principled man, I find this whole affair rather unwholesome and humilitating. I have undergone this humiliation more than once in my numbered professional days so far and needless to say ( as you the very intelligent reader must have already guessed it) the Office Doldrums are back to haunt me.

Far more interesting is the way the so called Management tends to describe these 'Happy hours' of employees. In my office they are called 'Asset building and investment activity leading to Gainful Employment'. Some mumbo jumbo isn't it? well consider this now. Some of these 'under investment' employees claim to 'Work from Home' when there is hardly any work to do even at office. Everybody knows the truth but nobody makes an objection and nobody seems to take any offence either. We all belong to a common brotherhood, bound together by workplace secrets that we all share.

Now this one is really funny. I know of one firm where the leadership went on to declare (and with much theatrics) that " We shall be celebrating this year as the Year of Learning!!" ( as obviously there is no work to do). I haven't ever come across any more generous use of euphemisms in English literature. Its extrapolation stretched to infinity. How on Earth can whiling one's time on Orkut or solving crosswords on the internet be an investment activity is beyond me. But then i dont claim to be the sophisticated kinds who make these investment decisions.

Let's give them the benefit of doubt for a moment though. May be they really believe that all humans ( and hence by assumption all employees) are born good and shall continue to behave in the most befitting and honest manner. But could reality be any more different? This assumption if indeed true on their part would make them look all the more stupid. The fact is (and it holds for most things in life) any logic is acceptable as long as it is put in a manner that is politically correct and if it can be made a little more obscure to undertstand even better.

Its past six already and that ends my quota of investment activity and asset building for the day. On that note time to go home.

Coming back to life!!!

The title of the post is a well known song by Pink Floyd and as such carries an obvious resonance with me an all-out Floyd fan. It also happens to be the first line that came to my mind after i could no longer contain the desire in me to revive this long forgotten blog. Yes, this very blog of mine was once a menifestation of my creative passions, a celebration of the joys of writing before I simply lost interest in it. Much like a child that gets bored after a while with his new toy train. Its routine run round and round the tracks that once got the child excited now barely evokes any interest. Soon after, it is relegated to the shelve of old toys to join the ranks of old and abandoned play things. This blog,my child, was reserved a similar fate.

To narrate its story, this blog of mine was born a premature child to the passions of an uncertain parent - my desire to write, the prolific word churner of once that now lives in a state of abandonment, longing for the return of its beloved muse. This muse whose beauty was once the object of its passions, whose trail led it to unknown territories of the heart where stories lurked in unformed shapes and words lived in the shadows, left it after she could no longer feel in it the same zest and virility of the past. Living in a state of perpetual bereavement, it soon forgot of the existence of the child(blog).

To carry the bored kid's and the toy train's story further, this kid grows up to be an adult and one fine day discovers this very toy train of his childhood in one of the delapidated cupboards (in a junkroom of his house). With tears in his eyes, he lifts and holds it close to his heart remembering its ritual circular runs and the sense of wonder that it once evoked in him. He desperately looks for its missing pieces, hoping to give it a new life. But is it really the train thats coming back to life or is it something in the child (now an adult)? To put the same question differently, is it that the train had ceased to live or had something in the child died?

I for one know that its not merely this blog thats coming back to life.