On the Other Side

How long is 967 days? 23208 hours. 1392480 minutes. 83548800 seconds. That’s how long it has been since my last interview. It has really been that long. Back on the 29th of August 2003. One day before my 22nd birthday.

A lot changed since then. I finished college. On July 14th a year later I came to Bangalore. I started working, well – almost that is! Not much changed since then, till yesterday that is.

The first few months in Bangalore were fun. The first taste of hard-earned-money and draught beer. The combination was a hit, made-for-each-other stuff, right out of the Wills billboard. Only the will (pun intended) had gone out of life – what remained was a king-size (again, pun intended) ambition to head-bang our (I wasn’t alone, not by any stretch of Asimovian imagination) way to the Rock-And-Roll fan hall-of-fame.

Its been a long journey. Styx-Purple Haze-Shivapriya Paradise-Denny’s-Legends of Rock-Murthy Wine Store. Draught Beer-KBL-Hay5-Antiquity-Royal Stag-Sagar Apollo. There has been many stops. More than I can remember to make the list longer. We started small. There were four of us in the beginning. Along the way many more joined. From Chennai and Hyderabad and Pune and elsewhere. Over-the-weekend and permanently. People started leaving as well. None permanently. Always foreign-porarily. And I was one of them.

The traffic congestion increased. And so did the flyover construction deadlines. We started spending more and more time out of our house. Not in the office. Not at some resort. On the road. In the bus. Bangalore was not growing in linear time, it was polynomial or even exponential. Surprising, isn’t it ? Especially when Bangalore’s second most omnipresent species (the first : Canis familiaris [Disclaimer: Its been eight years since I last opened my biology book, so pardon me if there is any mistake.]) is expected to go sub-linear on their workstations (the pun is still intended). But, as the cliché goes, “life still goes on” – no matter how much you “want to break free”.

There’s an old African adage – which could not be truer in the context of Bangalore :

Every morning when the sun rises, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve.
It doesn’t matter if you are a gazelle or a lion.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

In Bangalore you either “run like hell” or you become “comfortably dumb”. You cannot waste time “understanding” your choice – or there will be no choice to understand. You run to catch the morning bus to office, you run to get the window seat when returning ( to make the few-hour-long journey back home a bit more comfortable), you run after the guy who just grabbed your purse or mobile phone and started running (see, he also knows that he has to run, you better start too). There is no place for old-world charm in Bangalore. It is not meant to be there. So, don’t complain.

All this does is inculcate values of laziness in you. After five days of endless traffic congestion with whiffs ubiquitous pollution, laziness is not altogether detrimental. Opposition to my views are welcome – after all “freedom of speech and expression” and the “right to oppose” is part of the “Demockratic Combo” in India. And when the rhetoric becomes strong enough to shake us out of our self-imposed slumber, we take a tour of “The Forum”. The buzz of Bangalore. For couples (young and old), stags doing what they do best, shoppers and window shoppers and people who think the best place to hang out in Bangalore is the Forum. The crowd may bother you. It can get suffocating at times. You can deny it. But you can’t, again as the cliché goes, ignore it.

So, when the events turn from the ordinary and mundane you sit up and take notice. And that is why I started this post. That is what happened yesterday. After 967 days I was back at the interview table. But his time it was on the other side of the table. As the interviewer.

More than 350 years ago Newton proved “everything that goes up must come down”. A century or so before, Copernicus proved “anything that goes around comes back” (I don’t exactly claim he said that, but he did prove that the earth was not flat – Thomas Friedman though has some strong arguments against this).

My life, at least my professional life, has completed the first revolution.