Month: December 2018

Most people enter University and find their sleep cycle turned on its head. I’m one of them. It’s not something I exclaim about, but it’s something I’ve found works for me. I’m slow in the mornings – so I stay up later at night to finish off everything that I want to. It’s just the way I function. It isn’t universal and I don’t impose it on people when I’m working on teams. Working on teams tends to need compromise from everyone to ensure you’re overlapping in terms of the time you’re working on an active project – just to efficiently discuss things which are open items/still active.

Oh my God, I just used the phrase “open items” in a blog post. I’m talking like a Corporate lawyer now. What has happened to me?

Sigh.

Basically. My sleep cycle sucks. It’s my own fault. I work a certain way and I prioritize things in a particular manner. The compromise I make – and I’m comfortable making for now, is sleep.

Few people understand that, few don’t.

And it’s lovely and fine and dandy when it’s self-inflicted.

However. On principle, it starts to affect me a little when it isn’t necessarily self-inflicted and the late nights arise from things outside your sphere of control. It isn’t rage as much as it creates a lot of doubt about why I’m undertaking what I’m undertaking – and whether it’s something I’m happy doing.

That’s what happened over the last month. The answer was largely yes – because I ended work every single day with a lot of satisfaction about what I had managed during the day, and being happy with the kind of work I was given.

But working late nights for such a prolonged period can change you. It changes how you view your day – and your construction of how many hours you have each day – which begins to stretch as you go along.

It begins to affect your eating habits. The kind of food you eat starts to become the answer to “what’s convenient” rather than the answer to “what do I want to eat”.

It affects your lifestyle at home.

Essentially, my conclusion of things is that it’s a domino effect. Here’s how. You let one thing out of your control affect something personal – in this case, client expectations/work, affecting the number of hours you spend in the office. That factor makes its way into everything else and starts to put small small decisions of yours out of your control.

I say all this now. But trust me – I loved staying back those late nights. Solely because the kind of work I got was mind-blowing and the people I was working with were amazing. Made me very happy to stay in the office for as long as they wanted me to.

Corporate culture has flooded into my veins.

For the most part, I’ve grown up feeling like I couldn’t fit into corporate culture. I haven’t really seen the thrill in dressing up in a formal set of clothes daily and going to sit at a desk and work from 9 to 5 – or beyond. Even job descriptions at firms sounded extremely cumbersome to me, and never fascinated me.

As I grew older I understood that corporate culture was a lot more than a 9 to 5 job and a fat paycheck. There’s an entire lifestyle associated with it. It’s not something that I think you can accurately capture by experiencing it at just one firm, but I think it broadly includes being a workaholic. And prioritizing hours over efficiency.

That’s definitely true in India, especially at places where overtime is compensated, and there are no caps on working hours on a given day. It probably hits its peak in the service industry, where clients and upper management get to dictate timelines which filter down to worker bees.

This isn’t a chiding of corporate culture. Corporate culture will continue to exist irrespective of what my opinion is. All I wonder sometimes is whether we can effectuate any change as a generation on the way that it’s viewed in India. Insofar as we can make a change in the fabric of this corporate culture to permeate it with ideas of the way we prioritize certain things – like a healthier work/life balance, for one. Or returning home at a more reasonable hour. Or encouraging holidays. And more decentralization of decision-making power, perhaps.

It’s going to need a lot of work – but it’s something we need to examine a little closer. The one thing I do know, however, is that Indians work extremely hard. It feels like everyone within the corporate structure is tuned to working with a goal – whether short-term or long-term, and whether client-driven or otherwise. There’s a definite purpose about it all.

It’s also extremely Darwinian, I think. The market will spit you out if you aren’t able to keep up.

What’s crucial to recognize under these circumstances is that the fact that you don’t fit into corporate culture isn’t a failure on your part. It’s just a case of the allocation of your resources perhaps being better served elsewhere.

What I meant by the corporate culture flooding my veins is that I’m beginning to get a feeling that this entire mental wall that I had created about the culture sort of broke down. I can see the allure of fulfilling client expectations now.

Which is the wildest thing in the world for someone who definitely wants to do things for himself. I’m intrigued to see how the two intersect in a few years.

Hello! Good morning! Welcome! (Try to read this in three different Robin Williams’ exclamation tones – and you’ll understand the dramatic effect better.)

If you didn’t quite understand what I meant, don’t worry. I’m just trying to create dramatic effect and a build-up for (a) the flurry of activity that is going to consume this blog for the next few hours, and (b) your inbox – which, if you follow this blog, is going to end up receiving a lot of e-mails. My deepest sympathies, but warmest of regards. I fully intended the spam to come.

Speaking of spam, Gmail is doing some really wild things for me these days. My inbox is pretty much full – which is scary, because I live everyday on edge. I never know when I’ll stop receiving emails because the cup runneth over (literally). That’s one thing I need to fix. But more importantly, someone I sent e-mails to definitely marked my e-mail as spam. Because my e-mails reach people’s spam inboxes super frequently. It’s now become a running joke. Which is pretty unfunny, if you ask me. It’s something I am rallying the troops to try to correct.

I received my first piece of fanmail earlier in November – and because of how crazy things have been since then, I have been unable to respond. To said sender: I am very sorry – I am responding soon. Please check your spam for a reply – in case it isn’t available in your inbox directly.

What else, what else. Oh, yes. I’m 4 days away from going home. What you’re going to read henceforth is a vivid recounting/renarration of everything that I’ve been through emotionally for the last one month or more.

Good luck getting through everything! I’m so happy to be back here. Missed you folk.

Hello, readers of this blog. It’s been a long time – a month and more, now. That’s a fact I’m acutely aware of, but there’s not been much I could do about it. The last month has been a little crazy in my life. I know that isn’t an excuse to stop writing, but it got me to reprioritize and reshuffle a couple of things around. Writing, unfortunately, dropped to a little lower on the list – so by the time I ended up getting around to it each day, I drafted things and trashed them.

There’s a lot to say, because while I stopped updating you here, my life (surprise, surprise) hasn’t come to a standstill. I do actually still intend to chronicle everything I’ve done. It’s just a matter of time before it actually happens. Stick around and we’ll get there.

In the meanwhile, I’ve now come to visit my grandmother in Pune. What needs to be said is that several things might have transpired since my last visit here, and a lot has changed, but the gulab jamuns my grandmother makes still taste as delicious as ever.