Ghazal – mazrat ke saath.
Darr ka hevla kahan nahin hota,
Zinda rehna hee aasan nahin hota.
UjaRti bastiyon se pooch dekho,
Har dard ka darman nahin hota.
Ajeeb daur aaya hai behissi ka,
BigaRne wala naalan nahin hota.
Mera sukoot pardah to nahin hai,
Jo nazar aa jaye, pinhan nahin hota.
Qeemat lagti hai kaisey surkhi kee,
Lahoo rung koi arzan nahin hota.
Hairat bhi hai momin pe hairan,
Keh angisht badandan nahin hota.
Qaza ayee to Yawar bhi jaaney,
Zindagi bhar samaan nahin hota.
Letters.
I found letters. Scores of them. My father’s little collection, including letters from relatives, his friends, my mother’s friends, and from my brother and me when we were both in Pakistan and the rest of the family was here. Most of the letters were from ten years ago, but there were some dated as far back as the 80’s. There were Eid cards, letters of congratulations, letters of condolences when our grandfather had passed away, and letters full of demands from the two of us – the last part was exceedingly embarrassing and made me see just how much of a challenge I used to pose to my parents; it wasn’t easy being happy about being my parent . It brought back memories and mixed emotions.
What I found most interesting though was the language in which those letters were written, even my own letters. It is hard to believe those letters were written only ten years ago, the language is so refined by today’s standards, and the style so intriguing. A letter was structured, not written. There were nuances that every letter seemed to pay attention to. And did I mention the language? Oh! The Language… I read words, I had forgotten existed. Such lovely compositions. Such grace.
It drove home the realization that with letter writing going out of vogue, a beautiful aspect of life as we knew it may have been lost forever. Letters were written to appraise others of ‘haal ahwaal’ and ask theirs in return. There was subtle humor always at play, and the wordplay was delightful. The very nature of letters dictated that they be detailed. And they were all hand written – a letter from those days was indeed half a meeting with a person.
Today, the emails pale in comparison on so many counts, and the networking sites like facebook, ryze, Orkut et al with their two line ’shout-outs’ rather than ‘haal-ahwal’ have taken the little semblance of personal touch away. Compare the standardized “Wassup? How’s life dude? Where have you been?” to three or four pages of a detailed account of how things were, and how they had changed since the last letter, and how delighted one was at having read about this and how very concerned one was about that, and you will see what I mean.
I think I will go and write a letter to someone.
Portrait.
It feels strange. Blogging. I am not sure what it is that keeps me from updating.
We get to know a little bit more about ourselves as we go through our lives. If most people are like me, they have this image of themselves in their mind. It is a nice image, this self portrait. It is made of all things good. Of all traits and things one thinks highly of. For a large part of our lives we go through our daily lives taking that self portrait to be a true representation of who we know we are. Then… life happens.
Something we had not counted on jumps at us, and we respond to it. Our response defines who we are, and for the lucky few the response comes as a pleasant surprise. They go one up on their self portrait in real life. They find themselves to be better people than they think they are.
Then, there are those who are like me. Everytime, life throws something at me, and requires me to respond, I bungle it big. The portrait hangs there smug and shiny. It is Dorian Gray inverted. The portrait stays beautiful and life peels layer after layer of me to reveal a me I would rather not discover.
At first, I was able to convince myself that I had been setting my standards too high, that I needed to cut myself some slack, that I was indeed a better painter than I realized, that the painting was unrealistic. But if I were to redraw the painting now, more realistically, more in line with who/what I think is achievable, I am convinced I would be left with a hedious portrait just the sight of which would send my own sanity packing.
I seem to recall a childhood, and childhood years are all full of potential. I just do not know when and where did the slide begin. Or where it ends?
With all that I had going for me, the parents, the education, the friends, the opportunities; I should have grown into a better person.
Perhaps, I will end up with more than necessary possessions. I am truly blessed in the people I have in my life – even after the few I have managed to lose despite their efforts to hang on.
But the question remains: Will I ever get close to that portrait?
The thought process and an out of box kind of ‘Box’.
It is beginning to feel as if I can no longer trust myself to eek out a post. Quite often when I am out driving somewhere I see something and get thinking about something else and just as I am busy in the thinking, in drifts a line that I know I must make a post out of. I can already hear the humbug of scores of lines following that first pretty one, and I know I must get to my laptop and have a go at the keyboard, which has begun acting up a little of late. More often than not, I never get around to getting to my laptop, and on the rare occasion that I do, it takes forever starting up, and my account takes an eternity logging in, and then when finally I get to the blank page I mirror it in every nook and corner of my mind. Not one word do I find there.
Sometimes I know the words are hiding in the crevices of my mind, and there are lots of those up there, but I just cannot be bothered to make the effort to go about scouting for them in the wilderness that is the mind these days.
I have been out of a job for the good part of the last two months. I have walked out of two jobs in the last 60 days. I pretty much walked out of the first job, when I could take the whole senselessness, which pervaded that business, no longer. Though truth be told, I walked out after my negotiations for a raise got nowhere and not before that; but it feels better when you feign nobler intentions behind your actions as against downright greed for more money. I walked out on good terms if it is any consolation. For a minute actually, I had begun to think they were only too glad to see the back of me – I actually hid behind a tree to see if they released balloons and raised cheers upon my exit. If they did, it was not visible from a kilometer away, which is how far the tree was from the office, and if their jubilation was not visible from only a kilometer away, it was consolation enough for me.
I guess that happens to you when you have been fired from a job once before. Deep inside, you never get over it – the fact that your services were no longer required once. Yes. They messed up my personality when they fired me. I will never be the same. I am a nail biting wreck already. I am tempted to ask my prospective new employers if they have a practice or past history of firing people when they fail to meet expectations through their own folly; because in such circumstances I would obviously have to reconsider their offer. Either way. How can I take up employment with a company that already has a history of firing people at the slightest pretense – something as petty as non-performance? On the other hand, if a company has no such history, what kind of a company would that be?
I am guilty of getting ahead of myself on all of this of course. Since, in the past two months, I must have applied for a few hundred positions and by the promptness with which I have received regret letters, I am beginning to think I should lie a little (more) on my CV and remove the ‘fired for non-performance and tardiness’ part from there. So, in effect, I have not had to put the prospective employers in the catch-22 dilemma I have outlined above.
I walked out of the second job on a whim. Decided to not go one morning after going there a couple of weeks. Just like that. May be it was burn out. Not from two weeks of working in that place of course – but from not having had a vacation in four years. It feels better when you can use terms like burn out and non performance to define periods of your career. The logical question would focus on the factors that led to my burn-out and non-performance simultaneously.
This is where I bring ‘Relativity’ into the discussion. Everything is relative. My burn out is. My non-performance was. More importantly, the non-performance job was followed by the burn-out causing job. Even more importantly there was no real burn-out. We are just using burn-out as an excuse because otherwise my actions make me look like the total nut job I am. I am not proud of being the not job I am. I just am the not job I am. Not every one has to know what a nut job I am. Who would read the blog if every one knew the kind of nut job I am.
All of this is prelude of course. Because I need to tell you why I was having a discussion with HPN, my tech support, about the possible names we could choose for my company, should I have to open shop myself if no-one agreed to hire me in the next weeks. HPN had to approve the name, since he is the one entrusted with setting up the company website, email addresses and what not. And the name had to have ‘Box’ in it, since for the most part of life, I have been a shipping and logistics guy, and shipping containers are central to our business, and shipping containers are often endearingly called ‘boxes’ by the top shots and top shots-wanna bes. The conversation we had on gtalk is an excellent example of how the thought process progresses in my day-today life, and is hence a useful tool in understanding what is wrong with the world in general.
Here is the conversation reproduced as is – it is long, even after the omission of certain parts which were not very flattering to me, but I think you will still like it. Here goes:
:20 PM me: salamz bro..
Apne sooraj ke intizar main…
Tum ko rawa hai, jo chaho kar guzro…
Ikhtyar aaj tumhara hai.
Hathiyar bhi tumhara hai.
Tum jo is za’am main aa jao
Keh sooraj aaj tumhara hai,
Keh sansaar bhi tumhara hai,
To ye bhi rawa hai tum ko.
Haan!
Tum ko rawa hai, jo chaho kar guzro…
Yehi hai rasm-e-duniya,
Tum ke duniya ke pher main,
Apne ta’een zayeem huwe ho,
Yehi riwaj tumhara hai.
Magar…
Waqt ke phaer ko,
Yaad rakhna bhi izbaskeh zuroori hai.
Keh waqt manzilon ka khel,
Apne hee dhang se khela karta hai.
Jo guzar chukti hai,
Usi manzil pe aan rukta hai.
Par is taryon keh daikhne wala,
Jaan bhi jaye ke waqt kabhi is manzil se guzra tha.
Aur is soch main bhi rahey ghaltan,
Keh is manzil main kiya hai aisa,
Jo waqt ne jaate jaate badla tha.
Hum din ginen ge,
Lamhon kee aahaton ko sunen ge,
Phir jab hathyar-o-ikhtyar haath badlen ge,
Rasm-e-duniya waheen rahey gee,
Riwaj bhi tumhara ho ga,
Aur jo tum ko aaj rawa huwa hai,
Woh hum ko rawa ho ga.
Haan! Woh hum ko rawa ho ga.
In so mania.
I should probably not be writing this post. Now, don’t we all know that we should actually stop writing when we start a post stating we should not be writing it? And how many of us actually do stop? If my guess is any good, not one. Either that, or all of us – but when we do stop, we just write that post another time. Right after the glass of juice, cup of tea, slice of an apple, bite of a candy bar, or whatever else it is that works for us.
The long and short of it, the gist, the point I am trying to make here, call it what you may, is that posts that should not be written do get written. One wishes this would suffice as an explanation for all the digital diarrhea (with apologies to JB, who introduced me to this term) that plagues blogistan, and one would ride too were wishes ever to be classified as horses. In case, you were thinking we are trying to set a new record for the most cliches cramped into a second paragraph, give yourself a pat, and smile that contented smile that comes only in acknowledgment of being told you are right.
It is intriguing, isn’t it? When you think about how so many of us do the wrong thing knowingly. It is ridiculous, if you ask me, when we do the wrong thing thinking we are absolved of all wrong doing if we start by admitting we know what we are doing is wrong. People! It becomes wrong-ER, when you commit a wrong a) knowingly and b) admitting such knowledge. Actually, technically speaking, it becomes wrong-er-er, but I am trying to avoid sounding like a complete dunce, so lets just leave it at wrong-er. Now, when you factor in the fact that in the current discussion, I am the one who started with one such admission, it just leads to the conclusion that I am ridiculous-er. Which is more than a tad lame, but hey! I am being ridiculous-er, and I am admitting it, so I am allowed to go ahead and add as many ‘ers’ to ridiculous as pleases me.
I am battling insomnia these days, which is a 180 degrees turn from a year ago, when I was battling somnia, which I presume is what excessive sleeping disorder is called. Just to keep the record straight, I say “battling” because that is how I have seen people describe such matters. I am not really battling. I was not either – with the somnia that is. If I were hard-pressed to use a more apt word in this context, I would probably choose ‘experiencing’ or ‘discovering’ or something along those lines. But, like I said, we are going for that record for most ‘cliches’, and may be using ‘battling’ will help us qualify.
It is hard to tell which is better or worse. Insomnia or Somnia. I mean sleeping is good, we all know that. I probably know that more than the next person today. And if you look at how I have been able to get some reading done, and see some movies in the past few days, you cannot really argue that not sleeping is all bad. It is just the irony of it all. It was not very long ago when I had got fed up with my ability to make “I-can-sleep-before-your-hat-hits-the-ground” claims without garnishing them with more than a dash of exaggeration, and had hoped, actually hoped, I had insomnia. I recall having thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice? And wouldn’t I get so many things done in all the spare time I would have on my hands if only I were not wasting all these precious hours not staying up?”
Well, guess what? Its time for another cliche!
‘I like Drew Barrymore. Very much.’
‘I should have wished for something esle’, and “I should have been careful what I wished for – it just came true’.
Which is all very well. I mean getting one wish instead of not getting any is still good, isn’t it? I just need to figure out a way to get that nagging “I have to go to work in the morning” thought out of my head – I can sit back and enjoy the insomnia then.
I just noticed the wrong cliche up there. Now where did that come from?
Insomnia has its peculiarities, I guess. I should stop writing. I should, probably, not be writing this post.
Bossman
In the past, I have refrained from updating about work. No-one likes work, and everyone has a few people at work whom he or she loves to not like. If we were to take the liberty of assuming that yours truly has a few things in common with no-one as well as everyone, it is to be deduced that any updates about work might inherently carry some measure of ‘gheebat’, back-biting – a sin equated with eating the flesh of one’s dead brother.
It is a sin we indulge in in the name of gossip, lunch-meetings, exchange of ideas, and even as apparently harmless banter. Perhaps, we cannot help not liking a few people with whom we spend a greater part of our waking hours, but we can certainly refrain from expressing our opinion of them in their absence – if it is not a favorable opinion that is. It reminds me of another hadith that a friend brought to my notice recently, which discouraged exaggerated praise as well, and in light of which I realized that much of my old blog, JB-nama as it had come to become, was either blatant gheebat or audacious exaggeration of JB and his virtues respectively. But then, as I had often confided in and confessed to JB, anything that I said about him to anyone had to be exempt from being labeled gheebat, since it qualified to be a public service message. Which is all a different discussion altogether.
So when it came to work, I had to resist the temptation to update about my managers, my colleagues, and my customers. Not only because work-related matters are often confidential and rarely to be put up as news stories on a weblog, even if such weblog boasts of a very elite readership of only two, (The fact that an instrument of media is not popular is no defense, I presume, against libel law suits arising out of any information contained in such an instrument. The only instrument of media which enjoys these privileges is called Tabloid press, and as much as I may neglect my blog, such neglect is not to be confused with absolute disdain, which is all that I have for tabloid press), but also because I wanted to avoid overdoing a sin. There are sins galore, and most are less serious than back-biting.
This new place is, however, quickly turning into a work-blog. So far, I believe I have managed to steer clear of adding back-biting to my account of virtual sins, but given that every time I sit here to update, I find myself flooded with work-related anecdotes, I am treading too close to temptation.
For today, I am just not happy with boss-man. He has done some great things for me, of late though he has not only taken my gratitude forgranted, he is increasingly making himself less and less dear to me. The last one fired me when I did not want to be fired, and this one refuses to fire me even when I so desperately want him to.
Work is work – a means to an end. Life must stay life. Bossman, stop trying to make work an end in itself, or the sole purpose of life, and a very broad means to a very narrow end.
Do you hear me?
Inferno I.
There was a fire at work a few months ago. It started because of a short circuit, but with the winter wind to feed it, it became a raging inferno right in front of our eyes. The civil defense authorities were at the scene in a very short span of time, and it was apparent almost immediately that they were not up to the task. Fire brigades in the neighboring states had to be alerted, and the joint fire fighting continued well into the next week. Finally, after a week of relentless efforts, the flames finally simmered down. It was a miracle no-one was seriously injured. A few people had to be treated for inhaling smoke, and I am sure there were quite a few people who sustained small injuries – it was inevitable with the scale of that fire and with the scores of people in addition to the authorities involved in the epic battle, but Alhamdulillah no-one was seriously injured. I had got to the warehouse, which is where the fire had started, pretty much within an hour of the fire starting, and was there for much of the next 10-12 hours – and during this time I was witness to some truly courageous and self-less acts of bravery and loyalty; what was amazing was that while the civil defense people went about doing their job, the extra-ordinary effort came from the employees of the company.
There was Mohammad, the egyptian salesman, we had just hired a couple of months before and who had won many a heart over with his dedication, whom I saw running about the fire with some other maniacs trying to salvage what they could from the fire.
There were the pathan warriors led by Tikka Khan, one of our oldest employees and by far our best operator of any kind of machinery. Indeed, we have a joke going around the company that if NASA ever got stuck with one of their space buggies or space ships acting up, their best bet would be get Tikka in the driver’s seat and just let him know where they needed the machine to go. Tikka was quick to get behind the wheel of the wheel loader, often called Shovel in desi speak, and started rummaging through the fire to lift out the goods that had not yet been licked by the inferno, and also to make way for the fire brigade to get through. As if that were not enough, his nephew climbed up the 30 feet high stack and beckoned Tikka to bring the bucket of the wheel loader closer to him so he could slide and shove the cartons of goods into it from the top of the stack – before long he had been joined by two other men from the company. These men stood with the fire at their backs, and pushed the cartons into the bucket with an alacrity and strength that held us all in awe – that and the fact that we were ten to twelve feet away from these guys, and the heat felt as if it were setting our hair on fire. These guys were still at it, with Tikka making to and fro trips emptying his bucket at a safe distance, when the fire literally started pouring out like liquid from the cracks in the wall next to them, at which time we screamed and shouted for them to leave the scene.
Before long, the municipal authorities had their own CAT wheel loaders at the site, much bigger and stronger than our Volvo, and they were pushing through the various gates of the warehouse to get through the fire. These were again amazing scenes to watch as the machines broke through the burning gates and the flames leapt out skywards, and the CATs kept pushing further in while the fire-fighters directed their hoses first at the buckets of the machines, and then into the fire. I took no small amount of pride in the fact that with the half dozen wheel loaders leading the fight at various fronts, all of the machines had men in shalwar qameez at their helms.
The warehouse was next door to a manufacturing unit also belonging to the company, which had been lying idle for some years, and which also housed a fair amount of goods. There was nothing but a wall, and a huge steel gate to separate the fire spilling into the factory, and the vulnerable nature of it all seemed to have escaped the attention of the authorities. At which point our finance guru, who is approaching retirement this year rallied a few of the guys around himself and succeeded in getting the civil defense guys giving them a hose and showing them how to operate it. They then went in from the opposite direction, and set up camp there inside the factory. For much of the next ten to twelve hours, four men from the construction wing took turns in keeping the hose directed at the steel gate, and the wall separating the fire. They were instrumental in keeping the fire at bay until reinforcements arrived and civil defense took over. Two out of the four guys had to be hospitalized for having inhaled smoke, and all of them had swollen faces and puffy eyes the next day. I went in to see what they were doing, and could barely keep myself from running away from the scene, so horrible and scary it was. There we were, with nothing but a hose in our hands, and with nothing but the light from the fire to show us where we were, all surrounded by millions worth of useless machinery, aisles and aisles of goods (excellent combustible material) lining the empty spaces, and with the crackling noises from the roof telling us that the ceiling could cave in anytime because of the heat – and these men doing the best they could.
The ware-house was full chockablock with highly combustible goods worth tens of millions of dollars, and it all went up in flames right in front of our eyes. There was a next to nothing chance of insurance paying up, simply because the civil defense report would have held us guilty of violating at least two dozen safety guidelines, and under the circumstances everyone expected the owners of the business to be pretty gutted themselves about it all. But the two partners weathered the storm quite well; indeed they weathered it in the true Pakistani fashion – they put it behind themselves before the flames were put out, and the owner’s words translate to this: “Well, its a bummer; but we still have eleven months to recover!”
And that was that.
A sense of loss amplified.
We must all move on. Except, it has always been difficult for me to move on. It is a good thing, moving on is. I needed to find myself a new place. A different place. A place where I could be wrong. Politically wrong. Morally wrong. grammatically wrong. Just plain wrong.
Perhaps, it is not a smart thing then that my new wrong place is a wrong new place. What, you might ask, is the point of having a new place to be wrong in, if I were to call it much the same thing? Should that question mark be there? Go ask Lynn Truss. She knows all there is to know about punctuation.
Well amigo! Here’s a little irony for you. The right old place was black. This new wrong place is white. There is something right about it after all.
I work in a strange place. It is the most paradoxical, most ironic, and most conflicting place ever. It is massively wrong most of the times, and continues to turn a huge profit every year, and simple business logic says that they must be doing some thing right all along. The biggest thing wrong about it is also the thing most right about it. The owner of the company. The company is, on paper, and in many ways a partnership. A partnership between two friends, whose friendship should be stuff of legend, and quite likely will be. At the same time, in too many ways, this company is not a partnership. It is a one man show. He drives this company relentlessly, and he keeps it from cutting lose and realizing its own potential.
Most of the few hundred employees come from either partner A’s birthplace or partner B’s. Too many relatives work in this place. Everyone is related to at least a dozen other people. Everyone thinks he is grossly underpaid, and insanely over worked. Everyone thinks it is not a fair place. Yet, everyone keeps bringing his relatives to this company. Exploitation of economic factors back home? May be. May be not. I have stopped thinking about this question.
This year, very uncharacteristically, the owner of the company has embarked on what is by their standards a very ambitious plan for revision of packages. We are setting unprecedentedly ambitious targets for this year, but at the same time, this year there is none of the stick, quite a bit of real reward, and tons of carrot-dangling.
One of the oldest employees in the company is a childhood friend of the owner’s. He works for a partly sum, and so do his two sons. He is one of the most trusted people in the company. Last year, after an elaborate theft scheme was uncovered in the company, this man was made the in charge of internal audit. Things improved considerably. His son is one of the clerks in my office.
The father, in his loyalty to the company, is often harsh on his son; and I can see that the son is perhaps not happy about it. What he does not know is the number of times his father has come to me asking me to look out for his son. What he does not understand is that his father is hard on him because he would rather be hard on him himself than watch the ferocity of the company owner unleashed upon him. The son is young yet, and despite some effort going into passing on a more meaningful role to him in the company, he has yet to prove himself as a likely good prospect for the future – by the company’s stringent, mind boggling, and often fluctuating standards. The father has once again proved himself worthy of a good raise.
Sr. came to me today, and stood there fidgeting. I asked him what the matter was, and he eventually came around to talking about his son. Not sure of what was in store for his son, I wanted to avoid the discussion until Saturday, when I would have known for sure. He figured as much quickly. He left soon afterwards, but his parting comment has stayed with me: ” It is alright about me. Alright if I do not get any thing either. Just please see to it that his raise is well taken care of.”
Parents.
Hello again world!
Not that a new place guarantees new posts, but it is certainly a good sign when I can get a few words out on a page titled New Posts.
