A lonely house requires some company and I find news channels to be a good bet. Also contrary to my Bridget like bimbette image on my blog, in my office I am one of those people who is expected to tell people who is Wasim Jaffer and whether I approve of the “imperialists” visiting this part of the world or not. You see lunch time conversation requires that each of us take a certain role:
… The big bosses talk about children, IIT aspirations and husband person
… The only male will regale on the merits of having a wife and a maid (different people of course)
… The Bong will talk about where to find prawns, fish, and chicken… you get the drift
… Younger colleague will talk about the 3M’s aka Men, Malls and Multiplexes
… Me and B talk about geo-political issues (because that was the only one left)
So anyway at 7 pm, see yet another ‘breaking news’ item. This says that blasts have happened in the ‘temple city’ of Varanasi. Some woman on the panel says that, “What Mecca is to Islam, Varanasi is to Hinduism and this is an attack on Hinduism.” Some UP minister talks about it being an assault on the ‘social fabric’ of India. Mr Arun Jaitley the very articulate opposition man tells that it is all, the governments fault (when is it not?!). Some other random person says it is do with the American who recently visited (nope not Will Smith) and all the pent up angst against him.
I watch it part bored and part amused. Total apathy. I watched the blood stains with a morbid fascination and kept a watch on the rising statistic as I chopped the veggies for the Maggi (so what if one is having unhealthy starch, one must at least reduce the guilt by adding veggies to it)
7:15 pm
And then it suddenly stuck me that M, was in Varanasi on work and so I called her number immediately. Partly out of some concern but mostly to get my own version of “breaking news” and “eye-witness accounts”. So I try her number, it rings out. I shrug and get back to the Maggi. It does take much longer than the promised two minutes. It takes five minutes usually and with the veggies close to 8 mins.
7:23 pm
Before I start eating, must call M. Again phone rings. Slightly worried now because the images on TV have got more morbid by now. Proceed to polish of the Maggi with much gutso.
7:27 pm
While I am in the midst of Maggi, common acquaintance R calls and says no news from M… her family was very frantic.
7:32 pm
I am still trying to get in touch with her, but no luck. She has probably lost her phone. Get the Taj Ganges number and call to ask, if their guest M was in her room. Negative. Panic rises.
7:32 pm to 7:45 pm
Between me and some other friends/ acquaintances we try to understand M’s day and put the pieces together. R spoke to her at 6 pm, when she was on the way to some ‘random temple’. I ask R, did she say which one? Hanuman temple? R isn’t sure. She says, ‘Hmmm, Hanuman. Who? That Mahabharat wallah?’ Errrm. Sigh.
7:45 pm to 8:30 pm
Call up everyone I know with a cow-belt connection. Can you help? Can you do something? Everyone had ‘reassuring’ things to say:
She must be okay. Only the poor get stuck in all of this…
She obviously would have gone to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. That is where people go…
May be she has lost her phone…
I don’t think so many people have died or anything… errr, probability?!
8:30 pm
Still no news. May be she is okay, but is not able to get to her hotel. May be the phone is in the car. Call up my mom, to talk. For help. And mom’s always know. Stop being fanciful, she says. Hmpfh.
You don’t understand, I tell her. You see, I was supposed to go, but decided not to and sent her instead. Guilt, guilt, guilt.
8:30 pm to 10:15 pm
What if something did indeed happen to her? Will I be in some way responsible for it? Suddenly this was not a mundane piece of ‘breaking news’ for me but it was something that would determine how well I could sleep the next many nights. M was not a statistic after all, she was a ‘real person’ whom I knew, spoke with, shared a Chocolate Excess at Barista with…
May be I will go to hell. May be I will need to go Varanasi to get rid of my sins.
At 10:15 exactly I got a call from M, sounding most cheery, ‘Hey guess what there is major chaos in the city, bomb blasts and what not. Do you think the moron client will postpone the presentation? Pity that he was not here. And hey the next trip to Mugalsarai had better be you… I am an only child.’
Many others weren’t lucky enough I suppose. May their souls rest in peace…
Beyond the social and political impact of this tragedy it brings me to a more immediate issue of, ‘How safe we are, while at work…’ A lot of times at work, when we are very loaded with it we do joke about, ‘How one day we will die at work… at our desk’, it’s a joke because you actually don’t think it will ever happen.
But it does happen. Not too often. But in a job that involves so much of travel, one never knows what can happen and when. Especially coming from such women-centric work-places as I do, the risks become more. (Not to get into any gender stereotypes argument, but it is true) M was safe today, but if something had gone wrong, whose fault would it be? The company? The terrorist outfit? Our system which creates so much of anger to make people take up such drastic measures? Or just her Bad Karma? I really don’t know…
A few years back when all the employees of our company went for a training conference abroad, they booked us into various flights as batch of four’s. This was after the Nagpur plane crash in which Unilever had apparently lost a whole number of employees. Post which Lever’s put a cap on the number of their managers who could travel at any point on the same flight! My company dutifully adopted that. And worse still, they told us that too. That sure was good for employee-morale.
But I don’t think there are any easy answers here. Like recently I had to travel to various parts of UP including Muzaffarnagar on work. A day before I was leaving, Aaj Tak carried a news on the Kidnapping Gangs who were rampant in this region, wherein rich sugarcane farmers were kidnapped and hidden away in the sugarcane farms! My mom who was watching the news with me, was most upset and put that into her list of, ‘101 Reasons why Smugbug needs another job’. While I was in Muzaffarnagar I spoke to the Lucknow office guy and got into an intellectual monologue on protection of women in the region and or any of us who come there for work. Mr Srivatsava or DS as we fondly call him said, ‘Madamji only one solution, get a gun!’
Right!
Frustration
If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;
Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.
But I have no lethal weapon-
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.
- Dorothy Parker
PS: Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. This is becoming almost as marketed as V-Day! But here is wishing all the fabulous women who read this blog, ‘Happy Women’s day’. It will truly be wonderful, when we would actually not need such a day!
16 comments:
Glad M is safe and sound. But somehow I doubt we'll ever get out of this nonchalant shell we've built around us. No hope on hope anymore.
That day is too far and till then let's have fun on "women's day" :)
Well first of all glad that M is okay.
This issue you take up about – How safe we are at work, is most interesting. As an HR person I can tell you, there is no way you can hold your company responsible should something go terribly wrong. Remember Manjunath? Or that girl, who was working for HP BPO - where it was a serious safety lapse, wasn’t it?
And there it was much more of a serious case of absolute negligence and apathy. Actually there are Labor Laws which say that you can’t allow your women employees to work beyond a certain time and more than X number of hours. But nobody really knows that, neither the people doing the late hours know of it nor do their supervisors, lots of apathy everywhere actually.
I relate to this issue very strongly. In my stint with my previous employer, one of my colleagues (a young, bright Management Trainee) had actually gone to check on the plunging sales in a certain small town in Maharastra. She got into an argument with the ASM, who hit her in a fit of anger and she died right then. The Head of Marketing in the condolence meeting for her said, ‘She died for a cause…’ And I wondered when work became Jehad. Needless to say, I moved jobs! :)
Good of you to be posting this.
Loved that Dorothy Parker verse! And happy women’s day. I concur with Kumari, till such a day comes lets just be happy and lap up all the discounts that every marketer wants us to be given today! :)
Safety at work- very pertinent issue this is, Smugs! You know, when we travel as much as we do and to the kinds of places that we go to in our line of work, we sort of become immune to things like "how safe is this place" because we're too busy with last minute glitches and such like! We wake up to these safety issues when something like this happens. I know I woke up to it when I was stuck in the middle of a riot in Bihar 2.5 yrs ago!
I remember sitting on the one-platform-dark station on that rainy August night, with flames visible on the horizon and muffled screams reaching us once in a while. I remember what B (ad agency guy) told me, "What kind of a boss sends a girl alone to Bihar's naxal heartland?" I remember thinking who will take the fall had I died trying to understand bathing habits of SEC D!!! It was not even a "cause"!
Good thing you wrote about this.. and yes, the next time there is work in places such as Mughalsarai, please get one of the guys (of any office!) to go for it!
It will truly be wonderful, when we would actually not need such a day!
amen to that sister!
HWD! :)
Why should you feel guilty? If anybody must, it had better be the morons who planted the bomb. They are the Hawks of the real world, and far more dangerous.
I agree with [Bad Hair Day], work is not Jehad. Imagine dying while selling fairness creams...
Maggi is healthy, don't let anyone let you think otherwise. And it sure must be a change from curd rice! :)
You write really well. Add a fan to your list. :)
How very true, nothing ever bothers us anymore. Unless it hits very close to home. But I feel resentful of these bombings; they are all just ‘political’ in nature and having a misplaced agenda. People who go to pray shouldn’t die. Neither should people who leave from their homes to work.
Women and ensuring they are safe is another issue altogether. Somehow a man as the protector doesn’t seem to be comforting! The classic, “devil and the deep-sea” syndrome.
Nice post.
PS: Ms Soup, you do look most fetching in that previous post! :)
Oh the suspense building was a bit too much so I had to scroll down and see the ending. Glad that M is safe. :-)
Pretty much got an insight of all that went through with folks when S and I were stuck in Andaman during tsunami.
And never underestimate maggie. Its the most quintessential necessity for survival, spcially when mums are not around..:-)
And lastly "It will truly be wonderful, when we would actually not need such a day! "
Amen to that!
I'm going to ramble a bit now...
I play bridge at the local club every week. Sure, I'm just 23, but bridge is basically an old people's game. Half of the crowd there age 65+.
One day, one of my regular playing partners told me about his wife dying two years ago. Her numerous and beautiful paintings hang on the wall of the club now. Another day, a player did not turn up because he was unwell; and people in a hush talked about how he's finding it difficult exerting himself these days. And so on and so forth.
To me, Death has always been that distant apparition; the few deaths within the family happened when I was very young. Now, talking with people who face Death everyday right inside their clique, I feel... weird... sad...
Its so easy to think of all tragedies we hear about in the news, in third person. But when Tragedy is no stranger, it makes us think more and feel more. About our lives, its importance and its meaning. And about all those people in the world we don't know, but in this secret way, they are Kin as well.
Sorry about the long and not-so-relevant speech, I just figured this is a good place to share my feelings on this :)
It will truly be wonderful, when we would actually not need such a day!
Totally agree ...
But I think this day should still be observed; to remember countless women who struggled too hard to bring us to the fairly comfortable position we enjoy today!!! These days I'm in touch with very many 60+ women and I've grown to admire them so much .... Compared to the amount of discrimination they have endured; we've had it pretty easy ...
So this day should always be observed to mark their spirit ....
# btw "Comfortably Numb" is a beautiful song ...
'It will truly be wonderful, when we would actually not need such a day!'
Well said Smug! :)
Till then- Happy Women's day!
Happy Women's Day to you too...and glad that M is safe. And while your issue is very pertinent about safety at work, aren't we still a long long way from having these concerns echoed by the powers that be so some constructive action could be taken?
Until then, like Bad Hair Day says, lets just be happy and lap up all the discounts that every marketer wants us to be given today! :)
n all the time M unaware of wat u were going thro'...
n yaa companies do adopt the strategy of flying ppl in different airlines so religiously that u wud think that it is a pity that there r so few air crashes :)
Thank you girls for the various comments, hope the day was good for all! :)
[Prashanth] Hmmm, I know what you mean. Interesting this fasination for people over 60! You too [Intern]! :)
[Bad Hair Day] At least the law is on our side! :D
Have you folks heard about the Supreme Court case called Vishaka vs State of Rajathan? Bad-hair-day probably knows all about it but it was a surprising discovery for me. I stumbled on this a while ago (Tuesday, October 26, 2004 to be exact) after seeing the movie Bawandar and have a post about it on my blog. Check it out, if you're interested. Its all stuff from the web but it was very difficult to ferret out even with Google.
Thanks. I shall read it.Very many links must be read on a Sunday! :)
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