An Unanticipated Visit

Today I happened to visit a Tyre factory for some official work. It is the month of September here and the rainfall this year has been more than generous. An arduous 45 kilometer journey to work is no endearing feeling every morning. Road traffic and potholes test your patience to the core. So it is one of those very cloudy, drizzly and windy days. The area I was going to visit is an industrial hub with many small, medium and large scale units. Most of the population comprises migrant laborers from different parts of the country.

I hired an auto to reach my destination. As I stepped out of the auto a gigantic iron gate stood tall, one similar to the gate of a prison. After Id’ing myself to the gate keeper, I entered the factory. As I set my foot inside the gate, I was immediately teleported to one of those Hollywood movies about prisons, concentration camps or punishment cells. The towering walls, the dark surroundings, the greasy and weary faces, the reek of rubber, it all painted a very gloomy picture. There was something very depressing about the place.

As I kept walking inside after signing the visitor’s register, guided by a guard from the Northern part of India, many thoughts crossed my mind. The place was filled with hounding sounds of machines, stench of chemicals and black fluid spilled all over the floor. I entered the HR person's cabin and was asked to wait for him. I sat there, absorbing my surroundings. I thought “how can someone wake up and walk into a place like this, every day? What on earth could have possibly forced them to travel all the way, away from home and family to a gloomy dungeon like this one?” Then I realized, these people are not here out of their choices, they are here to make a living. I realized the subtle difference between, just making a living and making money. Maybe I have undermined the phrase “making a living” in the previous sentence. Making a living is not as easy. Unlike some of us with swanky, air-conditioned and well-furnished work places, others have to be content with dreary ones, places which can suck the energy out of their lives and reduce them to mere robots. And here we are, complaining about long drives to work, bad bosses, bad roads, mean colleagues and the list is endless.

As I walked out of the cabin after meeting the official, I requested if I can click a few photographs, which was politely declined. While walking out, I managed to steal a few clicks from whatever angles I could. I crossed the exit gate, with a feeling of victory for getting the clicks, a sense of relief for having my job and my life, and a sense of wretchedness for the workers of the factory.

PS: Scenes from a couple of Hollywood movies that flashed through my mind are: The Shawshank Redemption and Life is Beautiful.

The Perfect Match

Marriages are made in heaven….are they? At least we have been brought up to believe it. I have seen many couples ….happy ones, sad ones, arguing couples, quarrelling couples, prefect looking couples, weird couples and it has always made me wonder as to how did these two absolute strangers manage to find each other, and how on earth did they decide that they want to spend the rest of their lives with each other. I am not going to talk about how marriages or rather matches should be made, because hell I’ve no clue about it. Neither am I going to discuss the divorce rate or success rate of marriages these days. It’s just the whole process of decision making that interests me or rather fascinates me.

This comes after I have been through the grueling process myself. However the match was not for me but for a very close family member. I wasn’t given the authority to take THE decision on her behalf, (I wouldn’t do it - not for the world) I was just involved in the screening and handling the communication part of it. Of course I am referring to arranged marriages here.

The process of finding a match has its own challenges and that vary from one community to another. A few communities have well educated and good looking guys (oh yes, looks do matter….they DO MATTER) but the girls do not seem to be up to the mark. A few others are very particular about the dialect of a particular language or the city that you belong to. For example, for a Maharashtrian guy settled in Pune, his family would want a girl only from Maharashtra, any girl belonging to the Maratha community but staying in Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh is disqualified right away. Things like educational qualification, values, and family ethics of the girl are not even considered.

Consider this; Case 1: The first guy that we looked for was a well settled guy (this has no specific meaning or definition) with a software job in the US. When we sent the proposal with a picture of the girl, the mom said “we can take the decision only after our son comes back from the US, and then, after some time she has the audacity to give us contact details of another person and to say, “In the meanwhile you can get in touch with this guy, he is my son’s friend and both are very similar”.  Even the poorest of salesmen would not use this cheap technique to sell merchandise! I was literally fuming when my dad shared this with me.

Case 2: Now this guy is mesmerized the moment he sees the photograph of the girl, since the girl in question is beautiful. He wants to set a classic example for ‘love at first sight’, doesn’t bother to know more about the girl, doesn’t want to talk to her, for his utter shock the photo could have been a beautiful work of Photoshop (which was not the case of course), but apparently the guy had lost his thinking ability the moment he saw the picture. I had expected a little better from him considering that he was well educated and had a job in Australia. There’s another interesting twist to the tale. Apparently the guy’s parents had already seen a girl for him and his mom already gave a word to them, that she would get her son married to this girl. Till now the guy is not aware that his parents or his mom to be more specific has given a word, he only knew that they were looking for a match. Now the guy is adamant that he will marry the girl, whose picture he has fallen in love with. Till now he has no clue about what kind of a person she is. His parents were  having a tough time convincing him as it is, and when the other girl’s family came to know about the whole fiasco they landed in the guy’s house and started an argument, more of a fight, as to how can they go back on their words, and how their daughter has already applied for the passport and all that. So the mother’s word was final like in most Maharashtrian families and the guy finally gave in.

Case 3: Now this was a good looking guy, had a decent job and had come up in his life on his own. Through his own hard work, with little or no guidance from his family. But the issue was he had very little financial stability. The job was all he had. We were still considering this until my dad spoke to the guy’s dad directly. After the initial exchange of greetings he started bragging about how his was a well educated family with political and bureaucratic links. Later on after a little investigation we also came to know that he was expecting a huge sum of money as dowry. So we gave up.

Case 4: I cannot really write much about this as it is personal. But all I can say is this guy took all the time to know the girl, to think through it and only after that did he take the decision. The girl as a human being is only what mattered to him and his family, and nothing else. I had given up hope that well off families with guys with a good job will ever value a human being. All that would matter to them is social status, monetary expectations and gaining mileage. But I was proved wrong. There are parents who believe in values and instill the same in their young kids. In some cases things tend to change later on, due to circumstances, societal pressure or could be any other reason. Parents need to be strong; they must not succumb to pressure and must instill confidence in their kids for believing in everything that is right.

I am not trying to ridicule any of the parents or guys over here. Neither am I trying to say that all the above mentioned guys were ineligible for marriage. They might probably make the best of couples with their life partners if they look for the right things in the girl. It’s just that they were not the best match for the girl in question. The problem here was with their approach towards the entire thing.

I have realized that the entire process is no less than an adventure and how things change within a matter of days. It is one hell of a roller coaster ride! The anxiety, the disappointment, the feeling of being so near yet so far, and not to mention the wait! You patience is tested to the core! No matter how logical an approach you try to make, something will happen which is beyond what you had expected or thought.  You try to control everything, things don’t work, you still hang on, with double cautiousness, things still don’t work out, the stress gets on to you and just when you are about to give up, there comes the silver lining in the dark clouds.

Maybe everything happens according to the plan that destiny has for us. All we can do is to have the right approach and leave the rest to destiny. But the last part of the entire process, the silver lining in the dark clouds, forces me to believe that marriages are indeed made in heaven.

 

PS: Here’s wishing that the couple lives happily ever after. :)

The lessons of life

I was leaving early from work the other day, but I had no time to book a cab. So I requested the transport supervisor and he said "I'll see what I can do". Getting a cab in these kind of situations is a daunting task, thanks to the so called company policies. The supervisor had a chat with the driver and there I was, with an almost victorious smile on my face, boarding the cab. I realised that I was the only employee in the cab. The driver had actually lied about the other employee (the one who had booked the cab for himself) being in the cab. It was really thoughtful of him to do so. He also told me "Main bol deta toh apko cab nahin milta tha madam" (Had I spoken the truth, you would not have got this seat madam). It also made me think how common it is to see these gestures coming from absolute strangers. Strangers who are drivers, cart pullers, shop keepers, and aayas etc..Despite being burdened with the challenges of earning their daily bread and butter, they show us how they can still give so much to others.

I learnt that giving is not about how much you possess, but about having the willingness to give.

There was another relatively young driver in the cab.(Must be just 20). The experienced driver was to get down on the way and the younger one was supposed to drop me and then pick up some other employees.The experienced driver was giving him sound advice. He said,"I trust you with these pick ups. Trust is very important, you mess up once and that's it! Noone is going to remember the hundred times you did it right, but everybody is going to remember the one time you falter. So, be very careful! Cause no matter what, you just cannot win the trust back. It is very difficult." And there I was, an assistant manager learning the lessons of life from a cab driver!

Trust is the base of every relationship. Be it your family, friends, love or even your doctor or driver for that matter. We subconsciously trust all these people, for, it is impossible to survive if we don't. In a way we do not have the choice of not trusting them. But what do we do when we are put in a spot? When we know someone trusts us with everything and that our act might hurt them. Do we have the strength of character to let go of our personal gains? Or even sacrifice if required, to keep their trust in us? We hear so many stories of people deceiving, cheating on and back stabbing others .

The recent wikileaks were a breach of trust of all Indians who thought that US was a true ally and a reliable friendly nation. The incident has definitely left more than just a scar on the relationship between the two countries. We got to trust each other as friends, colleagues, nations and just as human beings at a basic level. And more importantly we need to make sure that we do not break it.

It is always good to trust each other out of willingness than doing so because you have no choice. Let's be strong in the moment of truth and give "trust" a chance. It is going to win us hearts and friends for a lifetime.

Cheers!