GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Ajit Chaudhuri – September 2019
I joined the private sector in 2014! Or rather, re-joined after a 30-year hiatus – I began my career the day after my BA Final exams as a salesman for a Delhi-based computer company, and lasted less than a year. I didn’t expect to be back; a life misspent down the salt mines of the development sector does not qualify one for management positions in institutions purposed to ‘maximize shareholder value’, and I was surprised to be at the receiving end of an offer of employment from a large and reasonably respected conglomerate. The role sounded good, the pay almost enough (no one’s pay is quite enough), and so I accepted and buckled down to work.
It will be 5 years this month! This note reflects on some matters relating to life here in the private sector that took me by surprise – both pleasant and unpleasant.
A visit to Mongolia: Not many can out-boast me in ‘been-there-done-that’ conversations on visiting remote, difficult and beautiful places (on the occasions that I choose to compete) – a pleasant consequence of a life basically spent roaming around. And yet, some places were always beyond the scope of my imagination! Mongolia was one such; the largest expanse of land without a fence, the coldest capital city in the world (with a year-round average temperature of 1 degree centigrade), the lowest population density in the world, the longest distance from a sea – absolutely the middle of nowhere, and the last entry in a list of places one expects to travel to. I was therefore shocked to get, in 2018, an opportunity to spend time in Ulaan Bataar on work, i.e. not only was I to go there but my organization was paying me to do so, and my boss was shocked at the extent to which I was willing to kiss his backside to make this happen (he was used to the US and western Europe visits incentivizing this sort of behavior). The visit was awesome – highlights included going into the countryside and seeing Mongolian dancing, falconry, wrestling and horsemanship in the backdrop of the steppes; eating horse’s tongue; hearing a public concert in Ulaanbataar’s town center, which included the dual tone singing that is traditional to the country and a brilliant rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’ on a morin khuur (or horse-headed fiddle); and dancing the evening away to pop music at Beatles Square in the heart of the city. I also zapped others by being able to read all the local signboards – they did not know that I am familiar with the Cyrillic script that is similar to Mongolian. I doubt that lightning will strike twice and I will get another opportunity to go there, but if it happens that I do I will jump at it.
Feet of Clay: I went into the job holding some myths about corporate leaders, that here were India’s elite – the brightest, best educated and most capable people in the country, and I expected to be in awe of them. Five years and four bosses later I find that, with some exceptions, I have yet to be seriously impressed. It was Norman Schwarzkopf who said that ‘leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character, but if you must be without one, be without strategy’. A distinctive feature of a regime change that we underwent some years back was the loud sucking sounds discernable across the so-called corridors of power. The middle management, who are either younger or not from elite education institutions, are far more impressive.
Gender Guru-dom: Gender experts tend to be soft-spoken but terrifying harridans in whose company the likes of me transform temporarily into sensitive metrosexuals, and I had requested one to hold a ‘gender workshop’ at a conference I was organizing. She backed out at the last minute, I couldn’t find a replacement, and I decided to do it myself rather than cancel. I survived! The 40-odd participants overcame their shock at a man facilitating such a topic, refrained from throwing eggs and tomatoes (both verbally and literally) at me, and were kind in their feedback. They also lapped up my quiz on ‘the differences between sex and gender’ and explanations on ‘strategic’ and ‘practical’ needs of women, both interspersed with examples from my days forming women self-help groups in western Rajasthan. It was my wife who put matters into perspective, saying that ‘if a fraud like you is giving gyan (knowledge) on gender, the private sector must be really desperate’.
Afternoon Tea with the Hizb: My first responsibility upon joining my job was to organize a humanitarian response to floods in J&K, and I was promptly bunged off sans induction and other such niceties to the K valley for the next two months. The visit was memorable for many reasons; a week spent sleeping on the floor of a local NGO’s office at a time when all hotels were under water, the rekindling of many old friendships from my time here after the 2005 earthquake, and re-acquaintance with the wonderful wazwaan style of local cooking. And for an entire afternoon spent in the attic of a house in a village near Bijbehara (similar to where they held Arvind Swamy in the 1992 film ‘Roja’), where a colleague and I explained our intentions to a group of bearded men over multiple cups of kahwa. They turned out to be from an overground institution of the Hizb-ul-mujahedin (not that we asked)! A consequence was that, while there were the usual problems of resistance to our relief efforts from local politicians, administrators and community power brokers, we did not face a single barrier from the militancy (and yes, we did work without security arrangements in areas that feature prominently in news channels for not-very-nice reasons).
A Musical Evening on the Roof of a Kathmandu Hotel: Movies such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” provide a distorted picture of parties in the private sector – in reality, they are civilized affairs in which embellishments such as cocaine, underage prostitutes, etc., are conspicuous by their absence and one doesn’t get up to anything that would shock one’s wife or mother. And yet, very occasionally, they can be fun! One such occasion was in the midst of death and destruction in the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, when I was part of a relief distribution team that on top of everything else was dealing with about four aftershocks a day, and we decided one evening to de-stress by having some impromptu fun. I managed to procure a guitar, a colleague some wine, and a few of us absconded to the terrace of our hotel one evening and spent it singing Kristofferson, Nelson, Dylan, et al. A strong-ish aftershock happened during this event, the building swayed (and the terrace swayed more), but we were so high that this was one that we enjoyed rather than endured.
To conclude, if you are planning to relocate to the private sector you may be surprised on some matters! Don’t expect to merely go to office in the morning, put your neck into the grinder for 10 plus hours, return home in the evening, and wait for your retirement benefits to kick in. You might be in for a little more than that!
