THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG!

I began the previous post by stating that a lot has been happening in my life. I’d like to elaborate. On the 5th of January this year I tendered my resignation, something that I’d been attempting to do, an idea that I had been toying with for more than a year now. And it has been such a liberating experience. I cannot even begin to describe the rush that I felt when I wrote it. I was on my way to freedom. I got the job when I was desperately seeking one four years back. I wanted to do something tame after having done quite a few wild things. I had been going through a particularly bad patch personally and I needed the reassurance of a secure job in the city I call home, which would allow me to come back to my family every evening. And for two years after I landed the job I kept on thinking that I was really one lucky bulb that I had got the job so effortlessly. I was arrogant at the interview but I was honest…and there I was, a job in hand (worth two in the bush—people said) after months of feeling unsettled in more than one sense. It took stupid me two long years to figure out that the sole reason I got the job so effortlessly was because I was too, just too damn smart for it. One of life’s little ironies, I suppose.
‘So… what went wrong?’, I asked myself and I realized how stereotyping almost undid me in a place that, pardon me, teems with stereotypes. My going to work in an educational institution attired and made up in exactly the way young professionals go to work worldwide, has over four years earned me quite an interesting bunch of responses. On my face it has always been, ‘You are looking great!’. In my absence, it has always been, ‘How does she find the time in the morning to come to work so prim and proper? How does she get so much time to paint her nails? Who is she showing off to?... A bunch of teenagers?’ (the last bit has been mouthed by the pettiest specimens of humankind I have ever met). How did I ever come to know all this? You will be surprised. How often these words have been uttered in my presence in just the right decibel so as not to arouse suspicion of deliberate bitching in my presence and yet be heard and hurtful. In a place which has no dearth of ‘lipsticked’ middle-aged women pouring over silk sarees on sale and ‘Oriflame’ brochures in between periods, I just never got their point. And, so, at various points I have been deemed frivolous, too self-conscious to be taken seriously by my students and as someone whose opinions and views on her subject of study doesn’t matter because she happens to be young and ‘attractive’ and not old, smug, illogical, narrow minded, all-knowing, Ekta Kapoor serial-loving women. Oh, how I am spewing venom! Do you see what they have done to me? I just had to run for my life, my sanity, my better sense. Let me make two points very clear. I have no illusions about the way I look. I do not consider myself attractive at all although I do not suffer from a low sense of self either. I, thus, never got to understand what in me evoked such subterranean censure and apathy. Was it my age that was all wrong? Or was it my manicured fingers? Incidentally there are young colleagues at my workplace who, for very similar and apparently unfathomable reasons, have aroused similar reactions in people. All I can feel for them is empathy. But then one has to realise that most workplaces offer a similar scenario. And I have kind of figured out why. It is the fear of being upstaged. It is the insecurity that gnaws at a person the moment he or she encounters a younger or brighter (or both) soul inching their way into a bastion that was till now well fortified against unwelcome intrusions. And thus, the best defence is to go about offending. Erode someone’s self-esteem…basically, bitch about them so much, and ensure that it gets heard or reported, so that you can shred the person to thin strips and hang them all around for a further round of backbiting because the strips are too thin anyways. Having said all that I have so far,let me once again make my stand very clear. Not everyone I have met and worked with in my workplace deserve the kind of lashing out that I have indulged in so far. My own department, for example, was the most awesome...co-operative, helpful, almost like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise (according to me) fetid cesspool.
However, after being overworked and thoroughly underutilised for four years I want to do my-kind-of-things again. I want to discover 'me' all over again. A two-year sabbatical with nothing much to do but travel really cheap is too wildly unimaginable, foolish, unambitious and downmarket for all the women I have worked with who have sent their sons and daughters or who aspire to send them to work for foreign multinational companies. I have nothing against this breed. In fact I am happy for their success albeit achieved conventionally. I have lovely cousins and friends who are happy doing the same. I just don’t understand why the existence of other kinds of people making ‘other’ choices make this new breed and their mothers so goddamn highbrow. Or maybe I do understand. Those who love living life out of the box generally find favour with only a handful. And so I have decided to move on, find ‘my’ ground beneath ‘my’ feet once again, find freedom from the compulsive urge to prove that ‘hey, I am good at what I do’, find time to be able to do just nothing and not feel guilty, find friends in foreign lands, treasure the few who understand my crooked crooked ways, and find wisdom from the lessons I’ve learnt in life so far… because you know what? ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’