The air tickets were booked in a moment of irreversible rage
over a client mail.
You know how clients have much too much to say, and I
forced out a polite auto-generated response, “we’ll look into it and have it
fixed at the earliest” and closed the browser window shut. Much like you’d purse your lip moments before
uttering a really nasty retort but fight to seal it shut into a toothless
wrinkled yap.
This was my whatever
moment and it felt as good as the original response I bore on my mind but
couldn’t get the professional slave in me to type out. It would have read
something like this:
“Dear pompous client,
As you read this sitting in your plush cabin, snuggled in an
overpriced who’s who jacket because your skin’s goose pimpled from getting
exposed to unnatural air cooling technology, sipping fancy bought green tea
from a gourmet store, someone not so far
away is wondering what of the countless consultations, written mails to confirm, phone calls and innumerous early drops of
the idea before the creative seals here were inducted into
cleaning up the chaff and give you a perfect chiseled idea.
Not super market
bought, but genetically engineered for it to spring new life the way you wanted
and the way your customer liked…personalized for your very random and frantic whim,
primarily because you took your customer to be a brainless, speechless podge of
colorless mass for long, too long.
And because you spent a little extra time snoozing your
alarm each morning, over the last month, because you were more concerned about
hiding that well-treaded ceat around your midriff every morning before you got
to work, because you were busy slobbering over that new trainee you hired for good
looks; this real work that you were accountable for, as much as I am, wasn’t
given due time and attention at the different stages it gestated in.
This here is my labor of love for your organization and you
are totally allowed to scrap it because what do I know. I have all the time in
the world to pour over your new lofty whims endlessly and keep toiling at it
like the buzzing bee trapped behind a frosted window. I am just an underpaid,
overworked work mule, so ye, I will totally redo it all like you command.”
Because I am a “seasoned
professional” I assumed zen without saying a word of what I just vented
above.
To heal, I indulged in 10 days of getting
lost in a bouquet of anonymous yet friendly faces in a landlocked country full
of mystic tales and simple pleasure – sun, them giants, comforting indulgences,
long monologs with the self.
To heal, I booked me a return ticket to Bhutan.
Ulka made it so much easier to make the trip. She was my host in Thimphu.
