rEiNs LeT LoOsE: And it was Bhutan

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.