Around this time of last year, I dumped my only full sleeve shirt in the
dustbin. It was not torn or unusable. I had brought it the year before to wear
it at the annual promotion interviews. Last year was the second time I got
rejected. This year, when I missed the bus again for the third time I had
nothing left to throw off the drain.
As the pain and humiliation subsided, there was a feeling of cool
soothe. it is said that the pain reduces after each blow. You enter into a
perpetual state of existentialism and wait for the ‘greater good’ from the
heavens above.
10 years ago as I joined this institution a senior person told me, ‘You
are not meant for this place.’ He didn’t mean to chide me but stated this as a
matter of fact. Every April as I wait for the selected list of promotees with a
pumping heart and browse down the list to find that my name has been left out
this year as well, the words of that man rings like an oracle. The small man as
I am, it leaves me with abject morbidity to see people below me, climb up the
ladder.
Validation is all
that I have been yearning for, all my life. Right from parents to teachers,
classmates, friends, colleagues and the bosses. I yearn for those little
‘Congrats’ messages with emoticons of flowers and claps and thumbs up. But I am
not sure if to seek validation in a job you don’t like by people who hardly
like you is the redemption I wish for. I have boasted myself of being
‘different’ and ‘rebellious’. That might have been a way of seeking attention
but the world knows no greater stupidity. The system weeds out the ‘different’
and the ‘rebellious’. Those who claim to have climbed the ladder while being
‘different’ are no better than pimps for the system.
One of my worst fears
has been of obscurity. That I will fade out of this world, unheard and unknown.
Perhaps that is why I have been yearning for the validation. The affable
Punjabi guy, who was roomed with me during a training program told me’ Either
you have to reach the top or don’t even bother.’
Perhaps its time I learn not to bother.
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