“If you have done something good, do it again and again and again, for good deeds bring joy and delight.” (13 May, 1982)

I did not feel much compunction quitting my job that fateful day, but I did feel some emotion for all those I had befriended at the workplace. They were all so naïve and unassuming people, going about their lives so mechanically - tick, tock, tick, tock. It couldn't have been otherwise.

This was also my first experience of an interview. The paper was the most popular in town, largely due to the incessant bandh¹ calls and disruption of normal life and office goers had to know such things so they could plan their day out. We were seated in the basement of the office and the newsroom next to us was so dark and pale while we waited to be called for our turns. It was so uninviting, and I wondered how the people felt working there. The prospect of having my own money far outweighed the misery of working in a dingy setup; so long as I could be on my own, that's what mattered.

The Editor called me first, and from the first look of him, I knew him to be a professional - the aura that successful (?) people wear around them. A stark contrast from the shady room one floor below, where we were seated.

I had applied for the accounting job. No, he wanted me to give journalism a try. Novel ventures always fascinated me and maybe this was it. But I knew it only too well, it couldn't be my actual future. Something fell short of my expectations, but the money... “I'll take it,” I said.

In the first few days of work, I thought my immediate colleague was very intelligent, at least she looked that way. We got along from the word go. She represented a friendly sister who doles out good (?) advice for free and I was too naive to understand the subtle insinuations of the work place. Sometimes, people thrive in situations that do not place a heavy demand on one's capabilities, where one is deliberately downgraded to the minimum. Caterpillars who never think of becoming Butterflies, never imagine the possibility, much less work for it.

“What is it that we spoke,
and lied to our hearts
that are now beating in solitary?
Disguised feelings
like orange peelings!
But memory lingers
of a faint color on your fingers,
the hand covering a face
that is cold and shivers
at the palpable emotions
of silently trembling dreams.
I can see them
through the soft veil of pretense,
your long ago and half forgotten
Dreams.”

Work was never smooth in the residence-cum-office of the tiny newspaper. People did their bit and that was all, nobody was too happy about it. Why couldn't these people leave their worries behind, I thought. They insisted on wearing them on their faces, in their frowns and their reluctance to smile. You could see it the moment you saw them in the morning, subtly saying, “I got up from the wrong side of the bed today.”

Once in a while, there would be a tiny incident, away from the mundane like this visit from a correspondent with a national newspaper and I got drunk with him at a popular hotel nearby, and it was quite a scene, both of us quoting Urdu couplets describing the pain of love. He was unhappily married while my love-story was going nowhere, so we tried to drown our emotions with whiskey. Mom got the scent of things late at night, when one husky male voice called up to enquire if I had reached home safe, I wonder how?

“All is deathly quiet
in the deserted streets
of this city in a mess.
I, like everyone else,
huddled in a closed room,
staring at the empty moment.
Longing for a lover's embrace
a trip to the bar
would lead to a war,
Within.
And one more journalist
would write a story
as drunken as he.”

By now I knew what journalism was all about. Telling the stories people wanted to know, not the real thing. They were yet to get interested in that, at least this is what it looked like in our spoilt country. And if you told them the truth, they would probably suspect it to be a lie, anyway. They still want to dabble around with failed experiments and useless pursuits, and shy away from finding the true purpose of life, except for a paltry few. Me and my loony crowd, the misfits.

And so the newspaper insisted on having six pages, only to make reason for its price, and the Sub-Editors fussed over the stories that people hardly read. Except for election results, bandh calls or the results of examinations when the newsroom would get busy with enquiry calls from anxious youths wanting to know their fate written by some callous paper examiners. It all had to take me away for another interview in Calcutta² to see another aspect of the newspaper business, and one more step towards realizing the purpose of trying out this experiment with journalism.

Those people are not concerned about information overload. Whoever was getting high blood pressure over the correct prices of stocks in the exchange markets? The offices of the almighty newspaper assumed a life and death demeanor about their business. I kept wondering in Calcutta although not consciously, what is all this fuss about? This maddening rush and frenzy? To what end? And in spite of all that, all those people working so hard in mega cities all over the world, things go wrong. We have poor people, people going hungry, unfed, unclothed. We have wars being fought, we have unfulfilled yearnings everywhere.

It did not make sense to me, AT ALL. Then why the heck did I go to Calcutta? Why did I worry so much about my career? Yes, to settle down with Her... only to live in a world like this??

Yet, something was accomplished. I understood its all nonsense, and realized, it is all relative. We ignore our spirit so indolently, but when everything else confuses, and only then, the spirit comes to the rescue. Not exactly comes to the rescue. Has the last laugh, actually.

Even then, I stayed on for the money that came every fateful 8th of the month. And this time, I could see the other face of the organization. The grueling one in the night shift. The resilience of the chowkidar³ who did his duty even when a newborn child of his died that day; the paste-up man who earned a pittance but complained he was not being able to send home a reasonable sum; the computer boys who slogged the late hours, singing loudly and sleeping like logs when the nights nearly turned to dawn. The driver who got a wink of sleep after a tired day but woke up again, rubbing his swollen eyes, just to drop us home but none of all this got reflected on the determined face of my Editor. He was the boss and this was PRESS in a fumbling democracy. Period.

I understood how VIPs (Very Insignificant People) contribute to the happenings in our world. How a small few get to hog the limelight while most go ignored. Those unknown faces too have a little fire in them and it takes something other than professional conduct to see it revealed. My days at the newspaper was nothing but a fragment of that chaotic world I had grown up in.

I left the office premises on my last day of work, banging shut the door of the white Ambassador as Bahadur, (the security guard and the name literally means ‘brave’) lazily closed the gates below the blue lighted billboard bearing the name of the newspaper, glowing against a black night sky.

Gone were the nights of harboring a little pride inside the car which displayed 'PRESS' on both the windshields as we drove home, the headlights aiming into a winding road, swerving left and right, while I murmured to myself, another disturbing phase of life, over.

Circumstances were still difficult. I was in the eye of the storm, fighting the forces of adversity working very much within me. In my attitudes. Everything presented a problem to be solved. I simply couldn't accept things the way they were.

There were promises my optimism continued to generate. Yet, day after day, I could see no hope. The same bleakness of despair stared at me from empty faces. From being locked in a traffic jam on a narrow lane. From the uncompromising attitude of a colleague I met at the market place or even the senseless violence on TV, with a room full of gaping youngsters.

“How long more will we kill life in order to sustain it? How long more will we wrong others just to right ourselves? How long more will we deprive someone in order to facilitate our own? How long more will we have these fences and walls that restrain us from reaching out?

Maybe a very long time... Until then all I could do was plug on my walkman and listen to Phil Collins⁴ scream, “If we agree that we could disagree, we could stop all of this today.”

“You have a paradoxical set of circumstances, where you know you have to change your ways of self-centeredness. You know this money clinging has to go but you are apprehensive to give up the old comfort and expose yourself to the whirlwind of new ideas. Ultimately, you will have to surrender yourself to the higher calling in you. If you are brave, you will make it faster, but you do not have a choice. You will be compelled to become brave.”

“You had chosen what you long to fulfill now. It is your fragment of the dream that you promised to fulfill in your own special way. To be born from your own conflict, to conquer them and spread the rewards all around, as your own life would hardly be enough to contain it.”

“You are so vulnerable to your surrounding environs but you are meant to be free. You are to be free from the vestiges of corrupt thought that attack from elsewhere. You are to be free from the clinging desires of the subconscious, drilled into place by previous imprisonment, and then nothing can disturb the freedom found hence.”

(.*_*.)

1. Bandh, protest closure of public services
2. Calcutta… It is now called Kolkata, just as Bombay is called Mumbai and Madras is called Chennai…
3. Chowkidar, security person who stands at the gate
4. Phill Collins, But Seriously…