To get fresh air!

I live in Pune now. Far, far from Chennai. This seems like a foreign country to me. This is a foreign language they speak. I am unable to get any chilli bajji here, or for that matter many of the things I had taken for granted Tamilnadu.

I have moved into Marketing now. I now handle Product Planning for our company, one in a team of 5 people, managed by a senior GM. I have been in sales for 4 years now, and I am going through a major transformation, at least so I thought when I was asked if I would be willing to move into marketing.

My immediate thought was the escape from month ends and targets. I knew there would be stress in any job, but this would not require a lot of travel. And I could go to office and come home every night to my family.

I decided to make the move despite the not so rosy financial situation we were in. I was of the opinion that one has to make a few sacrifices to get ahead in life, and in the long run, it would be alright.

I had been wrong on a few things.

I never knew how much I would miss the regular travel I have been taking for a nuisance the past 4 years. To go to office everyday is a thing I hate, I realize now.

I assumed sacrifices will be made by me readily. Now to think of selling my beloved motorcycle, the Zahir, and my first car, White. I feel like a morally corrupt person to throw off things. So much for my love of things. But I just cant see my things, my automobiles, bath tub, , being used by somebody. It is like abandoning a pet. Would they feed it properly, would they have a covered parking space, etc. Shit, the list of worries on this front go on like anything. So I decided not to make the both the sacrifice for my career aspirations. I decided to bring them here, and use them as sparingly as possible, without getting caught by the cops. It may seem impractical, so my wife and parents say.

I thought marketing was the natural progression for a sales guy with a management education background. I was excited when I though I would be managing a brand. It was what people do sitting in HQ, telling people how to advertise, how to campaign, how to promote, etc. Now when I am in this shit, I see meetings happening with ridiculous agendas:
• Project Planning of Product planning programs
• Market opportunity analysis process – to develop a template for understanding market opportunities and standardize the process of delivering products/brands/value, etc……blablabla……..
• There will be a meeting tomorrow to discuss the key take aways from the last meeting. Each member is to bring a write up on the above subject.
• The actual amount of time spent in thinking and executing the actual work will be 10%. The rest is spent doing fancy things, completely unrelated.

People are a lot more sophisticated. They like giving things names, making presentations to the top management – mind you, they literally fight for doing this. They like being snobbish, give themselves airs, trying to look intelligent. At the end of the day, they are being strictly professional, just what the employer wants. They would call meeting the customer for feedback as VoC – Voice of Customer. They would call a detailed project objective as PRF – Product Request Form. This gateway, that gateway, Gateway of India, etc. It’s designed to make morons sound intelligent. When I came in, it all seemed very intelligent, but to know what each term means, all these people here are running a swindle. Conning people and getting ahead in life.

People generally try to look very busy. But you go within what they do, they play solitaire most of the time, and they browse wikipedia, google news, ebay, solving the Friday puzzle in our intranet, etc. This means there is a lot of time for people to think about their environment and their colleagues, generally to be idle and think bad and not so bad things about people. Politicking is very common, and from where I came, all this did not matter. You were worth the gold for the numbers you showed in every month’s review. Here it is different. You are worth who you know. Your worth is in being in the good books. A rebel doesn’t fit in, and so does a person with a different attitude.

People in the office are stagnant. One can say this from their blank stares and bland smiles. There is no josh in anyone. There is no laughter in the office. So much work to be done, and people are just wary of small talk and time waste.

I don’t know how this will read to people who have had desk jobs their entire career, but I think this is not what I should be doing. I would become a stupid professor, a jargon crunching asshole and a scheming fox.

To meet 100 new people every day, I would give anything. To stop this suffocation, I would give anything.