Our Life

7th Oct’2010

Every morning over my regular cup of tea, my wife and I discuss our daily work schedule. As my wife is more addicted to sleep, I often read her the headlines of Bangalore Mirror. As I turned over to today’s newspaper, it brought back the memories I have of the IT industry. When I started around 2004, BPOs were the major attractions for young breed of men and women. Even though I was not working in a BPO, somehow my lifestyle mapped to BPOs’ lifestyle. Starting my work around evening; coming back home the next day; having dinner in night-canteen or dingy food-courts, etc... One of the only benefits with this lifestyle was to get away from the bad traffic we all are accustomed in Bangalore. While the whole city, tired and frustrated, returned to the comfort of their home, we start our journey to office and while the same tired faces starts with wet hair and hot head towards office, we are yawning and heading home in the yellow-plated vehicles.

Yellow-plated vehicle, the cabs provided by our organization for picking us and dropping us back. A few hours of journey, few laughs with our buddies and lot of calls with our Managers on the missing reports, this is what we remember of the time we all spent together in the cab. Sometime even comparing like a kid who has got a better cab for this week or this month.

And today when I looked Pratibha Murthy murder case conviction report by the fast track court, we all know how it has changed our mindset. Earlier even though most of my female colleagues were cautious about when and with whom we are traveling back, yet we all were naïve of problems we could have faced. Sleeping on the way back home, talking over the cell-phone with our loved ones and not knowing which path the cabbie has taken are some of the common mistakes we all did. Our company enforced us to have the cab driver number, but most of us didn’t have the hotline number our company had published number of times. To add to the pile of mistakes, the guys always used to think it is a problem for the women and they should be more responsible. As friends we failed number of times to make sure they aren’t the last to be dropped. Time and again such incident shows us the real value of life. But we fail to learn, “Someone has to die in order for the rest of us should value life more”. Kids are piled in taxis and they go to school, yet we are waiting for a time some accident claiming an innocent child’s life. Every day I see the Volvo bus leaving Whitefield overloaded beyond capacity, yet we are waiting… Our life deserve more attention, it is precious!

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Our company has organized a Creating Writing Contest where the participants have to come up with a story based on the QUOTES provided by the organizing committee. The QUOTE I have picked is marked in BOLD and this is my first entry in the competition. I might just send more... let see how much creativity flows when pen-paper unites.