When I first went to work for an aggressive Indian Bank, which had created Banking History in its first 10 years of existence, I was rumored to be of great potential.
But having spent the better part of my 6 years of working life, it seems that I have squandered away my "Great potential".
How? You ask how?
Well, it’s a long story. And unlike most stories it does not begin with a girl.
It begins one summer morning in the early part of the summer of 2005 in the Branch Manager's Cabin.Sohini Desai.
"So why are you here?" she asked me, as she looked up from the sheaf’s of paper(documents) that lay scattered in front of her table.
Why am I here? What kind of a question was that I thought to myself?
"Well-you know, the answer could be a variety of them..." I replied.
"Cut out the metaphysical allusions and tell me the real world deal" she replied, looking up from amongst the sheaf’s of paper.
"The deal ..." I held on to my sentence. The news was bad. In ancient India, princesses used to castrate the slaves who would earn her displeasure.
The situation inside the cabin was no less. She was the branch manager, the princess, and I her slave. My sweat would win her ticket to PARIS. That was the Insurance contest. And she was gunning for it. Gunning for both- the target as well as yours truly.
And I was the only wall she needed to subjugate, to break-the only one who refused to missell to clients. The only one on whose efforts hinged her Paris trip. Damn! And there I was purveyor of bad news. The contest was in its last leg- just one more day left before logins closed and the 50 lacs deal had fallen apart.
"I KNEW IT!" She erupted.
Through the corner of my eyes I could almost see the branch beyond the glass walls almost holding their breath. I was their hero. Young. Strapping. With youthful exuberance, an attitude they found positive and the Branch manager found disgusting.
What next followed was horrific. She screamed, she shouted, she swore that she would have my job and in the end she asked me to get out.
I got out. With a punched, smug expression.
Life Insurance for clients means a risk cover. For those in banks it is the very words that send down shivers down the spine......
By the time I reached my second year of my banking career I had moved on to Branch Operations and was the branch Operations Manager in a quaint part of the city of Shillong.
I thought my troubles were over, but over the mountains and far away my destiny was waiting for me.
(They say--That man meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it!)
I fell for a client’s daughter: She was an HNI...she was a local of shillong, rich, pretty, played the guitar and well.....almost brought my otherwise perfect world to a standstill.
Here's How:
After a week on Orkut, another week on Yahoo Messenger and a month on telephone, we met. I was at work when she called. She had come to the branch to conduct a transaction ff. By the time it was over, she was tired and hungry. The ways of the HNI Babes...
We decided to meet for lunch.
She was called Elizabeth!
C's was just around 200 meters from my workplace back then. She wanted to eat at ‘Casa Piccola’. The ‘Rs. 50’ in my pocket said ‘Konark’. I had dined there the previous day and knew that the North Indian meals were Rs. 25 a plate. Blaming it on my laziness and my unwillingness to walk, I had my way.
I walked down the stairs of my office building in anticipation. There she was. An angel of a woman clad in an orange salwar-kameez. I almost stumbled and fell into those bottomless brown eyes. My heart skipped a beat. I told it sternly to take it easy.
She looked a little confused and uneasy. In an effort to cut through the awkwardness of the first meeting, I resorted to a tried and tested method. I made a joke about myself. “Is it the t-shirt,” I asked smilingly. Considering the grotesque ‘Metallica’ print on my t-shirt, I wouldn’t have been surprised had she agreed. She just kept looking at me. And as if she was shaken out of the trance, she said, “I wasn’t expecting you to be this big.” Politeness. I was pleasantly surprised. I took that as a compliment. Love was on its way. That silly little bastard.
Lunch was a quiet and tense affair. Love took a backseat as my love life see-sawed between ‘inclusive of taxes’ and ‘exclusive of taxes’. The bill turned out to be an empathizing romantic. I sighed in satisfaction and proudly offered to pay the bill. Her smile read ‘gentleman’.
As we stepped out, so did my want to meet her again. “Your treat next time,” I mumbled nervously. She looked up, smiled that angelic smile and said, “Sure. But here only.” And I fell hopelessly in love.
And love brought my world to a standstill, all through 2006 through 2007 and through the financial bloodbath called 2008 I was in the hills of shillong, happy, satiated, holding hands, walking the serpentine mountain path, all along feeling her faint perfume and body as our fingers brushed against each other. We laughed, we held hands, we sang, I almost learnt the guitar and we smoked weed. Idyllic.
Paradise.
And then one fine day, just like that 2 news rocked my world:
My transfer back to Kolkata as Branch Manager, reporting in to the same branch manager (Sohini Desai- she now was a cluster manager and was still winning trips to exotic locations in the world. This time it would be Sweden.
Elizabeth was moving to Singapore, she had got a job with Standard Chartered Bank as Wealth Manager.
No more of Shillong.
No more of holding hands.
No playing guitar on the serpentine roads.
No tripping down lanes of cobbled stones. No weed.
Only Insurance.
Only Banking. And six years went by.
And now once again the papers say: The Markets are too low to sell and too early to buy.
Guess I have again lost out....to love, to banking to ....the markets.
First JOB 