The 1990s were rocky years in my career as I was
still coming to terms with the demands of my profession with my first employer,
while also enjoying the impression that my social circle perceived about me, as
being a part of one of the top companies in India. I had already been part of two
departments in the factory over a span of about eight years.
It was a Saturday in June. A very rare summer shower
had come down just an hour back and dressed the huge lush green grass beds and
flowers with silvery droplets. My company had bagged several awards over the years
that had gone by, for gardening. It was a very beautiful sight that many a passersby
would stop and watch from the main road that ran adjacent to the company’s outer
fence. On the inside and adjacent to this green area, lay the cabins with
dedicated air conditioning. The first three cabins in that row were occupied by
the Information Systems Department (ISD). This was followed by the ones where
the deputy general managers were seated and the last being that of the general manager’s
office at the far end. Behind it lay a
huge open corridor where the reception area leading to the front door was at
one end, followed by the Planning and Sales Co-ordination Department, the Exports
Department and the Finance Department. This space had central air conditioning.
I loved this setup as both a trainee engineer and a senior manager sat in the
same space. The only difference was that the seniors had dedicated desks while
the juniors had shared spaces. There were no partitions. The extensive woodwork,
wooden shelves and panels, gave the space a regal feel.
Behind the wall of this open corridor lay a small path
to the inner road leading to the rear exit gate and beyond this path lay the
factory bays, active most of the time in a day with the hum of a conglomeration
of precision machines. My stint then was with the Sales Co-ordination and
Planning department with a seat at the far end of this open corridor just
beside where the ISD cabins were.
The office departments that operated out of this
open corridor worked half day on Saturdays. It was noon and most of the lower
cadre staff had finished compiling the reports for the week. The reporting process
was like a relay and the next in line being the senior managers. I could see a
few of the lower cadre stand around tables in their department spaces, discuss
something and then step backward each time and laugh away. At the opposite far end, a fan suspended from
a long shaft, kept squeaking, as though trying to desperately communicate that
its last days were near. Sugun, the senior manager of the accounts department, like
the other senior managers, kept shuttling between his table and the cabin of
his boss that lay on the opposite side. Shortly, the divisional general
managers would also be shuttling up and down the general manager’s office. All
the shuttling was for refining the reports in terms of accuracy and presentability.
And all this was to create impressions. Whether we like it or not, impressions
rule the world we are in and impressions create unreal bubbles which in the
long run we find difficult to sustain.
And even during this shuttling Sugun was one of the
very few senior managers who could remain calm and keep his sense of humour
intact, while processing the work in parallel. His team around his table were mostly
smiling and laughing at the statements he made while moving around. At the same
time, he was adept in commanding respect and getting work done from them. A
fine balance it was.
The noise of huge hardboard binder files being
shoved inside the wooden shelfs after use, dominated the scene. The central air
conditioning went down and I saw Sugun call up the maintenance wing and inform a
person there about it. “It was Anand, the new trainee who joined last week who
took the call. God knows what he understood. No one else is there. I think the
whole bunch is on the third bay installing the new boring machine”, he mumbled
to his folks around. This was not the age of the mobile phone or when support
tickets could be initiated on a company portal for internal issues to be fixed.
The factory stood in a space of two hundred square metres and most of the
issues and communication happened over phone calls. Internet and e-mails were
just getting established and formal communication between departments were
still through written memos while communication to outside parties was through
fax.
Through one of the windows that lay adjacent to the
path, I could see a branch of the Alstonia Scholaris tree with its yellow flowers, sway in and out in the wind. Vishal, a senior clark, who was two desks away from my
place, was slowly chewing on his next bout of paan after finishing his work for
the day. A distant annoying sound of the Pegard horizontal boring machine, taking
another deep feed came and went quickly from the machine shop bay. The workshops had shifts running on Saturdays
too and they would work until late night.
Suddenly there was a pandemonium and I could see young
girl associates, shriek while running out of the ISD. Soon their male
counterparts in full chatter came out too. The ISD folks who normally looked
like silent monks in a monastery, in full focus in front of their computers, suddenly
looked like a chatter box. I got up and went to where they stood to understand
what had happened and so did many from the open corridor. “A snake has entered ISD
through the air-conditioning vent Sir”, said one girl. “I saw it slide into the
server room”, said another. The manager of ISD, Kumar, wasn’t there and was
into a meeting in one of the cabins with his superior. “I wonder why someone is
coming into the office when it’s about closing time on Saturday”, Sugun chipped
in as his rotund figure approached with its characteristic gait. It brought a
faint smile on the flabbergasted faces. “How did the snake sneak in without an
identity card?”, he asked himself loudly. It made the ISD folks and all of us laugh 😂😂.
The best part of Sugun’s humour was that he would hardly smile while delivering
some of the best humour pieces.
“Let me call the maintenance folks. Kumar will take
time to come as he is into a review”, he said as he picked up and dialed while switching
on the speaker. “Oh, Anand. Is any one there?” he asked. “Not yet Sir. I have
told them about the air conditioning issue”, he said. “Ok. So, I called up for
something else. There is a snake inside the ISD. It has come through the air
conditioner’s vent. Please tell your team it’s urgent and send someone here to
clear it up”, he explained. “Oh. A snake? Does this normally happen Sir? Has
the air condition problem you reported earlier got solved Sir?”, he asked earnestly.
Sugun smiled and there was a pause. He took a deep breath and winked at us. “Anand.
Two things. We need one thing and we don’t need the other. The central air
conditioning, we need it back. The snake, we don’t need it. It should be out.
Please don’t confuse and exchange the requests. It can be detrimental”, he articulated
with a tinge of humour that could have been interpreted as sarcasm. “Hahaha…yes
Sir, I got it”, said Anand as he laughed away at the explanation. There was
laughter on our side too.😂 The maintenance team arrived in less than ten minutes
and got both the requirements done.
Sugun had beautifully handled an otherwise heavy
situation and made all of us laugh and feel light. This is one of the many such
situations where I saw him execute his natural strengths to fizzle out tough
situations. Sugun’s humour comes to my mind and gets me into quiet times of
laughter even after many decades. It’s been the same for my colleagues too.
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