Friday, October 15, 2010

Phases/ Faces of life!

Often heard people say, childhood / schooling is the best Phase of their life…..
Often heard people say, ‘I Hate working, school and college life was much better’.
Well I was just giving it a thought, since I too am experiencing the same,
I was trying to figure out what could possibly be the reason for this!

Its so much more better in school because we have all the liberty to do what ever we want. We are free to take an off without giving a reason, play around, not do the homework, keep playing all day with the reason of co- curricular activities.
One takes that risk because at the end of the day there’s not much to lose!
At the most your teacher would scold you, punish you, ask you to kneel down in front of the class. And if you’re the sportive kind, you would kneel down with a smile and wink at the first benchers, with an expression saying, ‘look I am the cool one being punished’.
On the other hand if you are the serious kind then you would kneel down with a frown and your expression would be ‘Damn! This is embarrassing’.
But at the end of the day, you have your set of friends in school who are by your side to cheer u up! And you can still be yourself, you are free to express yourself, cry, shout, show excitement, jump when you win a competition, give a hi five to your best friend for every small achievement of yours. This is the phase where we can be ourselves and be at our natural best.
College is the next phase, this is when one gets the feeling that he/she is a grown up and suddenly there is a gush in the air that gives you the feeling that you are now Independent and you have all the freedom in the world. But don’t you forget this is when you get the biggest one liner which haunts you all your life. ‘This is the turning point of your life’, this is when you feel like the whole worlds responsibilities have fallen on your shoulders! And yes to some extent you start believing in it and start taking everything seriously. This is when all your focus is on your career. You are loaded with assignments; you hardly have the time for any co-curricular activities. And even if you do manage to get some time off for your interests, you later complain that you 24 hrs in a day are not enough to complete all the work assigned. But then even here you still have the liberty of not doing your assignment or delaying it by a week or two, because you know that all you will be losing is a few marks in your assessment. So as the years pass by as you are closer to your graduation, assignments take a back seat and all the pending get togethers, parties become your priority; as you realize ‘ these are the last few days of college, we will never get these days back’. Worst case scenario, you will be suspended for all the pending assignments and other undisciplined behavior! Even then that’s not all that bad, cause you will be back in college in a few weeks!( believe me this is something you will be proud of for life) This is the phase when you can still manage to be yourself with all your friends around. Because you know that all of you will stay united and stand by each other.
And then comes the phase which you would be waiting for all through out your school and college life. The job profile that you always wanted to be in; a position that you always looked up to and dreamt about. You feel elated on the first day of your job! You say to yourself ‘Yes! This is what I always wanted to do’ but as the days go by, a few months and the 9-10 hrs of work feel longer than the 36 hrs of work you used to put in during your college days. Suddenly those assignments feel like a blessing! You would’nt mind doing the whole classes assignments, but you would just hate to even look at a single mail in your mailbox.
And as this blog becomes longer, draggy, and boring; as the smile on your face is fading off as you read on, the smile on your face would completely fade off in your office.
Rather you are expected to keep a straight face all day long no matter what. Flash a fake smile every time you see any of your colleagues and don’t you forget about the colgate smile you need to give your boss every morning no matter how much you dislike/hate him. And then slowly you start forgetting what you ever wanted in your life, because suddenly everything around you is so fake, you can barely differentiate between the genuine and the fake ones! And hey you need to also organize/schedule the number of days you can fall sick. An extra leave and your pocket gets lighter which is now inversely proportional to the anxiety and tension that you go through. Wondering about the punishment if you go wrong? No suspension this time. You get a big fat mail from your boss marked to every person in your team, the mail would further unfold with the most diplomatic words, ripping you off left right and center. Now is when you miss all your friends, this is no more like college where you stand in a group in front of your prof. and give them lame excuses, which he will later be forced to believe because you leave them with no other option. But it doesn’t work the same way here. The next time around you manage to go wrong, you will find a nice sealed envelope on your desk from your company, showing you the way out!
Yes after all those fake faces you made, after all those fake compliments you gave to your colleagues. This is how you will be welcomed in the ‘Corporate world’.
Eventually this Phase is where you need to learn the art of being able to frame the right ‘Face’ in the right situation.

Funny? Analytic!!
Which ever from the above.

That is Just Me!!!