A beautiful day starts with the alarm beeping on the phone. More sleep would have been wonderful but the DSA realizes that the morning huddle is at 9: 30 am. He better make a move or manager’s ire could spoil his rest of the day. He rubs his eyes to find that the rest of the house is still nourishing cute sleep. Oh God! It’s LATE AGAIN. After a quick ablution the DSA looks for his neatly ironed clothes (mostly bright white shirt & black trousers). The Satya Paul blue tie reinforces his belief that he is still a DSA. “FUCK! THIS IS NOT WHY I DID MY MBA”.
The Street is jostled with people from different walks of “LIFE” running across to catch a bus or train which is again crowded with unfamiliar faces. The DSA makes every attempt not to rub shoulders with passer-by which will undo the iron on his shirt. But the effort is futile. He reaches the station to find out that the train is jam-packed to the extent that even Osama will feel pity for the commuters. You realize that you have just unlocked the highest level of “Khatron ke Khiladi” and have to conduct the next stunt of boarding the train. But more than yourself you put your trust on the mob awaiting the arrival of the train. The simple yet dangerous trick of standing in the front of the platform and leave your fate on the crowd to thrust you inside. The train appears to be arriving. You can spot people hanging out of the door and wishing you were a superman. Before you wake up to the reality, in a flash you are already inside. A sense of rejoice but no time to celebrate .You are happy to find out that all your limbs are still intact. Your body is glued against another, balls resting on someone’s ass & your ass kissing someone else’s. GOSH! HOW PATHETIC. The rest of the journey is covered with body odor & indistinct smell of things unfamiliar to you.
You reach the destination station and the near impossible task to find a cab starts haunting you. All cabs are engaged and those not, zoomed by as if you never existed. After some 100th cabs have shown no interest in offering you a seat in their vehicle, which now appears to be a luxury. You have made your mind to walk down the packed lane. From nowhere a cab appears and with no luck you casually wave at it. Your belief in God is reinforced in the form of the cab driver who agrees to taxi you. Without a second thought you are seated. Man, you are just late by half an hour and little anxious what if the manager questions you. The tea stall is always surrounded by common tired colleagues who pass a smile to comfort you that things aren’t as bad as expected. You start hurling curses when he informs that there is no morning huddle today or the manager has not yet arrived. You could have sneaked another half an hour sleep. Poor DSA!
The moment you set foot inside office a peculiar smell follows you everywhere. You are little annoyed with the admin for their inaction. Bosses arrive one after another and your cheerfulness departs simultaneously. You mentally prepare yourself for the common questions which can be posed like how many apps today? The road map to achieve your month’s target? Why no PL file logged in for the month? Any CG lead? So on and so forth.
Its 11 am and you are required to hit the field. You check your diary to look for any possible leads and naturally you have none. You inquire your colleague about their appointment for the day and feel envy for the ones who have some CG leads or Ultima pick-up. You feel miserable and to convince yourself you start believing that these “morons” are using their PERSONAL CONTACTS. The rest appears to be like a lost & found sibling. You mock at how you have nothing to do today and then come back for the evening huddle and make up stories which acts like contraceptives (prevent you from being raped by your manager & higher-ups.).
A secret understanding with people who are equally fucked, binds you together. And you plan to loiter around till evening and discuss the course of action to get out of the situation. With no place to go some choose CCD & some goes for a movie show. You should choose a place which is away from the banking world and the probability to bump into a colleague is least. The rest of the day are fun-filled sharing jokes about Citi, pulling one-another’s leg, bitching about another colleague who isn’t present, sharing secrets to do business, cursing your fate, interviews in the pipeline, your past relationship, exaggerating about things you did, life during college days, horrible experience in the recent desk where you have been deployed and “waigaira waigaira” And in between the message from S&D reminds you the “Vijay mantra of the day” and product information which you least bother about anymore. You take no time to press delete, most of the time even without reading it.
Day passes by effortlessly when the thought of going back to the haunted office strikes. Time to “manufacture” your “Contraceptive”. Like a virtuoso FBI agent you plan on how one by one we will enter office with a gloomy & enervated face to benefit little pity from your manager.
Half the day done, the second half rather the tough half begins. Even Gandhiji would have renounced Satyagrah if he was asked to wait for no reason for hours before the evening huddle starts. (Well why do you call it evening huddle? Midnight huddle would be more appropriate). In between you catch time to connect with non-citi friends and narrate the ugliness & frustration building up. A real test of patience & control needs to be exhibited to go through this difficult hour. You are uneasy & frustrated after an hours' wait. A run to the smoke shop or wada paw just managed to get you going till 9 pm.
The battle begins when the manager asks you the number for the day and you have nothing but to say that you met the following people and they called you sometimes later for the documents. In between your MIS SPOC reminds the manager that you haven’t messaged the days’ number to be included in the MIS. (Bloody, why didn’t he remind when you were sitting idle?) After a detail Ass-giving session the manager asks the deployment plan for the next day, which obviously you don’t have. He over-loads you with tips & tricks on how to achieve your target. All of a sudden everything seemed to be logical & easy. But the question is that whether it’s humanly possible to do what is expected to be done in 12 hours’ time. The solution is that your boss is always “RIGHT”. And you always have the right not to practice what is “RIGHT”.
Finally, it’s the time to head home. Your excitement is vanished the moment you step out, no transport to the station available. After another half an hour of coaxing & nudging folks managed a cab. En route to station you begin cribbing about the evening huddle & the way managers conduct themselves. The station welcomes you with another dreaded mob waiting to get in a machine which is already over-utilized. The journey is spent preparing the balance sheet of life, weighing the liabilities against the assets. The conclusion is how your college fucked you up on placement. On reaching home you feel even pathetic on seeing your roommate who was sleeping in the morning when you left is already home after work & poking strangers in Facebook. You just have sufficient time to relish dinner & prepare your bed. You have stopped dreaming altogether and your friends complain about your snoring habits after you have joined Citi.
The life of a DSA revolves around the above note with little variation based on color, sex, size & “PERSONAL CONTACTS”.
With Love
Ex-DSA
