You see, I was supposed to go, but decided not to and sent her instead. 8:30 pm to 10:15 pm What if something did indeed happen to her? Will I be in some way responsible for it?
Suddenly this was not a mundane piece of breaking news for me but it was something that would determine how well I could sleep the next many nights. M was not a statistic after all, she was a real person whom I knew, spoke with, shared a Chocolate Excess at Barista with May be I will go to hell. May be I will need to go Varanasi to get rid of my sins.
At 10:15 exactly I got a call from M, sounding most cheery, Hey guess what there is major chaos in the city, bomb blasts and what not. Do you think the moron client will postpone the presentation? Pity that he was not here.
And hey the next trip to Mugalsarai had better be you I am an only child. May their souls rest in peace Beyond the social and political impact of this tragedy it brings me to a more immediate issue of, How safe we are, while at work A lot of times at work, when we are very loaded with it we do joke about, How one day we will die at work at our desk , it s a joke because you actually don t think it will ever happen. But it does happen.
Not too often. But in a job that involves so much of travel, one never knows what can happen and when. Especially coming from such women-centric work-places as I do, the risks become more.
(Not to get into any gender stereotypes argument, but it is true) M was safe today, but if something had gone wrong, whose fault would it be? The company? The terrorist outfit?
Our system which creates so much of anger to make people take up such drastic measures? Or just her Bad Karma? I really don t know A few years back when all the employees of our company went for a training conference abroad, they booked us into various flights as batch of four s.
This was after the Nagpur plane crash in which Unilever had apparently lost a whole number of employees. Post which Lever s put a cap on the number of their managers who could travel at any point on the same flight! My company dutifully adopted that.
That sure was good for employee-morale. But I don t think there are any easy answers here. Like recently I had to travel to various parts of UP including Muzaffarnagar on work.
A day before I was leaving, Aaj Tak carried a news on the Kidnapping Gangs who were rampant in this region, wherein rich sugarcane farmers were kidnapped and hidden away in the sugarcane farms! My mom who was watching the news with me, was most upset and put that into her list of, 101 Reasons why Smugbug needs another job . While I was in Muzaffarnagar I spoke to the Lucknow office guy and got into an intellectual monologue on protection of women in the region and or any of us who come there for work.
Mr Srivatsava or DS as we fondly call him said, Madamji only one solution, get a gun! You see, I was supposed to go, but decided not to and sent her instead.
News RSS