The Slow Learner

It requires a lot of courage and caution to write about your workplace affairs and fellows. If your colleagues have no interest in such useless activities like blogging, writing or reading, there is no harm in penning about them. But if the team members with whom you have to work in the current period have interest in reading, writing and following your blog, writing about them will be dangerous.

But, what a blogger will do, if he/she is running out of subjects to jot down? Naturally, you would look for plots in your own immediate surroundings. But, you would find yourself trapped in a quandary seeing your workplace as your immediate surroundings. Presently, I am in such a situation, and I discovered a method to untie this trap. The trick is to write about myself in the backdrop of my workplace, allowing my colleagues move freely in the background. 

During the break, when we were having tea at the canteen, the creative guy (you met him in ‘Time Waits for No Man’) was asked about his love affair, which germinated in school days and reinforced in recent times through marriage. With full attention, our team listened what the creative guy said.  

Suddenly, ‘the full-moon girl’, (a brilliant one in our team), mentioned the presently getting-popular living-together system (please note that I am talking in the purview of the extremely conservative Indian society). “Nowadays, it’s becoming a common life style,” she lamented. 

‘The practicing clairvoyant’, another girl in our team (well, I hope, I could tell you the reason why she is called so, in any of my upcoming posts), simply laughed. From her smile, I could not completely deduct whether she approves such extra-modern life styles or not. 

Another girl, who belongs to another team (let’s call her the ‘talkative techie’), kept on talking without even inserting a single pause, citing such new-gen life style examples from her acquaintances. Suddenly, the creative guy said, 

“My elder brother’s closest friend lived with a girl for nearly six years and they got married only very recently”

“Is that so?,” the girls asked harmoniously.

The creative guy nodded. 

I thought, “hmm...creative guy’s brother’s friend lived with a girl in the same room for six years without marriage and even without the knowledge of parents!”

The full-moon girl said, “this is currently shown in many of the popular movies, and..hey..any of you saw the movie 127 hours? Danny Boyle’s?

I thought, “and they got married in quite recent times only, God, where does my traditional India head to?”

“Danny Boyle’s Slum Dog Millionaire was such a waste,” the talkative techie commented.

According to the practicing clairvoyant, she liked the Twilight series. 

“Twilight is about some horror things, right?” the Workaholic, another team mate, who was sipping a tea sitting silently, asked suddenly.

I thought, “and hmm...the creative guy never told me about such a thing. Is he telling the truth?”

Thinking so, I soon turned my face and asked the creative guy in astonishment,

“Really, your brother’s friend was living together?

Everyone surprised. 

“Err...what did you say?” the talkative techie questioned me. She asked the creative guy, “does this boy have the habit of talking to himself?”

The practicing clairvoyant said smiling mysteriously, “he used to be like this, follows very slowly what others speak.”

“Buddy, we passed that subject hours before, are you hatching upon the same idea still?” mockingly the creative guy said.

I laughed it off. The full-moon girl tried to recollect some other incidents in which I acted similarly, “last day also he did something same, hmmm...what was it?”

“The novel False Memory has the same theme, memory,” saying so, the Workaholic stood up suddenly and left the table. He is such a work fanatic, who would quit a conversation even by pausing at a syllable in the middle of a word of his opinions. 

I began to recollect the incident, which the full-moon girl cited. That was also during a tea-break time some two days before. We spoke about Malayalam film directors. There are two directors with the same name Lal. One is Lal Jose and the other one is Lal Paul (or simply Lal). The full-moon girl had mistaken the same name Lal for the two directors. When the creative guy requested my mediation, I also shared my knowledge regarding the names of the two directors. Even after everyone quitted the subject, I was thinking about that. On reaching back to the front of computers, I had asked the full-moon-girl jokingly, while she was seriously involved in some jobs,

“Any one of your classmates who studied with you in that film institute is alive still?”

I remembered the incident clearly. Well, that was the flash back.

Waking up from my thoughts suddenly, I announced to the gang who were about to leave the canteen after some heated discussion.

“Yeah, I remember, it was the curious case of film directors Lal Jose and Lal Paul,”

The gang, who were discussing some other things, stood up harmoniously and saluted me.