Appu is in Kashipur for a short visit. She has spent many childhood years there and therefore shares a strong bond with her grandparents. I left office early last evening (which is a hurculean task in itself) to be able to drop her to the station. I am hoping she will get a break from me and GC (GC has truly taken on a humungous space of its own in our lives).
We have HR, Accounts, Admin and a Pantry (Can you believe it? I certainly cannot). There is also a hardware guy available throughout the day for maintenance issues (this is most definitely a luxury for us). We were quite used to calling up the hardware guys umpteen times in a day for the repair of one system. We were also quite used to losing all our unsaved work in case of electricity failure as the UPS was not functional. All of that is history now and we are counting each of these facilities as a luxury.
Things vs relationships. The give and take of ‘things’ in a relationship has always been a medium of expressing love,care and concern. However, increasingly ‘things’ are the only ‘thing’ sustaining a relationship and that is when it starts crumbling. The foundation of a relationship, life or career needs to be based on mutual trust, respect and honesty. Whenever that is compromised and compensated for ‘by giving money, gifts or things’, the foundation is lost and sooner or later there is death. My sister had given an artificial necklace to me for wearing in a family function (to look wealthy for the world, as I have no jewellery anymore). Of course I never attended the function and even if I had, I would not have worn it. There is too much ‘realness’ in my life to do fake things. However, she wanted it back and a lot of storied were created to get the message across to me. It was amusing as I had no use for it anyway. The long and short of it is that it has gone back to her and it has just demonstrated to me that ‘smallness of mind’ is a greater poverty than the lack of larger things in one’s life. I am glad that it has gone back to its owner. I am also glad that I have no jewellery. I hope my self esteem does not need outside accessories for survival.
There is pain. And there is sadness. My family has always been that way. The smallness of mind leads to smallness of actions and I have always dis-respected this level of poverty more than the actual poverty. But attitudes cannot be changed. They have already discarded me. Very strange. I never got the chance to do the same, although on an emotional plane, I think I am trying to detach.
No project so far. Ok. No need to panic. One day at a time. One step at a time. The online shop is gaining momentum. We have Adam and Paul working on it from UK (They are also hosting our site and they are the also the ones who designed our logo). I would like to thank both of them for a great job done. We are hoping to get the same classy touch in the online shop. Ankit,Bhagat,Narendra,Shikha and Dimpi are working on the maps and Rajesh is the cartographer. So hopefully, we will have a link on our home page very soon (fingers crossed).
The second hand window AC which was running in the house has been now installed in Ashok’s cabin as he wanted solitude and peace for software development. He sits alone in that cabin without even a phone connection. Very inspiring. He hopes to have the first module of the software ready by August. InshaAllah.
The current team is finally beginning to understand the vision of the company. They are also understanding the meaninglessness of the word ‘package’. The term ‘package’ in a salary implies the ‘stagnation’ , the ‘ deadness’ that will happen in a job and the ‘ amount of money’ that a company is willing to pay as compensation for that ‘ dying ‘. So we say here at GC that we are not offering any ‘ package deal’ as we do not want anyone to die. We offer a ‘ way to live’, not a ‘ package to die gradually’.
Staying away from the package deals.
In life and work.
