Chapter 2

Chapter 2 -

February 13^th 2009- Although 13 is considered an unlucky number by almost all of us; it was a really lucky number for all the people in the village of Bosenagar. It was the first time someone from the village was stepping foot outside the village. Young, twenty four year old *KRVSB* was travelling to Bangalore to embark on a journey which will remain in our minds for a long long time.

The first paragraph of this story itself left me confused. I had never heard of any place called Bosenagar. And I reread the last line a few times to make sure I got the name right. KRVSB??? What sort of a name is that?

I looked at the bottom of the word document and found what KRVSB meant.

KRVSB – Krishna Rama Vishnu Shiva Bramha. The boy’s parents didn’t want to displease any God, so they decided to name their son with all the God’s that they could remember.

So that left me with the Bosenagar. I tried Googling for the name but with no luck. But I knew a friend who was very good with his trivia, so I called him up. He advised me to check out some site called Indiatownsandvillages.com which had a huge database of even the smallest villages of our country. So I went to the site and searched for Bosenagar.

Bosenagar – This small village near Vishakapatnam is more familiarly known as Boskar. Called Bosenagar since Subhash Chandra Bose had once been near the vicinity of the village (I later found that he passed about 15km away from the village). Since this was the closest that someone had passed by the village, their 250 inhabitants decided to call it as Bosenagar. The village currently has a population of 5 lakhs or half a million (Now that’s called progress!!!). Cricket is an extremely popular sport and Sachin Tendulkar has his own temple here. After Tendulkar’s brilliant performances against Australia in 1998, the villagers wanted to have a part of Sachin’s name in the village without wiping out Subhash Chandra Bose altogether. The village was then renamed as ‘Boskar’ although the elder inhabitants (who have no cricketing interests) still prefer to call it as Bosenagar.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading; this is only possible in India. After another sip of coffee I tried looking for the village in Google Maps, but even with maximum zoom, couldn’t find the slightest trace of any Bosenagar or Boskar (They should get a Oscar for this Boskar name; they even rhyme each other!!!) . Anyway I went back to the word document and continued reading.

10 am – There was a huge crowd at the village square, near the bus stand. All of them had come to see of KRVSB (let’s call him Krishna from here on). The bus to take him to Vishakapatnam was due to arrive at 11. Krishna was really excited as he started to get ready; he had never even visited the neighbouring village, let alone travelling as far as Bangalore alone.

“Krishna, have your food now before you leave”, his mother Sitalakshmi called.

“Don’t call him just Krishna, his granddad shouted. That would be an injustice to all the other Gods. Call him by his full name, Krishna Rama Vishnu Shiva Brahma.”

It was already 10:50 when Krishna finished his lunch. Looks like his mother decided to feed him for the next one month since her son would be away. Rice with dal, chapattis, and seven different preparations of curry, meat, chicken, eggs, curd, sweets and kheer all served between moanings from Krishna that he couldn’t have any more.

“Have more Beta; his mom persisted after triple helpings of rice and dal. God knows what sort of food you will have to eat when you are away.”

11 am - The small bus had already arrived at the village; but Krishna had to still make it through the crowd of well-wishers who had come.

“Be careful boy, make our village proud”, the village chief said.

“I’m not waiting any longer, its already getting late”, said the bus driver after quarter of an hour.

“Wait Sahib, he’s coming.” one of the villagers pleaded.

“Try to get an autograph of Sachin, Krishna”, one of the boys yelled among the chaos.

“You’ve been saying that for the past five minutes.” the driver said holding his head and he started his engine.

As the driver started his bus and pushing the accelerator, the bus didn’t even move an inch. He pressed harder as the engine of the bus roared with power, but with no forward movement.

“This bus isn’t going anywhere till Krishna comes”, the village chief commanded.

The bus driver looked back puzzled to find the village pahalwan grabbling hold of the bus. He just had to wait now. Finally Krishna got in and the bus proceeded towards Vishakapatnam uneventfully.

Wondering what how this story would next unfold, I checked the time in my computer. 1 pm, time for lunch with my friends.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I hate Monday mornings. Going to work again after a weekend that quickly passed by, I got up yawning at 9am in the morning. Office was supposed to start from 8:30, but who cares!!! As long as I reach office by 10 before my manager comes, it would be fine. Slowly I brushed my teeth, took a bath and changed to those formal clothes I hated wearing and headed out to office at around 9:50. I got a call from my manager just as I was locking my front door.

Where are you, Siddharth?

“Checking my mails, Boss. I came to office an hour back.”, the words came out of my mouth automatically, since it was something I said every Monday morning.

Any important mails from the client? , came the next familiar question

“Not so far. I still need to check all the mails though” , I blurted. Again it was a response that needed no thinking. Perhaps even my manager knew that I was lying, but he played along.

“Ok then Siddharth. I won’t be coming to office today. However I will be working from home and checking my mails. Do keep me updated on the status. I will be coming to office tomorrow”, my Boss said in a commanding fashion.

Idiot, I swore after cutting the phone. He just doesn’t want to come to work on Monday like me, but he can still not take a vacation by working from home. As if he even worked at home, he would check his mails twice in the day and enjoy the rest of the time. If only this work from home facility could be given for us ordinary employees as well.

Knowing that my boss wouldn’t be coming to work, I went directly to the cafeteria to have my breakfast. I sat down with a sandwich to a seat close to the TV. Slowly I paced back to my workstation at around 11, after breaking the Guinness Book of World Records for the slowest time to finish a sandwich.

I sat down at my seat and opened my workstation to check my emails. 11 new emails. Any person with no IT experience might be thinking that these were a lot of important mails, which need to be attended, but that definitely wasn’t the case.

The Subject line of the first mail itself read: Child in Distress: Forward this mail to 15 people to help. Another one of those junk mails, these spam mails are reaching the official mail id’s as well these days.

I double clicked on the second mail since it was marked with High Importance. But that was a mistake, the message was some mail about Client Ethics and how we should present ourselves to the Client when in a Status call. Normally I would be keeping this mail open for around ten minutes and scroll through every few seconds, just to show my manager (who kept glancing at our workstations from his seat every now and then) that I was interested in learning such ethics and appropriate Client behaviour. But today was my lucky day, no manager so an instant Shift + Del beckoned.

The same pattern followed for the next six mails which included Subject lines like – “Fill Your Time Sheet by tomorrow” (Who needs this mail now? They would send another reminder tomorrow and I can fill it then. I can fill it tomorrow, when my manager is at office to eat up some more time.) , Mail from the CEO – Financial Results for the past quarter (Yeah right, like I am interested in how the company has fared financially in the past quarter!! As long as I am getting my paid my monthly salary with timely promotions, I don’t care about the company’s financial gains/losses), and some other similar mails.

I scrolled down to check the last three mails. Two of the mails were from my manager, the first one telling me to fill some spreadsheet which needs to sent to the onshore team by 5 pm, and the second a mail to the team telling each member to fill a sheet with the details of what work they did hour by hour in the entire day and send back to him at the before leaving for the day. I would need to make something up and fill that second sheet.

Finally I attended to the only remaining mail which read – “An Incredible but True Story – Part 1”. I checked the mail id of the sender and it came from some Anup.Tiwary@BestMobCompany.com. Must be some junk mail, so I was about to delete the mail, but decided to check the content of the mail anyway. It was only addressed to me, which is uncommon in forwarded mails. It read,

Hi Siddharth,

I am about to tell you a true story which happened. This is actually currently going on at our company and I thought that I should share it with someone. I have seen some of your writings in the internet and I think you might be able to share this story with the world and make a name for yourself. Who knows, it might even help you in a big way. Anyway, I hope you will find this story interesting. Since the story has just started at our place, I can only send it in parts, as the story unfolds. This is the first part of the story which began around a week back. I will only send you the next part of the story if you find this part interesting and want to hear the rest of it. Send me a reply if you are interested, and if I don’t hear from you anytime soon I will not be disturbing you any longer.

Thanks,

Anup Tiwary,

Software Engineer,

Best Mob Company,

Contact: (+91) 99342 34653

Attached with this mail was the word document, which presumably contained this so called story that this Anup Tiwary is bragging about. Although I was convinced that this was some silly story with some ending probably requiring me to forward this story to x number of people, I decided to not to delete this mail, it would be a good time pass for the day especially with no manager to disturb you.

It was 11:30 am and I decided to head out to the nearby Break Out area to bring back a cup of coffee to sip through when reading this so called Incredible Story.