Just like religion, a ‘corporate job’ has usurped a high moral status. It is supposedly our moral duty to offer obeisance to God and the boss. We blindly follow what others do, and cannot apply our minds to appreciate diversity in terms of gender, culture and other aspects. We are unable to decipher the direction of our personal moral compass when confronted with ethical dilemmas at work. We simply reproduce the mannerisms of others, or merely and thoughtlessly do whatever gets us to our goal quicker, so that we can all fit into one homogeneous blotch of nothingness.
It is this highest level of our emotions that has to be redeemed from the challenges of corporate life.References
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Part IVCHAOS
12Money
I first met Chirag at the crowded rooftop bar of a friend’s restaurant in Delhi. Towering over everyone else with his tall, slim, muscular frame, he had approached me almost immediately after stepping on to the terrace. He was dressed in a pair of cream-coloured faded jeans paired with a plain mauve cotton shirt, and his brown hair was lightly brushed back over his broad forehead. He seemed to be in his late twenties, I estimated quickly, as he came closer. Wearing a boyish smile—which I later learnt was a permanent feature of his face—he effortlessly struck up a friendly conversation with me. He had a polite, cool-headed, frank demeanour when he spoke, completely unlike the Delhi boys I had met thus far. So it was no surprise when he told me he was only visiting Delhi for a few days—here for the second time in his life, in fact—to check out a prospective investment in the very restaurant where we stood.
I told him I was pleased to make his acquaintance, and then wandered off into the crowd with my girlfriends.
Two days later, it was by providence that we met again—Chirag came by unannounced to a party I had been invited to. We had not planned to meet there. The loud music made it the worst place for a conversation, keeping us on our feet and dancing instead.
And so it was only the day after when he took me out to dinner that we really talked.
From across an oversized platter of sushi and dumplings, Chirag patiently explained to me that forty years ago his father, barely seventeen years of age then, had jumped on a ship that had taken him from India to the shores of opportunity in Dubai. Illiterate and without a coin in his pocket, his father had earned his living initially on a shop floor selling Indian saris in Dubai. Later he joined an electrical and waterworks company and fixed electrical appliances and pipes in people’s houses. Chirag’s mother, a graduate from Bombay University, belonged to the Sindhi community like his father, but until they married in Dubai, they did not know each other. She was sent to him from India, a marriage arranged by Chirag’s grandparents. She bore him a son and a daughter in Dubai.
When Chirag turned fourteen, his father packed him off to faraway New Zealand, accompanied by his mother and infant sister. That country seemed to offer better education and living conditions than impoverished India and the cultural ‘bling’ of the UAE at the time. Meanwhile, his father stayed on in Dubai. The oil economy was taking off, and the desert was being transformed into a peninsula of multi-storey modern homes, offices, shopping malls and entertainment centres, flanked by the sea on both sides.
His father felt that the opportunities for profit in Dubai were unparalleled anywhere else in the world. He established a small company,
