Salary Slip

Here comes another recessionary post from the stable of my indiscriminate wanderings. There is a two-fold reason why I choose to call this a “recessionary” post. For starters, it comes at a time when fortunes of many a worlds are being torn down and those of some other worlds being rewritten., a time that most of us will look back at with nauseous nostalgia and sigh "Those were the times". Secondly, this marks a significant departure from the normal verbosity and lack of philosophical connotations that are usually associated with my blog posts, yielding themselves into a torturous experience for many a reader. It is a recession of thoughts in that sense.

There was a moment, or rather there were moments, of truth that occurred to me today during my visit to my ever so efficient ‘sarkari’ bank. I’ve always been an advocate of the fact that everyone must have some form of ‘sarkari’ interaction in his life – either through a bank account in a nationalized bank, or a visit to pay the electricity bill, or if you are real connoisseur, a visit to the post office. Not only does it help relive the experience that an average Indian like me should go through but it also serves as an occasion to meet and interact with the real India.

As I stepped through the hallowed portals of my bank today, long queues in front of every counter greeted me. I promptly joined one of the queues that seemed to be the shortest, and began to wait for my turn with what could be termed as the exact opposite of bated breath. Right before me in the line was a young man, about my age, may be slightly older. He looked like a student, and a studious one at that, what with his thick spectacles and an overloaded backpack. He seemed to be in deep contemplation, probably worrying about the upcoming exam that he needed to prepare for, or the gift he needed to buy for his girlfriend or may be thinking about the butt kicking he was likely to face on an upcoming birthday, or so was the deduction of my tunnel vision. As the line crawled forward, I saw the guy opening his backpack and taking out a plethora of documents. I was doomed. It seemed he was going to be an unfavorable outlier when it comes to servicing time. Nevertheless, my enthusiasm was not daunted, what with all the experience my curious affairs with the red tape, in my presidential capacity at IIT Roorkee, had left me with.

Finally, it was his turn. A mention here for the ever-so-intriguing nature of Indian queues. Unlike their western counterparts, they seem not only to grow lengthwise but also breadthwise. The inherent curiosity of peeping over a fellow citizen’s service coupled with the reconciliatory element of witnessing the activity from close quarters, rather than sitting in the oblivious black holes at the rear end of the queues, have proven to be the major causes for this phenomenon. And I was not an exception to the norm. I took a position to the right of the guy, who was now seated and all his papyrus paraphernalia was now out in the open, sitting on the counter.

And there I saw the familiar McDonalds’ “M” on one of the documents. It was a salary slip. My eyeballs scanned the document in quick succession, and paused at the figure in bold: Basic Salary: Rs. 4678.

My mind wandered back to the experiences of a couple of weeks ago, when the final placements of our seniors were in progress. Having been involved in the process at close quarters, I knew the undercurrent of pessimistic sentiment that had been and has been riding our minds over the past few months. At prestigious institutions like the IITs and IIMs, we are breaking sweat over our salaries slipping from a gazillion rupees to a gazillion minus thousand rupees. We consider our careers ruined, our fates sealed and dejectedly term ourselves as the “Children of Recession”. And here was a truism, wherein an individual was making ends meet at a fraction of the moolah some of us spend on a wild evening at Purple Haze.

Maybe if we could have brakes or even a neutral gear in our lives, we could have paused to see the blacks and whites. What was more poignant – the guy’s salary slip or the slip in our salaries? Fodder for thought, maybe.