White Collar Rascals - A Long Sigh.......Shrikant Vasudeo
A Page from My Life Diary.....................Shrikant..SomanWe all know rascals. This word itself conjures up our own ‘prototype’ of the person whom we call rascal. I am not here going to define this word. It is live in your mental vision. Everybody’s Rascal is not the same. My Rascal is different from your Rascal. It is a combined morphogenic image of the various ‘rascality’ we have encountered in our life.
During my more than 3 decades of work experience in India and abroad and considerable amount of exposure to social service, I have got an exotic collection of ‘rascals’. These persons are white collar ones. What I mean is that they are ‘gentleman’ type rascals. They dress nicely, they talk nicely, they behave nicely…. everything is so nice about them. They may even go out of their way to help you. Their rascality is to be detected as an ‘undercurrent’ of their personality. I understood the correct meaning of the word ‘gullible’ because of them. They actually demonstrated to me what gullible means. This gullibility was my proud possession. What is gullibility? It is how I acted in the hands of these White Collar Rascals. I was a demonstration of this word. I realised it long time afterwards. I had the tendency to take every person at face value. I was myself ‘straightforward’ in my approach towards everybody. However, much later I realised that it was not my ‘straightforwardness’ but my stupidity garbed under the guise of some nice words. I made a virtue of my immaturity to deal with the tough mean world outside.
This is background introduction to this note. Now let us see some practical examples.
The Great Silent Sigh
I had a boss named Maniratnam (of course I have changed his name). He had apparently learned ‘anger management’ techniques – no, not like Boman Irani type in Munnabhai MBBS. He did not laughed it out. It was different. It seemed that he had lots and lots of pent up anger against me – which he did not dared to express openly – because then he would have to take the trouble of proving his point. He knew that he was much less prepared to take on my counter offensive. He had invented a novel technique. He will call me on intercom and then there used to be long silence. I will hear a long sigh. Then he will speak in a very controlled and monotonous voice. It became obvious that he is very much upset with me and is trying to control his anger. If at all he had to express his anger, the magnitude of his anger would have been nothing short of throwing me out of the window on the 25th floor of our office. This much I could guess by his actions or lack of it. He had mastered the power of silence. He had several tricks under his sleeve. Once when there was no voice on the other end, I could easily guess that it was Mr Maniratnam. I simply asked ‘Yes, Mr Maniratnam, what is it ?’. He will reply ‘Um… … … (silence)……. (long sigh) ….. I will call you afterwards’. This will keep me guessing as to what exactly is in the mind of my boss. Whatever it is, it must be pretty serious and I must have made some big blunders. I will not receive any call from him afterwards. I was also not bothered to call him back. In case I did peeped into his cabin to know what is the matter, he will be having some very minor matter to discuss. I would then wonder as to why did he got so much angry. I had the dilemma here. If I did not ask him the reason for his anger, the real reason will forever remain a mystery to me. Or worse still, whenever I actually came to know about it, it would have taken a worse proportion. On the other hand if I directly ask him the reason, his reply usually would be ‘Who said I was angry ? Common Mr Soman… what is wrong with you… don’t be so silly’. Here is the real rascality of Maniratnam. He was a fine example of ‘eat the cake and have it too’. He will express his anger to me in no uncertain way while at the same time had all the liberty in the world to deny that he was angry at all.
Now you will ask, what did Maniratnam gain by behaving in this way. Here is the main theme – a punch line. He was in the business of keeping me on my toes all the time. He would ‘play’ on me various psychic games and keep me vulnerable at his mercy. There is more to it. I found it out one day when as soon as I kept down the receiver, I dashed straight to the cabin of Maniratnam. I saw a senior person Eric from our central office sitting in front of him. He was trying to gain several mileages out of his behaviour. Firstly, he impressed upon Eric as to what sort of ‘scrap’ material he has to deal with. Secondly, how he has mastered the art of anger management and thirdly and most importantly, he was able to convey the message that he does not have good team under him without having to take the risk of actually defining the real shortfalls of his team and to get exposed with the return fire. This was not an isolated example. He did it as a usual practice. Whenever there was a long sigh on the telephone, it turned out that he invariably had somebody or the other key person sitting in front of him! I learned much of his tricks when he played the same trick on other persons when I was sitting in front of him!
I was saved much damage to my career in the hands of Maniratnam because of my habit of always having direct dialogue with the higher boss and secondly because of my habit of not bothering much about matters which are vague, grey and ambiguous. However, it took me a long time to realise that Maniratnam was a ‘White Collar Rascal’. We can not ‘pin’ them for their rascality. We have just to grin it and bear it.
प्रस्तुतकर्ता Shrikant @ 12:54 pm
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