Where the fuck am I?

I know, it’s been a while. I have written nothing the entire March, not been too active on social media either. It’s not that I have nothing to write about, it’s just that for the first time in my life, I’m working.

But before I tell you where I am, let me tell you where I’ve been.

My first job was for a BPO in Chandigarh called Excel Callnet, I was there for some 2 months between engineering semesters. My work involved making upwards of 400 calls a day to sad fuckers in the UK, trying to sell them ADT alarm systems. I left almost immediately after my training was over. I made 624 rupees.

My second job was for Wipro BPO, Delhi. Those were the best and the worst 6 months of my life. My work there could only be described as organized molestation, both physical and mental. My salary used be around 6000 bucks. But as torturous and life-sucking that time may have been, I made the craziest friends there and did the stupidest shit imaginable. I won’t mind living that life one more time.

My third job was for Patni Computer Systems, which then became iGATE-Patni, which then became iGATE Global Solutions, which then became IGATE Computer Systems, after which I stopped giving a shit. I spent 4 years there, 6 months of which were spent at Chennai for training. I used to work second shift, which was supposed to start at 2 PM, but I rarely ever got to office before 4. The first order of business used to be lunch, followed by replying to comments on RiderZone and chatting with friends. Next in line came gym, which was generally followed by about an hour of table tennis. Then it was time to head back to my desk and write the article for the day. By the time I was finished with that, I went out for dinner. A nice meal, a few phone calls, and a long walk around the campus later, it was time to head back home. All of this was interspaced with random tea breaks, impromptu discussion sessions, and sometimes long drives to nowhere.

I was part of a brilliant team and had an impossibly nice manager. 1 week leaves were easy, 2 week leaves were common, 3 week leaves happened too. I did Ladakh, Bhutan, Himachal, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka, whole of Maharashtra and then some, without a single spot of bother.

I basically got paid 5 lacs a year to do whatever the hell I wanted.

Why the fuck did I leave this dream job then? I don’t know. For a “normal” person, I think this would’ve been a more-than-fair compromise. You show up in office, you reply to a few emails, you vomit some technical diarrhea on some poor son of a bitch who has no fucking clue what you are talking about, and on the last day of the month you get a message saying some 35,000 bucks have magically made into your bank account. You have to be kinda stupid to let go of such an opportunity, especially considering the soul-raping jobs some other IT folk have, even more so considering I definitely would’ve made it abroad if I had stayed a few months more.

If there’s one thing I have plenty of, it’s stupidity.

The fact is I just couldn’t do it anymore, it was easy to the point of being disturbingly boring. On top of that, it was all pointless, hollow, without meaning. Why should I give a fuck if some fat slob in Atlanta can’t make his insurance payment? What does it matter to me if some server in Florida has no memory left? Why should I care if Bank of America burned to the ground and took Wells Fargo with it?

But the deciding factor in my struggle against myself was definitely the Bhutan trip. After I saw an entire country where people didn’t give a rat’s ass about money or fame or success or achievement or promotion or meetings or appraisals or hike or leaves or salary or politics or any other thing that defines the life of an IT guy, I knew that it was possible.

In a time where people consider it an achievement to know since school what they’ll be doing at 40, I am proud of myself for having no fucking idea. I lost interest in studying after 10th class, did B.Tech in Electronics simply because my sister was doing the same and I could borrow her books rather than buy my own, then joined an IT company only because I wanted to see India, and here we are now. I don’t use a lot of my brain, nor do I ever feel the need to. Life isn’t complicated. You do shit, you have fun, and then you die.

Which brings us back to the topic, what the fuck am I doing now?

I left IGATE on 18th Feb 2015. 19th Feb 2015 I was in Goa. 22nd Feb 2015 I was in Bangalore. 8th March 2015 I was in Hyderabad, and that’s where I am right now. I have a new job, a new house, and a new life, and I’m trying my best to enjoy all 3 of them.

I have joined ViaTerra.

I don’t really know how this happened. When I resigned from IGATE and wrote that post asking people for ideas, I got a call from Suki, the dude behind ViaTerra who nobody knows about. I had met him before during my monsoon ride to Hyderabad, and had a few online and phone conversations with him. He said I could join them if I wanted to have some fun, so I said OK, I like fun. There was only one condition though, that I had to ride Suki’s Bullet every single day.

Damn, that was a hard choice to make.

I have never been the guy with a plan, and I have no idea how this is going to work out. I don’t know how I’ll keep writing on RiderZone now that it’s NOT the most important thing for me. I had a few options to choose from, I could’ve dedicated myself to this website and tried to make it into something more meaningful than just my personal rant factory, or I could’ve become a traveling hobo junkie and given up on this world, but this is what I’m doing and this is what I’m enjoying and we’ll see how it goes.

My designation here is Senior Manager, although I have requested them to make it CFO (Chief Fuckery Officer). Something tells me that request will not be fulfilled, but it’s alright, you can’t have everything. My work here involves marketing, product development, product testing, website development, taking nice photos, making nice videos, and telling weirdly sad jokes at the most inappropriate times. Life is good.

I’ll still try and write something everyday, still try and piss everybody off, still try and say the things that we all say to ourselves but never to others, but don’t hold your breath.