The clock is ticking away, the pressure is mounting, your head is splitting into smithereens, but hell, you can’t do anything about it! Because what figures prominently in your life is work, more than what you can pitchfork on your priority heap. And that’s when the flame of love and peace flickers out from your life.

 

The movie, “Devil Wears the Prada” talks about the same work obsession shared by a slew of svelte women working for a fashion magazine. This movie has Andy (Anne Hathaway) executing the insane orders of her boss (Meryl Steep) in a bid to shin her way up in a journalist career. She works round the clock, dons stilettos, goes for a makeover, and kowtows to her boss like the other assistants. She bawls her heart out on realizing that her boss doesn’t even applaud any efforts and instead saddles her on with zanier demands. Andy’s friends want her to quit the job, but she finds it difficult to give up her career aspirations, when the door to instant fame is just a few paces away. However, it doesn’t take long for her to realize that giving up on the job that “million girls would love to take up” is the only way of getting a whiff of happiness back in her life.

 

But that was a picture-perfect ending! Come to think of it, how many people in real would actually think of “quitting and getting a life” as an option, in this morbidly cut-throat competitive world? I know, had I put up with the ego and demands of my erstwhile boss (editor of a film magazine), I would have been rubbing shoulders with the who’s who in the film industry. I could not survive because I wanted to break free. And free I was, as I jumped on to the IT bandwagon and revved up my chance of kick starting an alternative career. But then, history has an awfully vicious habit of repeating itself.  I was in the midst of all the wonderful things again like swelling work, foul-mouthed bosses, and thankless errands! So, forced I was to resort to chopping and changing jobs every single year of my life. But did things change for the better? Hell no! Imagine my frustration when after 5-6 years of building a life around the quicksand called “WORK”, my BOSS tells me that I need an appropriate training on the job! Worse comes to the worse. After having burnt the mid-night oil, tossing and turning in the sleep only to have nightmares of not meeting the deadlines, I get something really sweet as my REWARD. A mail from the BOSS saying that the Project has won some award, when I am not even there in the list of team members who contributed to the project’s success! OK, OK, I know, time to break free again!

 

But then, I know, certain things will never change. For instance, if you are the hard-working type, you will never get your due. If you are smart enough, you might just win your boss’s approval, and then you may have to wait a couple of years to get your boss chinwag about your promotion, and if that doesn’t happen, then twiddle your fingers of course. For all you know, you might get real lucky! So there is no escaping from WORK and the crazy odds and ends that come along with it. As I try doing the balancing act between work and work of course, I mutter the famous lines spouted by Meryl Steep in the movie “Oh don’t be silly, everyone wants this. Everyone wants to be us.”