teaboy

The vicissitudes of corporate life warrant some vital measures to stay alive and awake through a torturous day, wondering how one could kill time a little more efficiently.

That is where the cup of coffee or tea, somewhat mandatory in an Indian office to be served piping hot at your desk at least twice a day, comes in. When the American CEO visited us in 1993, he was amused how religiously coffee, tea and cookies were served at every meeting and how it seemed somewhat more substantial a ritual than the actual deliberations.


Now do you remember your teaboy? I ask with no hyphens or capitals so I avoid giving any false sense of importance to this minion. He is but a minor underling in a pecking hierarchy where your own position is not really that high unless you are able to see the rumbling clouds at the top of the corporate echelon and are already talking to some head-hunters.

If you are, like I have been most of my life, a hard-working manager attacking competition and pushing useless products to skeptical customers, you may not have had much time to notice too many things in the office. You would also not remember when the teaboy changed but would surely notice that the taste of coffee or tea changed when they introduced a new coffee machine or tea brand.

So imagine when someone starts talking about the teaboy in their office, his life as a human being, and his own imponderable issues of dealing with money or health problems. Or when someone states how their teaboy's son got admission into engineering, or just starred in a vernacular movie. Then you start wondering, what is this life, so mechanical, so indifferent to our social space, and how our lives are ruled by Power Point pitches full of exaggerations, extrapolations, and obfuscations, in a pyramid of imbecility that passes off as corporate excellence. And the teaboy? He also dreams that one day, his bright-eyed son or daughter will also be a big executive, in a big office, big enough to ignore the teaboy there.

Uh oh. Is this my cup of tea?