To make matters worse, none of my close friends were allotted to Hyderabad so I was forced to live alone at a great expense. I considered the option of sharing the flat of my aforementioned colleague, but I realized that his locale was farther from the company than mine. So I lived alone in a quite luxurious two-bed apartment; for me it was a gilded cage.
Like all undergraduate internships I had nothing to do in the first few days. I used to go to work, get to my desk and sit all day. My colleague kept himself busy by studying, and hence was rather uncommunicative. Even my smartphone failed to dispel the boredom that was beginning to become malicious. I tried writing, but scribbling gibberish with a pencil on some waste paper all day is not as romantic as it sounds.
You know that phrase most corporate folks use - "I hate my job"? That is probably because they're overburdened with work, not like me, who literally had nothing to do at the office but to eat lunch and drink tea at specified times. This went on a few days. One evening I was returning from work. I got off the bus at my stop. I realized that I hadn't explored my neighbourhood yet, despite having lived there for nearly a week. There was an overhead bridge across the main road. I climbed up the iron steps. The bridge was empty, except for the man sitting there. He was sitting on a plastic chair at one end of the bridge, asking people not to stand on the bridge. He wasn't some urban lunatic screaming at pedestrians. He wasn't some good samaritan preventing broken hearts and unsuccessful examinees from leaping to their deaths. It was his job. He was probably employed by the municipality to sit on this bridge all day with just a water bottle and ask passers-by not to crowd on the bridge, and maybe to prevent the occasional suicide.
As I passed him on the bridge, I saw the melancholy gaze his eyes. He wasn't listening to music, he wasn't sleeping, he wasn't restless or fidgeting. He just sat there, motionless, his tired stare wandering about the interior of the huge iron bridge.
I passed him quite uneventfully. As I walked down the stairs of the bridge, I was stuck by a most spectacular revelation. Here I was interning in a prosperous company under the auspice of one of India's most prestigious colleges, and yet I moan due to an apparent bout of "joblessness". And here was this person - desolate, depressed and downtrodden - forsaken by the very society that he comprises of; a person doing his duty without any vociferous complaints, insensitive whining or hateful lamentation. At this point I felt a lot better about my job at the factory.
Since then, whenever I see anyone complain about their office jobs or their 'miserable' lives at some firm, I withdraw into my hall of recollections, think about the man on the bridge in Hyderabad, and smile in a cynical disdain.
