Realization

Hum ek baar jite hain, ek baar marte hain, First job bhi ek hi baar hoti hai, aur company se pyaar bhi ek hi baar hota hai. Little did I know that like Shahrukh Khan in the movie I too would fall in love a second time. The cupid struck … in the last hour.

Yes I love Aricent… my second company. And I did not realize it until now. The uneasiness had started creeping in as no dues clearance started arriving from all the departments one by one . As I handed over my id card to the office security personnel I suddenly felt orphaned. As I lay one last forlorn look on my seat, my floor my building and finally my office campus I could already feel the pangs of separation anxiety. All the time I kept telling others and myself how relieved and super glad I was that my daily tryst with noida gurgaon traffic jams was finally going to be over.

Back home, in the late hours of the night the first thing I did after switching on the computer was to login to my office mail account just to check if could still log in. The SAP action had not run today and I found that I could still access my office email id. This surprisingly pleased me and as I started browsing through the mails I saw the parting mail that I had sent to the team. This mail had been a shameless and thoughtless copy –paste of the numerous good bye mails that keep flooding our inbox every now and then, with a few minor changes to suit my purpose. I actually read the mail now. Word by word. And this time each word weighed so heavily in my heart. It was then it dawned on me that despite my best efforts of keeping the professional me and the emotional me on two different far away islands, I had become emotionally involved with my company. I was in love with aricent. As I write this I am still head over heels in love with the company, my work and everything that is even minutely e related aricent.

Not that I regret resigning. I had to do it to give a new direction to my career, to be able to fulfill both the personal and professional responsibilities with equal dedication and most importantly to avoid wasting precious hours in the traffic chaos day in and day out.

My first job as a fresher was at naukri.com. After clearing two hard to crack written tests and then being grilled in interviews for what seemed like centuries when the HR person finally told me “Congratulation you are on board now”, I immediately knew I loved naukri.com, my first job. But It was not so with aricent. I always treated it skeptically and took pride in saying that Aricent in spite of being a big company can in no way match the work culture of naukri. As I crossed one milestone after another (both on professional and personal front not once did I feel the bonding with my job the way I used to feel earlier. I attributed this to falling in love only once theory.

Now as I look back into the three years at aricent I cannot recall the exact moment when I might have shed my initial inhibitions. May be it was when I got an appreciation card from my skip level or maybe it was when I attended a training via video conferencing or maybe it was when my manager and the whole of the top management took extra efforts to move me on to a different project in the time of recession or maybe it was when I availed a maternity leave of more than six months without any hassles. In spite of the work pressure and stretched hours I fell in love with the company for its transparency, its well defined processes and its employee friendliness.

I love you aricent and I am going to miss you!!