The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. - T.S. Eliot

It been hard resisting that temptation.
Its so very easy for me to do that right thing - like say be nice to people for they are nice to you.
I am naturally polite most of the time and can behave like quite a soft spoken person but to behave like that with people , for issues I do not believe in or I am not convinced about is being hard on me.

Happenings last week seem quite very simple on the surface but there is a feeling they will resonate in my head for quite sometime.
It was such a beautiful day today at home i felt somehow since the morning that i did not feel like writing much about the dismal things that are around me.The day almost made me feel somewhere some good thing had happened. May be i woke up with some nice dream subconsciously, nothing else explained it. I felt so fine that i did nothing much except stare through my window onto the sunlight beaming all around.Its only after nightfall that I manage to write somehow.

Its quite easy being rude and cut people out its said but its really tough I feel esp for me if you are not convinced that these people have no ill will towards me.It makes me feel queasy after i behave the way i do.

After ranting so much against my team mates in quite some previous posts due to their opinions and thinking , when i think it over charitably i feel a bit bad , simply because none of this whole charade is regarding me in particular.
I somehow end up in situations where people at least outwardly are rather nice to me. Too nice for my comfort frankly.

The hardest part of life right now is having a too sweet and a bit too friendly absolutely unmoved by stuff kind of manager is - you dont know whom to really get at at times.
The culture in this wonderful place is where nothing seems urgent or planned explicitly reminds me of that quote
"Take your life into your hands , and what happens? No one to blame".

I try to maintain my distance and try coming across as extremely ill mannered but ah i am quite disturbed with all this.
Like this incident when both of them invited me over to check out the houses they bought recently as they were going there and it was on the way for them to drop me at home.
I made the most pathetic excuses , to the extent of saying they should not even look forward to a cup of Tea I am such a bad host in general, but neverthless when i did ask them they just had a glass of water, but the thing is I feel bad being so unkind to people who for whatever reason are decent to me.
I just do it with some nice self deprecating wit but still I dont like being that unhospitable.The issue is honestly its not a comfortable thought to think of fighting/arguing with a manager and team members who visit your home. That kind of status quo spoils things.It is actually being quite a learning curve for me.

It is quite an experience shifting from a services organization to a product based organization.
You miss the buzz and happenings and expectations that are part of being in any services software or otherwise.
Appreciations from the clients, the expectations (most common being the onsite stuff), the particularity of things, the careful drafting and revising of emails repeatedly befor hitting a send.
These are the very things you hated then and I stll remind myself of that instead of calling them sweet memories.
Here where i am its a perfect place for the innovators i guess OR the world weary - cool atmosphere , not much nonsense about etiquette and relaxed attitudes which only get disturbed on news of firings for cost cuttings.
And here I am complaining I have nothing to look forward to.
I complained about the extreme pace of things then and now i fret at the lethargy of things around me because i have seen things moving faster in every sense.
Why is quite such a big thing to have the balanced best of both worlds i quip….

Then there was another drama which left me all the more unsettled.
Some of my mother's close but far off cousin sister turned up with her family.She's a government servant , with a husband who is a lecturer in a small town. Belonging to the educated but traditional kind of family they started the same charade that everyone does , but in a more polished and kinder way than say the more rustic relatives.

They see me after what some 20+ years and express their deep affection and keen desire to see me well settled and try talking as they say some sense into my head. I try every trick in my book dissapearing to the balcony , picking up a book and keeping silent saying that i hardly am much of a speaker.

But the lady seemed quite intent on forcing a rountable conversation , with her hubby my mom and sis included and would stop at none.
She thought I should stop at reading books, enough books by now. I have a job too , so thats enough.

Anyways the conversation veered off in all directions of my expectations , their experiences etc etc, with the lecturer ending up asking me , how much do i earn - a question i deliberately did not answer but was forced to quote a figure in a way only Indian relatives can.
In fact the man joked it off saying "Tell me - lets see how much i have earned after putting in all these years of service and how much you people earn.What is that you people do to get paid such. All these stress strain things that people talk on these days."

My essential problem is unlike others is with age i become more passionate when talking about what i believe in and have lost the patience that i seemed to have so easily as a child.I started pretty reluctantly due to this but when they seemed to be so insistent i gave them a piece of my mind.
"Its pretty simple. You as a lecturer can take classes of any quality as you like that is if kids attend firstly and get away with it, not something you can really do in our case and so on as easily.
For you what you have learnt in college is the end , here you just have to keep unlearning and relearning."

The fact is there are so many misconceptions in half the people outside software about software industry.They just know software engineers = good money earning and scope and US chances.There is one set who thinks they are overpaid for jobs that even Xth standard people can do and the other half thinks just the opposite . I almost feel like cracking a bad joke that well because a highly educated person supresses his capabilities and does a Xth standard job he ought to be paid more.

"Whatever happens no one employed now will lose jobs for next 20 years " says this man and I tried to enlighten him about my friends who were given pink slips with 2 hrs of notice period.That the real money is hardly earned by an average software engineer but by businesses which were built to cater to them.That half of the rich lifestyle this set of people put on is debt money in the shape of plastic cards.

Its really easy to snap such people out of your life i think and then realise , but for my family or may be my job i would never associate with such.
And as this continued , I was told that my expectations were all wrong I tried to make some fair arguments and my sister chipped in with some but for them all that i could talk of were trivial.

As per them
Finances should not be an issue(This from a person who in the previous conversation had said he never joined any of the universities as a professor because , it only means research and career growth and I want financial growth too for my family hence i stayed on as a college lecturer- which i though was a very honest decent answer.)
Lifestyle should not be an issue.
Differences in upbringing are not an issue.
Looks must never be an issue

Survival is the the word they spoke of (though i guess social conformity was what they meant at heart and should have been spelled it such ) and then I really was worked up to a point that i was forced to be blunt that I survive decently if not well and any so called compromise of settling down should improve my quality of life rather than doing the opposite.

The conversation finally was ended up with a cheery smile that we both sisters spoke too well and know almost every line of argument, but you know from those polite faces that these things have resonances in people heads, like how the generation has changed, how the world is going to become and what not.

The thing is they were not bad people or one of those scheming / sermonizing relatives everyone has their share of - but they just belong to a world I want to escape from.
They cannot see beyond what they are in ,as they find it safer and comfortable in there and I do not like what they show me from their perspective.I never like being so heartless to such people but I guess that seems to be destiny.

Anyway life goes on and at this point in life with over thirty years of being a nuisance in the
universe i can only quote from somewhere

"The years are forest paths
Where I've lost my way
Not even a sun-ray
To guide my wandering… "

The best thing though in this rather unsettling week was my reading "India Unbound" by Gurucharan Das.
What a fine book , nothing earth shattering and yet so effective in presenting the country's journey from pre independence and its dilemmas to this age and i will write a seperate post on it. Its core may be set about the economic ideologies that have changed but its touches a whole lot more splendidly.

P.S: this was a old post i somehow missed hitting publish