First Whirlwinds of Expectations & Perceptions: My Unfolding Voyage 065

As a student or as a bachelor, it did not matter much to me as to what others expected of me or perceived of me, so long as I knew clearly about own goals and remained honest to myself. But as I became a part of a family of senior and junior colleagues and peers in the office or as I brought over a girl from elsewhere as part of my own existence in the family at home, I slowly started realising that I are now a suspect in the eyes of all. Without my knowledge, someone so close to me turned envious, jealous or even rebellious against my evolving existence. A few seemed not to be as happy with me as they had been before. Nearly all appeared to start thinking about me in a completely different perspective, treating me as an unfair competitor, a manipulator or attracted to an undesirable camp within the broader family. I seemed to be not fulfilling their (unknown) expectations on me. Some showed up their feeling of being hurt by me, some were explicitly angry with me and I failed to fathom why? I was suddenly in the midst constant whirlwinds of conflicting expectations and perceptions altering my simple, straight-forward relationships with each member of the family into a cobweb of complex and incomprehensible relationships. Three years before I could got exposed to concepts of theory X or theory Y or "I am OK. you are OK", through the middle management executive development training program of United Bank of India, I got caught into those whirlwinds, responding as a novice rational element in what people call family and office politics.
In the process, I got hurt, became more constrained in living freely and started picking up elements of managing the family environment to protect myself from falling into traps laid down by members of the family, especially those who tended to live in their imagination about others.


First about the family in the office. I had left some few pages of manuscript with a steno-typists( stenographer-cum-typists) assistant to type those out and indicated some urgency that the boss may like to look at that Note before I return from a guest-speaker lecture at the Bank's training school that would take me about three hours. When I returned from the school, my assistant colleague complained to me that another colleague of mine who had joined a few months back had demanded that the typing job he had given earlier should be completed first. As a result they had some verbal interaction that was not pleasant. I told him that he need not worry about this incident and he his decision to complete my assignment a little later than what he had planned for did not cause any difficulty to me. I knew that the stenographer colleagues had developed an idea of what assignments flowing to them from different officers had what kind of priority. I kept quiet on the subject and did not raise the issue with anyone or the boss. A few days later, the new entrant officer colleague, two years' junior to me in the University, came to me and told me that he regretted his behavior motivated by his understanding that since I was not his boss, he had interpreted that we were all equal in terms of priority for the stenographers assisting us. He explained that his 'I-am-a-rookie-so are you' was wrong as the priorities arise from the bank's requirements and boss's specifications which were not as clear to him as they were with the stenographer assistant who has been in our department for long. He also said I must be a good man for not having raised the issue of his behaviour among the office colleagues. He would soon become a kind of my fan and younger brother.


Another colleague who had joined the Bank at the same time with the colleague I had just mentioned was also very close to me. Both them used to visit my residence, share food with my wife and me and occasionally stayed overnight with us. He was indeed an intelligent guy but probably slower in picking up the office communication skills. He had also taught me a few yogic aasanaas (exercises). While the Calcutta boy was more demanding in drawing on my affection, the Delhi boy was somewhat reserved in this. We loved them equally. But he probably felt that we were being more affectionate to the Calcutta boy and gradually started distancing from me, though remaining still warm.


A senior colleague who was very affectionate to me used to spend about 40 minutes a day discussing various things. We had gone to restaurants and pictures together. Suddenly, one day he was so cool when I visited him at his desk. He was explicit and curt in communicating to him that I had been using the clues I had been picking up discussing with him against him and in favour of our boss. I was almost in tears. I had lost an affectionate elder because of his sudden change of perception about me though I had not done anything that could hurt his interest. It was just a possibility that our boss would get transferred with higher responsibility and both of us would be sharing the charge of the present boss.That did not happen either: my boss did not go out to become the managing directors of the regional rural bank that our bank was setting up.


At home, the mis-perceptions and misunderstandings created stress on relationships with the parents and they preferred that we shift to a separate residence. I resisted but ultimately shifted to a small flat in Bangur Avenue. It was indeed a boon in disguise: my wife would resume her work, taking the trip to her office accompanying me in the same bus, waiting at the bus stop where we got down till I waived my hand from the 10th floor f our office        and then she would take another 7 minute bus trip to reach her office. She would return home earlier than me on most days: otherwise we would return together. We had all the time to go wherever we liked: cinema shows, restaurants, friends places, parents' residences, shopping. Most evening would be so enjoyable and some times we would fall asleep to get awake around 11 PM and then I had rush out to buy some dinner from a nearby eating house. My Mom would visit our flat over lunch one day. She seemed very impressed over our living and felt happy. A few months later we would return to her house, Gurudham, for a four/ five months' stay there.


At office, I would continue to enjoy the affection of most of the seniors. A special friendship would develop with Mr. D. K Bose, the Librarian at the office. It is through interactions with him, I would get to really appreciate how valuable a Librarian could be to a researcher or a seeker of information or knowledge. It was much easier to search books/ documents with the help of a competent and user-friendly librarian. Those days Internet search engines were not available but Mr. Bose will be always helpful in trying to understand what I was looking for and guide me to the accessing the relevant material if these were available in the office library or other libraries he had contact with. It is through him I got to get an idea of the work flow in the library and the essentials of library management. Decade later this would help me in contributing to the efforts of librarians in other offices. By observing his motherly relationships with the books and other resources of his library, I could sense what responses ticks the librarians and get the most out of them: most office library users however tend to ignore the mental make up of librarians, perceive librarians' work as unskilled work and in the process failed to get the best out of the potential services of librarians. The very nature of the work of a librarian, Mr. Bose, had to deal with large number of library users, from the most senior officials of the bank to the most junior and treat them as his valued customers, who would not normally regard an office librarian as a productivity raising agent in the office. And, yet Mr. Bose treated all of them as his valued customers in need of help. Mr. Bose through his own behavior with the library users showed how one could deal with whirlwinds of complex perceptional and expectational relationships in groups in the office and home. For, when a library user did get what he wanted in the library seldom perceived that as a contribution of the librarian and when he failed to get something he wanted perceived the Librarian as useless or unhelpful or inadequately responsive to office colleagues needs.