Jubilee Pains & Resolve: My unfolding Voyage 069

My employer United Bank of India celebrated its Silver Jubilee in 1975. In the same year, I had both Golden (50) and Diamond (60) Jubilee of my employment with the Bank in terms of months of pay-checks received. I had not been with any school or college or university for so many months. I had developed some degree of endurance with the increasingly old environment at the Bank. But Jubilees led me to review my achievements: I had a decent job with reasonably comfortable earnings, I had good romance and got married to the girl I chose, I had a little son to play with. I had already submitted my PhD dissertation submitted and two technical articles published in the National Institute of Bank Management's journal. By bosses were pleased with me and I had got a promotion. I received admiration from colleagues and come to gather a fairly good overview of banking and bank management in India as also an insight into various aspects of my employers strengths and weaknesses.

Yet, something would bug me. I had lot of time to take up new projects both at office and outside. The Bank was not prepared to let young officers to get into diversified areas of management responsibility with any fast track movement upward in hierarchy: rather would require me to continue doing whatever I had so far demonstrated that I was capable of doing efficiently and effectively.

All this was generating a sense of urge for getting over the constraints to a movement towards a more varied and higher level exposure. By this time, I had picked up, from an article in Harvard Business Review, a hypothesis that power does not lie in the position you enjoy but in the ability to influence colleagues, peers, bosses and other minds through your depth of knowledge,innovative ideas and communication. I needed to enhance that power for in India in the foreseeable future public sector would only generate opportunities for growth and that would accrue to anyone with seniority irrespective of your capability, potential or performance.

So, I was in search of new challenges in 1976. How do I make my old parents happier? How do my wife get more happiness? How do I get into an office environment that would make me learn more things at a fast pace as had happened in the first 36 months of my service in the United Bank? And, of course, what else could I do?

I tried behavioral management tools to develop transparent, "u r OK, i am OK" sessions with my wife for better mutual understanding and failed: she would suspect that I was trying to brain-wash her further. My parents were happy that we were staying again with them with our baby son. My wife had been on long leave, beyond the three months' maternity leave she was entitled to. Now she would need to resume office and my son would be taken adequate care at home by my mother and sister-in law during her absence of eight/ nine hours a day. So, one fine morning, she reported back to office. In the evening she announced to me that she would never go back to office as she was unable to bear the few hours of separation with the five-month old child. So, she would immediately resign. And, we got a new challenge cropping up: she desired another kid.

Since my wife wanted to resign from office, we went back to our rented apartment. Jhupa was growing up fast. The landlady who lived on the second-story of the same building, Maya-di and her daughter were very affectionate to all of us. So, was Jyotirmoyee-di, who lived in the adjacent apartment ed. This short, beautiful lady had moved in to this flat recently after she had retired as a Professor of History in a college in Patna in Bihar. She had lost her husband when she was just 13 and then went on to study in school, college, university and had gone to London for higher studies. She was also a guest teacher in the Sarada Mission Women's College nearby. Through her we cam in touch with the College's Principal, Saradaji (Prabrajika ...Prana), a very affectionate Sanyasin of the mission. Jyotirmoyee-di was very fond of Jhupa and she enjoyed see him crawling and then learning to walk, dance and speak. The next door neighbor were also very affectionate to us. One of their relatives, a professor in the university at Gauhati, had come on a visit. Jhupa would try to talk to him from the small balcony that we had opposite the neighbors backyard. One day this professor told my wife that when Jhupa would grow up he would be a mathematician. My wife was very happy.

We would be visiting our parent's residence, 20 minutes away from our apartment, every week. That would make them happy. But I thought I could make my parents happier if we could go for a trip[ together. I was by now entitled to get reimbursement of another family trip to anywhere in India by train. This time I chose Guwahati (formerly Gauhati) in Assam because the 50 minutes air trip from Kolkata to Guwahati was admissible for reimbursement because the train journey involved two nights over an unusually log stretch. So, in August-September 1976, five of us (my wife, mother, father, one-year old son Jhupa and I)flew off to Guwahati, and then straight from the Airport went in taxi to Kamakshya Temple on the top of a hill about 45 minutes away from the airport. At the temple, my parents would offer a special puja worship ceremony that would take about two hours. Then we went in a taxi to the city center and took a bus that would carry us along the sloping and winding roads up the hills to Shillong, the beautiful capital of the State of Meghalaya (Residence in the Clouds). We stayed in a hotel at Shillong for three nights. It was so exhilarating and romantic roaming around the hilly terrain with clouds touching you. It was a romantic environment as well. My father told me the name of a relative whom he knew lived in Shillong. I searched out from the telephone directory (there were not many people who had a telephone in the sparsely populated town those days and the Bengali's among them would have very few) probable Bengali candidates with the surname my father had said and ultimately got in touch with the person's daughter in law and wife: the person concerned was no more but his son and the family were still in Shillong. We visited them one afternoon. Shillong was cold and we had to use blankets at night. One evening when Jhupa was with my mother and she was taking her dinner of mutton-rice, my wife inquired about what Jhupa was doing? My mother replied that he was sleeping under the blanket beside her. Soon, my wife would ask about from where some peculiar sound was coming from and then find Jhupa was enjoying mutton juice from my mothers fingers while enjoying the warmth under the blanket. We would down from Shillong on the fourth day to stay at a hotel in Guwahati for three days. Here Topu had a relative. Again, I tried with the Telephone Directory to find out her cousin's husbands telephone number, contacted them and visited them one evening for an hour or two.

Back to work after 10 days vacation and I started exploring for an opportunity somewhere. I have to get out of United Bank. But before I could do that in November, Chupa, our second child arrived 15 months after
Jhupa, his elder brother. In the case of Jhupa, when the gynecologist had confirmed and I shared the information with my mother, she was so happy. Then, on a Monday morning, as I was getting ready to go to office, Topu said that the arrival date seems to have arrive. I took her to my parents' place and deposited her there. By the time I had come back from office in the evening, mother had already got her admitted to the hospital five minutes walk from the residence and late at night the nurses rang up so that we can walk to the hospital to welcome Jhupa. In the case of Chupa, Topu felt uncomfortable at around 10 PM on a Saturday night as we were just about retiring to bed. We left Jhupa under the care of the neighbor, rushed Topu to another hospital near Shyambazar Five Point Crossing, half an hour away by taxi from my rented apartment, admitted her to the hospital, returned home by mid-night, took back Jhupa from the neighbors and passed the night with Jhupa sleeping for the first time without his mother beside him. In the early morning got up to feed Jhupa, gave him a bath, dressed him up first. Then I also had a bath, took some breakfast and both of us went to my parents' residence. They had already received the telephone call from the hospital about Chupa's arrival in the early hours of Sunday. I left Jhupa with my sister in law, informed my in laws walking down to their residence three minutes away and then proceeded to see Chupa and Topu at the hospital. On Tuesday, I would bring them straight to my parents' residence where we would be staying for the next seek weeks. When Topu arrived home with Chupa, Jhupa received some kind of a shock: as she approached Jhupa to take him in her lap after a hug and kisses, Jhupa suddenly felt shy and jumped on my lap loo kin asking at the infant baby in the cot! That is the beginning of a new journey for the two brother growing up together.

I resumed office on Wednesday and explained my absence for the previous two days sharing the good news with the colleagues. Malay Babu quipped. " Basudeb, you had just been back from the hills a few weeks back and we never imagined that your wife could have been already pregnant! How do you keep secrets?". It was really amazing that my wife's movements and appearance would not give any perceptible signals of pregnancy to visitors or passers-by during the relevant two periods.

But now an opportunity would come for a new work experience, besides a new family experience.