Off The Cuff: Of creatures great and small

When my Chief Advisor, the Internet, is unable to provide me with the information I seek I immediately lapse into my role as the King of Vagueness. So I cannot say for certain whether it is Sir Isaac Newton or Thomas Edison I refer to in the following incident.

Anyway, one of these gentlemen inventors was, so the story goes, confronted one night by a fire in his laboratory. A roaring blaze, fuelled by the loads of scientific formulae it was devouring.

The great man, recognising his own helplessness in the face of such natural fury, said to his young son, Thank God for that, now I can get down to rectifying all the mistakes I think I made…or something to that effect. The bottom line is, he was unperturbed while the work of a lifetime went up in smoke.

Which brings me to my friend and one-time student, Bikash. A young man from Nepal, educated in a public school in the lush tea-garden hills of Darjeeling, he graduated from a college in India before making his way to the US, in pursuit of a variation on the American Dream. He reckons he would have realised it, too, had he not run into Susan, his CEO.

I, of course, pointed out that it was his own injudicious political mix of socialism and idealism that had contributed in no small measure to his resigning. He accepts, but admits he cannot change overnight.

The way he tells it, he was extremely happy with the work he was doing, despite the slave's hours and the fact that his marriage was fragmenting. But Susan was the clichéd last straw, as it were.

Susan, I'm given to understand, spent more time out of her air-conditioned office than in it. She skulked around corridors, keeping a furtive eye on her minions. On one occasion, she is said to have dashed into the pantry and caught an employee red-handed making tea with two tea bags instead of one. The worker received a written warning about depleting the company's exchequer, or some such term.

Susan nit-picked, she argued for change but gave no reasons to back up her arguments; unilaterality was her watchword. When an employee requested justifiable leave in lieu of a day worked, she rolled her eyes dramatically in search of an elusive heaven.

A public dressing-down was commonplace, she demanded unrealistic levels of perfection and even had the following sign pasted in strategic areas of the office: Professionals must never ask for commendation, only condemnation.

When a lowly-ranked colleague who had mastered the art of fawning vaulted over Bikash and landed in the vacant deputy's chair in his section, Bikash knew it was time to go. His letter of resignation was as routine as anybody else's except that it ended with this indelicate touch: "Little minds are affected by little things. Great minds see it all and are unmoved."

Bikash is now freelancing, and while the latter half of that word has him crossing swords constantly with clients, he is relishing the 'free' part of it all. In fact he is spending his spare moments patching and darning; repairing the rents in his marriage. Hail Edison, or Newton.