It has been four days since I joined PwC (as the HR guys requested, I must be careful how I write it, even if it is in the short form...in full, by the way, it is written as PricewaterhouseCoopers with only the P and the C in caps). These four days have been a little confusing, at times raising my hopes and at others, dashing them right down the ground. However, I am rushing myself in excitement of the new things that have been happening in my life without really being what could probably be called systematic.
So, let me try to be just that...a little systematic and try to recount all (or at least some of all) that has happened since I last wrote...will try to be brief about it but don't know how far I will succeed. For firsts, the Coorg trip happened and what an eventful trip it turned out to be. Apart from being a throughly enjoyable one in the first half, it had a night and an ensuing second day that forced me to write a blog entry that could not have got on to Mode C for anything, despite all my earlier pretensions (or that's what people think) of being honest and true to this blog. In fact, the post was so disturbing and end result of it all so personally frustrating that I decided to bring the curtains down on the blog itself. Incidentally, I must say that I realized later that there were actually quite a few people who actually read my blog quite regularly and enjoyed it, too. With suggestions and concerns coming to me dime-a-dozen, I was overwhelmed enough to change my decision of out right deletion of the blog.
Letting the blog remain, I kind of made it live my mood for many days, right till the end of the term. Though I did delete the last post that reeked badly of pessimism, frustration and what-not, I was still not prepared to revive the blog. Whenever I did come across to writing something new, so many things used to come to mind...admonitions by people in authority for writing what I shouldn't have...remarks by colleagues about the blog making too many of the things public, things that I had no right to make public...and of course, my own problems that were fast making life diffcult (especially with the exams approaching).
All this was nothing but an addition to the mental burden that I was carrying with myself to home but as someone intelligent said sometime, nothing like mom's cooking to get your tail up. Believe me or not, my tail is nothing but up right now. With three weeks of Ma's cooking behind me...a well spent Holi with Bhabhi and Bharat Bhaiya enlivening the proceedings at home...Anoushka, my one year old niece making life amazingly sweet and innocent (absolutely nothing can be compared to have a kid smile at you right after she wets herself all over you)...having Bua and Pallavi visit us for my last few days at home (Pallavi is quite excited about joining her new job and why not...a well paying one and a well deserved one after two years at GIM)...there couldn't have been more eventful three weeks to lift a person's mood and so it turned out to be for me, too.
And thus it was in absolutely good spirits that I landed in The City of Joy on the 10th of April at Howrah Junction, backdrop to the famous Howrah bridge and its screamingly mad, speeding traffic. With one foren-maal in front of me and another behind, even the queue for the pre-paid taxi was worth the time and of course, the sweat that Kolkata greeted me with. The next step was the PG place that was arranged for me by Rajesh, my friend at DPS who is now working with Cognizant in Cal. The owners of this place are interesting, especially the worse half (that is, the master of the house) who pasionately believes that he must entertain all those who have to listen to him (for any reason or compulsion, whatsoever) with tales of how PG places in the UK in his time were called digs and people who stayed there diggers (he actually expected me to laugh at this).
This place is quite close to the PwC office (about 3-4 kms away) and even the room and room-mates are cool...went for a roam-the-city trip the very first evening. Calcutta has grown from the last time I was here...there are some places (Forum, Crossword to name a few) that actually make the place good enough to be called a metro. Big Bazaar is amazingly cheap and good to shop. Though I had heard a lot about the sense in shopping at this place and how it has revolutionized the apparel industry, I never knew that things were changing this fast...trousers and jeans for as low as three hundred bucks...tees for a hundred bucks...wonders never ceased for the two hours that shopping and subsequent rain made us stop at the place.
The first day at PwC was interesting and not the least for the people from other institutes that I met at the place. Half a dozen guys from IIMC, a guy from IIML I knew to be a trainee right from the moment that I saw him at the bus stop, one apparently haughty female along with another long lost contact from the days at Infy, Chennai from XLRI, 2 Bongs from IIMA (one of them is also going to ESCP-EAP with us) and of course Sandipan added masala to a pretty uneventful first day as far as work is concerned.
More masala and a lot of nostalgia kicked in as I met Rajesh and Arnav for lunch. All the people at school, how each Dipsite is doing right now, where are the old flames of people sashaying nowadays were topics that kept the three of us busy for nearly two hours. I also met Debayan in the evening and I am really happy that he got through IIMC this time. He was really unlucky to miss out last time but this year, he got what he deserved.
I was briefed about the work on Monday and apparently, it has to deal with the business process mapping of the consulting practices of PwC as well as their internal HR policies and procedures. Although the HR aspect is a little off-putting right now, the project has all the potential to turn into something interesting once the consulting practices part comes in. In fact, while reading the Assurance division policy today (which was given to me after quite a lot of consultations with the HR head due to its secret and confidential nature ;-)), I could make out how much the events at Arthur Andersen have affected the consulting industry and its policies.
So far, the stage at which the project stands right now can, at most, be called initial and the heat has not really caught on yet. As the days progress, however, things are certainly going to be more eventful and hopefully, more interesting.
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