Responsibility to what? To whom?

With great power comes great responsibility...that's what Peter Parker's Uncle Ben told him hours before he was shot by a robber. It did not take long for Peter to ask the obvious question: Responsibility to what? To whom? I guess he got the answer, too. He transformed into the messiah of the downtrodden and avenger of the common man, a character we all know as SpiderMan. I was just wondering, however, if it is all related to comics and the world of make-believe alone. Can we really try to ignore such things in our practical life and still be able to live with it? I learnt the hard way that we can not.

Infosys is certainly a strange place to work in. Perhaps it is not just Infosys (to be fair), but all other software (or even other) companies as well. Regardless, the amount of power wielding and the yielding to power that you see in Infosys is surely something that has opened my eyes and opened them wide. There is a hierarchy at the work place that is invisible and yet very potent. You can go into your boss's cabin any time of the day but you can not really say something first and think later.

Your boss can come and say something to you and even though you want to protest and say 'No' to him in an assertive way (as taught in so many of those mundane HR Lectures), you can not really do so. At the back of your mind, you know that his demand of your time is reasonably fair, considering that you are hardly doing anything for the project for which you are currently being billed. But after you have said the 'Yes' to him and come back to your desk, all defeated and pensive, you seem to realize that you have just agreed to work for free!

I guess that this is what they call life and its compromises. I know I sound a little too melodramatic but that's the way I am feeling right now. The fact that the new project, to which I do not belong and yet have to 'help', is a documentation project does not help either..