Changing The Calendar
The calendar was the last bastion to fall this morning!
With the previous year having come to its end and the dawn of a new year, the calendar had outlived its utility. From a thing of value even till the last day of the previous year, it was reduced to a mere showpiece the moment we welcomed the New Year. However much one would have been tempted to leave the calendar hanging on the wall simply because of the colour and variety it lends to the wall of the room, I wouldn’t have dared to commit such a mistake. After all who would have appreciated the use of such a thing as calendars simply for the purpose of decorating the walls of a house? So, however much you admired those snow covered peaks of some undisclosed hill-station or those bikini-clad females smiling at you from the glossy pages of the calendar, every year, a new calendar adorns the walls of people and the older one is unceremoniously consigned to the corner of the attic, to be sold to some “raddi-paper waala” at a later date.
In our youth, the old calendar still could be used for a few more innovative things; like covering the school books and copies for example. At least my school was not so particular about having to cover the books and copies with brown paper bearing the school name at the top. Commercialisation had still not dug its roots into the core of the education system in India. Anything clean to cover the books and copies was acceptable and the directive was simple-one had to be neat and proper in the school. And what could have been neater than the white backside of the calendar’s page! So I waited for the year to end when the calendar was removed, the pages cut to size and stored inside my school book-cupboard. As I grew up and graduated from school to college, my horizon of knowledge expanded and so were the number of subjects that I had to study. It meant reading more and writing more too; more notes to jot down, more problems to practice and more formulae to be memorised and then written down in an effort to remember what I had memorised. Computers were not discovered and we had to make do with those long, unbound standard exercise books, which we used to buy in dozens from the College co-operative stores, simply because the store gave some discount on bulk purchase. Even then, the expenditure was significant and was directly proportional to the amount of effort I put into my studies. While my parents never shied away from giving me the money to buy any number of exercise books, a little money saved out of this expense always meant an addition to the pocket money. This, in turn, meant being able to smoke an additional packet of cigarette or spending it to buy some more snacks at the college canteen. It was the calendar which helped to minimise the expense of buying exercise books. The white pages of the calendar was again put to use for doing “rough-work”; Cut to shape and size, stapled or sown into a “rough-copy for practice in solving those tricky arithmetical sums or rewriting the Laws of Physical Science or to solve those test papers, which were supposed to be a sure-shot way of entering the hallowed portals of the Engineering colleges of India.
Am not sure whether people get emotional with calendars and therefore wipe a silent tear or part their lips into a faint hint of a smile when they bring down that old calendar from the walls. After all, the calendar is a reminder of the days gone by! Nov 26th, the day Mumbai was attacked and one lost a loving friend, or for that matter, 17th August, the day we all partied throughout the night when a friend had thrown a party on his birthday. Still more memorable must be the day when someone gets his or her first appointment, first salary, wedding anniversary or the day of becoming proud parents. The calendar is a reminder of all such events and am sure that while people celebrate or mourn the day, no thanks is spared for the calendar for reminding one of the occasions.
It was therefore a little bit of surprise this morning when my wife suddenly asked me to recount the significant events that marked our lives while I was bringing down the calendar. A few of them came straight-away to my mind; 1st January 2008- return back from one of our first overseas holiday; 17th August 2008-the day we celebrated my departure from youth to becoming a middle aged man; 3rd September-the day our pup cut one his legs so badly that he had to be tranquilised to sleep before the vet performed a sort of minor operation on him. The one, however, that will probably be counted as a very significant turning point in our lives is 1st June 2008-the day I decided to resign from the services of my previous company. After having served almost 18 years in my previous company, I decided it was time to seek my pastures somewhere else, to try and seek out that proverbial “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”. So I resigned and took up a new job. The calendar will always have the date of 1st June and every time the date approached, I would be reminded of how many years have passed since I resigned from the services of my first employer.
However, it was with a sense of nostalgia that I looked at the old calendar before bringing it down from the peg on the wall this morning. The calendar was printed and carried the logo of my old employer and served as a reminder for every visitor to our home, about my employment with the company. Even after resigning on 1st June, the calendar was like a link to my life in the previous company, the joys and the sorrows, the success and the failures that had marked my stay in the company. The pages in the calendar depicted scenes from the company’s plant and the mines and also some special occasions that the company had been proud of during its 100 years of existence. While these were mere photographs for people who were not associated with the company, for me the photographs had its own stories to tell. The picture of the mine, where I started my career as a young lad filled with ambition and pride. It was here that I learnt the value of true friends and it was here that I realised how vastly different rural and urban India was. The picture of the park sponsored and maintained by the company, which was a favourite roaming grounds for me and my family when we had the fortune of being deputed to the plant for a brief period. Then there was that picture of the company’s previous CMD, who had been like a GOD for all employees of the company. I remembered how we had been gifted with a watch embossed with the company’s name to mark the occasion of the company’s 50th year of inception. I received it just after my first watch had been stolen by a thief and therefore saved me from the discomfort of going to office with an empty left wrist.
Indeed every photograph on every page of the calendar had its own link to the storage place of my memories. Amongst the colleagues of the company, the calendar itself was a silent displayer of the owner’s status. Employees, like me, who were ranked higher up in the hierarchy of the company, got the calendar that I was holding in my hand at present. Others lower down got a different, much inferior calendar than what I possessed. Thus the calendar was also a reminder to all that I had achieved in my previous company and how my success had been recognized and appreciated and helped me to climb the rungs of the corporate ladder.
The old calendar was a reminder to all this and more. Bringing it down from the wall meant snapping the umbilical chord and letting the new “me’ breathe on my own and chart my own course for the future.
In our youth, the old calendar still could be used for a few more innovative things; like covering the school books and copies for example. At least my school was not so particular about having to cover the books and copies with brown paper bearing the school name at the top. Commercialisation had still not dug its roots into the core of the education system in India. Anything clean to cover the books and copies was acceptable and the directive was simple-one had to be neat and proper in the school. And what could have been neater than the white backside of the calendar’s page! So I waited for the year to end when the calendar was removed, the pages cut to size and stored inside my school book-cupboard. As I grew up and graduated from school to college, my horizon of knowledge expanded and so were the number of subjects that I had to study. It meant reading more and writing more too; more notes to jot down, more problems to practice and more formulae to be memorised and then written down in an effort to remember what I had memorised. Computers were not discovered and we had to make do with those long, unbound standard exercise books, which we used to buy in dozens from the College co-operative stores, simply because the store gave some discount on bulk purchase. Even then, the expenditure was significant and was directly proportional to the amount of effort I put into my studies. While my parents never shied away from giving me the money to buy any number of exercise books, a little money saved out of this expense always meant an addition to the pocket money. This, in turn, meant being able to smoke an additional packet of cigarette or spending it to buy some more snacks at the college canteen. It was the calendar which helped to minimise the expense of buying exercise books. The white pages of the calendar was again put to use for doing “rough-work”; Cut to shape and size, stapled or sown into a “rough-copy for practice in solving those tricky arithmetical sums or rewriting the Laws of Physical Science or to solve those test papers, which were supposed to be a sure-shot way of entering the hallowed portals of the Engineering colleges of India.
Am not sure whether people get emotional with calendars and therefore wipe a silent tear or part their lips into a faint hint of a smile when they bring down that old calendar from the walls. After all, the calendar is a reminder of the days gone by! Nov 26th, the day Mumbai was attacked and one lost a loving friend, or for that matter, 17th August, the day we all partied throughout the night when a friend had thrown a party on his birthday. Still more memorable must be the day when someone gets his or her first appointment, first salary, wedding anniversary or the day of becoming proud parents. The calendar is a reminder of all such events and am sure that while people celebrate or mourn the day, no thanks is spared for the calendar for reminding one of the occasions.
It was therefore a little bit of surprise this morning when my wife suddenly asked me to recount the significant events that marked our lives while I was bringing down the calendar. A few of them came straight-away to my mind; 1st January 2008- return back from one of our first overseas holiday; 17th August 2008-the day we celebrated my departure from youth to becoming a middle aged man; 3rd September-the day our pup cut one his legs so badly that he had to be tranquilised to sleep before the vet performed a sort of minor operation on him. The one, however, that will probably be counted as a very significant turning point in our lives is 1st June 2008-the day I decided to resign from the services of my previous company. After having served almost 18 years in my previous company, I decided it was time to seek my pastures somewhere else, to try and seek out that proverbial “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”. So I resigned and took up a new job. The calendar will always have the date of 1st June and every time the date approached, I would be reminded of how many years have passed since I resigned from the services of my first employer.
However, it was with a sense of nostalgia that I looked at the old calendar before bringing it down from the peg on the wall this morning. The calendar was printed and carried the logo of my old employer and served as a reminder for every visitor to our home, about my employment with the company. Even after resigning on 1st June, the calendar was like a link to my life in the previous company, the joys and the sorrows, the success and the failures that had marked my stay in the company. The pages in the calendar depicted scenes from the company’s plant and the mines and also some special occasions that the company had been proud of during its 100 years of existence. While these were mere photographs for people who were not associated with the company, for me the photographs had its own stories to tell. The picture of the mine, where I started my career as a young lad filled with ambition and pride. It was here that I learnt the value of true friends and it was here that I realised how vastly different rural and urban India was. The picture of the park sponsored and maintained by the company, which was a favourite roaming grounds for me and my family when we had the fortune of being deputed to the plant for a brief period. Then there was that picture of the company’s previous CMD, who had been like a GOD for all employees of the company. I remembered how we had been gifted with a watch embossed with the company’s name to mark the occasion of the company’s 50th year of inception. I received it just after my first watch had been stolen by a thief and therefore saved me from the discomfort of going to office with an empty left wrist.
Indeed every photograph on every page of the calendar had its own link to the storage place of my memories. Amongst the colleagues of the company, the calendar itself was a silent displayer of the owner’s status. Employees, like me, who were ranked higher up in the hierarchy of the company, got the calendar that I was holding in my hand at present. Others lower down got a different, much inferior calendar than what I possessed. Thus the calendar was also a reminder to all that I had achieved in my previous company and how my success had been recognized and appreciated and helped me to climb the rungs of the corporate ladder.
The old calendar was a reminder to all this and more. Bringing it down from the wall meant snapping the umbilical chord and letting the new “me’ breathe on my own and chart my own course for the future.
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