Okay, I'm going to try and not make this a senti thread. God knows there are enough of them. Some of them quite excellent in their tear jerkiness. (Meaningless aside. I had a batchmate called Tuhin Sen, and we called him Senti. Though he was anything but.) +
I went back to our office last Sunday. To tell our landlords we had decided to give up the place. And I walked around the deserted office, taking pictures and half imagining this thread. Maybe my wife is right when she says Twitter rules my life. +
Of course I couldn't say, Ramanandji, chai pilao. Because he is back in Madhubani, Bihar. And I have no idea if he will ever come back and serve us tea again. In the all too familiar cups. I always wanted to get fancier cups, but never got around to getting them. +
This was our third office space. And we had carted some of our trademark belongings here too. The cartwheel for instance, which @nadeemcon (or @sourabhonnet ?) scrounged. And my Grandfather's table which has some ambiguous symbolism associated with it. +
On the table are some old worldly things. A manual typewriter, a landline, a table lamp. We ad folks love nostalgia.
A mousetrap. Because someone said Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. And a print of Norman Rockwell's Blank Canvas. +
It felt strange. Because we never thought we wouldn't be coming back here. We just decided abruptly that we'd start working from home. Guys took their machines home. And that was it. We thought it was for 3 weeks tops. Poor Parineeti. She misses Ashish. +
In our wishful thinking we created a lovely library in the basement. And for three years we kept telling ourselves we'd spend time there. Of course, we never did. Long lunches and mindless surfing always won. +
Sure enough, we have the essential agency props. Guitars and bean bags. To be fair we used them a lot. Way more than the library. We have an electronic drum kit somewhere too. And for a while we had tablas too. +
Office felt enough like home for some of us to bring pieces of furniture here. Just like that. Not an interior decorator saying Let's get some chor bazaar chairs in here. Just guys confusing home and office. +
I saw Mehboob's corner. What an amazing dungbeetle he is. His stuff has also come from office to office. That's where he gets his strategic insights from, I guess. Good luck to him, shipping all this back. +
I poked my head into the conference room. With its table-tennis top table. And the Calvin and Hobbes strip on the wall. I don't know if it amused or frightened our clients with its message. +
I was amazed by how quickly we adjusted to the idea of wfh. The same people who spent weeks trying to create the perfect work place. Let's have a nook here. A couple of benches there, just for fun. A picture of a happy girl here. And a bike hanging from the roof. +
The books we used most were on our desks. Not in the cosy library in the basement. For now, they've all been replaced by Brin and Page's ubiquitous invention. But in the next month, we are hoping we'll find a new home for all of them. +
We started in a small apartment in a residential colony. We then moved to a proper office. And then to this place you've been seeing pictures of. Now it's time to go back to a small place. Not because economics demands it. But because the world shrugged her shoulders.
ANTHE.
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