Cleanup Discoveries!

I could live in the PG for just a few days. The door opened straight into the staircase and that led out of the bilding. Walking down that straicase of my PG is so imbibed in me that sometimes i am fearful of doors. What if i open the door to my appartment or what if the elevator door slides and i walk into that PG once more sleepy eyed - look around and realize that all this while i was only sleeping. That everything i felt has happened to me in the last couple of months was just one long night's dream which has finally come to an end? That the coldness i felt was only because Bangalore has had a good rain in the night? I would realize that i was feeling sleepy the entire duration as i was, in reality, asleep! I would probably call home, talk to everyone for a while, puzzled. And they would wonder for a while as to why i called them so early in the morning.

The work got finished very early today at the office and I sat wondering at the closed racks and a table full of books in my cubicle. Dusty and not even touched since a very long time, i had never cared to look into it since the last twenty days i am here. So very excited to clean (the day before was a cleaning day for my desk that is huge and has many facets - as in sections for various clients) i ventured into the dust. CD's never fascinated me as they are simple metallic looking discs with no features. But today it was an emotion that was beyond likes and dislikes as the number of CD's that i had to identify ran into a little more than a thousand. Numerous ... many and many papers - printouts of graphs, mails, guides, manuals - all of them presented what would be the complete opposite of a paperless office. And all sorts of hardware - hub, switch, a laptop, connectors, chargers, adaptors, tapes - whatever one can imagine was there too. Oh yes there is a ESM (thats my team name) toolbox too - just like the one that can be expected in a garage.

Papers were in a different form too - that of bound books and folders. Reams of pages with lots of handwritten stuff - showing sketches, block diagrams, one liners, paragraphs, doodles - everything ranging from even before 2001. That year became specific as looking at one of the sheets i remembered how that very month of that year the first semester of college had begun for me. And here were these people having numerous discussions among themselves and with the clients in order to setup network monitoring. I felt a strange feeling of nostalgia - not for myself but for those papers i was looking at. It was as if i had become them and was remembering the day i was last scribbled on, last turned, last touched. Everything was there - undisturbed.

Strange how people do things for such a long time with such zeal and enthusiasm and move on. They set and care for a thing like their own child - that it should be the best, it should be flawless, it should be "mine" - and just like that one day say goodbye to those very things. So much knowledge, so much information, so much stuff that has now become the "background", so much design, so many processes that no longer even exist - how did they come into place? How was it when they were being worked on? How much research went into their development? Who did all those planning? Was it done in the office hours or after office hours? Was the person who did the implementaiton, for example did it successfully in the first attempt? Where are the people who did all of this now? Why did they leave when they left? So many questions - some would say utterly useless to ask - still stand up!

I never had dealt on a daily basis with anything where i was after many. The appartment houses ever allotted to dad were almost always newly built, the schools I went always had their buildings newly built at that point, the college i went to was a brand new one, the house i lived in with friends in Banalore was a new one, but this is unlike them all - work. When i was a kid someone suggested to have as much fun when there was time, as once one started working, there is no fun and many other things about work. But no one ever told me how to deal with / take the shoes of the "ghosts" at work!

I feel so numb now, am sure will just climb in my sheets as soon as i reach my appartment. I did not have the heart to throw away those papers - none of them ... just cleaned them off and left them as they were in those closets. Among all the stuff were also a bunch of visiting cards of the people who might have been the team members probably when the team was found long back - read the names and wondered if would ever find those people. So much associated history is lost with what and where we work that it wont be a good feeling when someone says - "Oh it is just work!"

Song: क्यों बार बार आंखों में तुम, करवट बदलते हो ...