Day One.

May 12, 2008.
8.40 am





'Bhaiya yeh whirlpool ki factory kahan hai?', I asked a rickshaw wala frantically.



'wunphool?'


'No. Whirlpool?'



'Are haan. wunphool.'



'Nahi whir..'



'Wo washing machine waaali na? seedha ja ..gol chakkar aaaga..mud mat ..seeeeedhaa..ulte haath pe naala dikhe? Bas wahin.'

I was back on the cracking road. Bikes meandered ahead of me, like they always do in congested traffic. I hate them for this. I must have been the only chump riding a car on that nightmarish road. My windscreen had been beclouded by the fumes churned out by innumerable autos crawling ahead of me. Forget about the time, I was fighting to just make it to the factory today.

Anyhow I finally managed to reach the factory by 10 am. The stupid rickshaw guy had sent me to some small home-appliance maker shop in old Faridabad.


I had to park my car outside the gate becuase the guard wouldn't allow me to park without an employee card.

Whirlpool of India Limited. It was a huge unit. It had several sub units too - sheetmetal, vacuum forming, paint etc. Each of them were enclosed in a separate buildings having alternating shades of blue and white. The employees too were all neatly dressed in blue shirts and black trousers.
'Some kind of colour code in the company', I thought.



I was required to report to Mr. Rakesh Bhatia, who was the senior manager there.

I called up Mayank.

'Kahan aana hai yaar?'

'Come to Mr. Bhatia's room. Hum bhi yahin hai.'


Mayank and Siddharth were the other two trainees from IIT Delhi. They had reached there long back. I was over an hour late.




'Hello Sir.'

'Hi. I am Rakesh. You must be Sagar?'

I nodded obediently.

'You guys make yourself comfortable here. I'll be back in a minute'.





After some random chit-chatting we decided to take a stroll around in the factory. On our way out, our eyes independently browsed for any signs of the female species among the employees. It is almost like the foremost principle of guy-hood. In college, Pushkin- a friend of mine, used to joke about guys having radars for sensing the proximity of the female species. The signals from here were however, expectedly negative.

As we walked past the different shops, there was this entire humanity engaged in assembly lines. Unit after unit, they worked without a pause. I think If ever one of them was asked to read out its job description, it would be like:


Pick the compressor.Place the compressor.
Pick the compressor.Place the compressor.
ad inf.


And yet there were people who had spent a good 20 years in their lives doing this. Bloody hell.



In the middle of acquainting ourselves with a heap of technical crap, we came across the pantry for the first time. It was a small-ish room having all the stuff needed for making your own coffee. It served as a kind of a breathing space for everyone within the ruthless confines of the corporate world. It was also home to some of the office gossips and rumours that circulated around.
We were to visit this room a LOT in the next two months.



After that we rambled about some more till the clock stuck five. Time to hit the road.