Life as Unusual Work as Usual: A Work-Life Toolkit

By Ayon Banerjee

- ‘Life is not an umbrella you leave outside while entering work, and vice versa’, says Ayon Banerjee, as he presents his third instalment of life bytes sitting on overlapping boundaries of work & life of an Everyperson. A compelling page-turner full of real-life anecdotes, deep insights & actionable tips that help you navigate through work & life in a post-pandemic world. This is a collection that will make you pause, reflect & smile in agreement as Ayon takes you along on a new journey in his old, folksy conversational style that you’ve loved in his earlier books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Aug 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9789358830309

Ayon Banerjee

Ayon Banerjee, an Asia Pacific Leader for a Fortune 100 Organization is a keen observer of human behavior & someone who loves documenting his life and work as he goes along by collecting & connecting ideas. Over the years, Ayon’s articles have garnered a steady and diverse readership from around the world. This book is the third instalment of heterogeneous articles & blog entries, particularly written by him as the world was slowly recovering from the Covid 19 nightmare. Like most bloggers, Ayon’s inspirations are scattered – from his own life to the lives of people he observes, the books he reads and the dots he loves to join in his spare time. Though these are all different posts written at different times, the common theme that perhaps links them, is that they all sit on overlapping boundaries of work and life – a narration of events, relationships, successes, and failures which add up into the randomness of life that we all like to construct backwards into coherent stories. Ayon believes that at some point while you are reading this book, his story might intersect with yours, and make you reflect. And smile.

Book preview

Preface

Is children from the pre-internet era, we would invent a lot of games our long evenings.

One such game was called Memory.

In this, the first person in the group would say a word — (Say India). The second one needed to say the original word + a new one (So, it would be India, China). The 3rd guy would then have to say the first two words and add a third one (India, China, Japan) And so on.

Depending on who missed out a word first (either a word itself or the sequence), the participants would get eliminated one by one from the game.

The winner used to be the person who could hold on to the maximum number of names in their correct sequence, and for the longest duration.

As I grow older, I find myself reflecting more and more on my changing faculties. Every year, each of us becomes a different person when compared to the year before, with revised degrees of drive, spirit, beliefs, and triggers.

We all peak in some particular aspects at specific corners of life. Every age has a lesson for us, and every year modifies us a little bit with its events and the emotional housekeeping that these events do on us. I would say that about 15% of these changes are somewhat permanent and ‘stick’ to the residual personality of ours for good. However, it’s unfortunate that we often trade most of our yesterdays for our todays, and most of our todays for our tomorrows. As we grow into the skin of today, we automatically assume that it is essential to shed the skin of yesterday.

This July, I’ll add one more year to my life. Having slowed down a little bit in recent years, I obviously (& subconsciously) try to constantly measure the perceptible changes in myself during the past one year since my previous birthday. It goes without saying that there are many — physical, psychological, and also spiritual, even when the externals seem to have barely altered. I can sense my body a little older than before, with some

new limits added to old limitations. My knees are significantly weaker than last year (and I have had to consciously give up running). Though I have reading glasses for four years now, I have started using them seriously only in the past year or so. My mind too is undergoing its own aging process - sometimes exerting its elderly strictures on the playful heart, and at other times swaying to the odd note of the now-buried youngster from a distant past. I no longer possess the razor-sharp memory of my youth and I need to write down telephone numbers (.sometimes, even names). Some of my contemporaries have been placed under medication for diabetes, high blood pressure and other lifestyle ailments. And then there are others who have already departed for their next planes of existence.

Yes friends — no matter how much we play it down with humor , growing older is not sexy. It is like crossing over to the second half of a wonderful book or entering a dark cinema after the intermission - where you realize that the good parts are already over and hereafter it is just a reluctant trot till you reach the back cover or till the credits roll up. It is a deeply unsettling thought that your yesterdays now outnumber your tomorrows and so many innocent dreams shall never see the light of the day in this lifetime. At twenty, the whole world stretches out like an enormous ocean in front of you and you have infinite combinations of choices to hoist your sails and set off for new lands and new adventures. The universe bows to your youth and to its whims. Life is a never-ending realm of possibilities in front of you.

Bit by bit as you grow older, you start letting go of these possibilities — sometimes by design, sometimes by default. One after the other, you start shedding your dreams and making peace with each departure as you head into the next leg of the journey, each day a little narrower than the one before. One by one you start saying goodbyes — to people and to places, getting a little lonelier with each passing year. And the worst part is that you often fail to realize this transition till you are midway through because all this happens when you are too caught up in your theatre, donning masks and playing roles. Then one fine day you realize that you are fortysomething and suddenly cornered by life. No matter how much you blame it for being unfair, life shall annoyingly prove to you that it was otherwise, and it was YOU who missed those bends while gazing at a rainbow over Neverland. Suddenly you realize that there are very few takers for you in this new world — YOU, who used to be the coolest superhero you ever knew! You might not want to believe it, but you are now among the elderly lot — comical people who walk slow, who speak slow, who eat slow, who think slow and who often tell the same stale jokes again and again, thinking that they are still funny.

At twenty, you were a challenger to the Gods. By the time you wrap your 40s, staying respectfully human remains your only humble challenge.

But most of all, what will haunt you and take away your sleep is your resignation to nature. Nothing can be more heart-breaking than the moment when you shake hands with the stranger that you have become, a mediocre and also-ran individual whose aspirations had sadly overshot his capabilities and his destiny. Deep within, each of us wanted to be someone great when we started off. The saddest day of life is when we re-caliber the greatness scale and readjust our limits. That is the day when we say goodbye to our most innocent selves and start our countdown to the end. And no matter how pessimistic I sound as I say this, it happens to everyone. Life mostly burns out and time often runs out when we are still not ready for it. And harsh though it might sound, not everyone weaves & leaves a legacy of a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa. As I grow older and accept the limitations of my life, I also try to list down things that I could still do within my reach (simplifying it with each passing year) , and that could leave me with the solace at the end of my days that I did not surrender my greatness to my fate or to my abilities. I tried, in my own little way.

Hence, one misty morning in 2020 when we were all locked inside our homes due to the onslaught of a new pandemic that was about to ground us for the next thirty months, I thought of compiling some of my journal entries into a book. To my surprise, people from all over the world gave it a lot of love. And before I knew it, I came up with a second book the very next year. Then, a third, a year after. Nothing fancy - just scribbles of an Everyman trying to do life and leave a toolkit behind for other Everymen & Everywomen like himself.

Something like that ‘Memory’ game from my childhood.

An attempt to chronicle cumulative life-bytes from the years going by & creating a user’s manual for the next generation.

Wouldn’t you too like to take a walk into the passing years and reconnect with the You.s whom you are leaving behind while becoming the resultant ‘you’ of today ? Would it not be awesome if we could manage to hold on to the playfulness we had at three , the curiosity we had at seven , the optimism we had at twelve, the aspirations we had at nineteen, the capacity to love without expectations like we had at twenty one, the aggression to win fair & square like we had at twenty five and most of all, the ignorant faith to entrust ourselves to the care of someone larger than us without any self -doubt , like we had as new-borns ?

If you said yes, then hop in. Let’s do this together.

I thank you for picking up this book. I hope it will touch you in a small, positive way.

Ayon Banerjee

July 2023

Toolkit Diaries

The bus doesn't stop here.

During our growing up years in small town India, the private buses, which were the main form of public transport, would compete fiercely with one another, often making unscheduled stops at random places to pick up or drop passengers, much to the annoyance of people seated inside. Then, one day, an out-of-town transporter came in & launched his services. His vehicles didn't just have a better overall upkeep (that included his uniformed staff), but his fleet followed a strict timetable & would stop only at designated stands, at scheduled times. By habit, the townsfolk, used to the earlier & easy-going ways, grumbled & scoffed at such strictures. But the transporter held on. In a few months, however, some (not all) people switched loyalties & started showing up to board his buses on his terms. The old order, meanwhile, kept honking, screeching & overtaking each other, trying to wrest customers from one another. Maybe their business continued to thrive. Maybe not. I can't say because I soon left for the big city ( boarding a bus belonging to the new transporter).

The lesson somehow stayed.

Today, of course, in business as in life in general, the collective aggression (& available click baits) to secure your fleeting attention span, is amplified a million times over.

After assembling the content for my first book, when I was asking title suggestions from friends, many of them suggested that I use a 4-letter cuss word in the title ( with an * to soften it aesthetically), as statistics indicated that many authors have used it to much success. This is obviously not a new tactic. In the early 2000s, there were a few dozen books that came out within a span of a year & each of them had some form of ‘BS" in their titles.

This reminded me of a prominent showman's (in)famous quote, justifying objectification of his woman protagonist — Let them come to see her ****, they will go out forgetting her body & remember the film..

Maybe it worked for the gentleman. As it may have worked for authors who use catchy baits of controversy & language to lure an audience in.

But I refused. I went for a white cover. No lurid images. No provocative words. No click baits or sensationalism on social media (in fact — no social media at all).

True, I didn't end up with a million-copy bestseller (a bestseller, nevertheless) But I found my niche where I wanted to make a difference. On most weekends during the past 3 years, as I reply to messages from readers (majority of whom are not even personally known to me) who reach out & write to me that I made a small difference in their lives, I know I am getting there. My craft may have imperfections, but my intent doesn't.

As for the audience I couldn't reach, all I can say is, I tried & I failed. Because, like the transporter in my small town, I didn't want to honk & brake at every doorstep, trying to please everyone & ending up pleasing no one. I'd rather please a handful, my way.

Thank you.

Chapter One

'Someone I used to know' - Ten lessons from the last ten years

Five hours to go.

I'm at my brother's Gurgaon flat, a little restless, waiting to start for the airport. It's not a happy feeling when you leave your shores and are taking off into the unknown. By nature, I hate goodbyes. And for multiple reasons, this particular goodbye is getting heavy for me to handle. The first nip in the Delhi air saddens me even more because I know I'm going to miss many more things about my life in India in the years to come, besides just the winter of Delhi. I'm reading Mitch Albom's ‘Timekeeper', an adult fable about the first man on earth who thought of measuring time, and who went ahead to become "Father Time" by inventing the first clock in this world. It is about the punishment he undergoes for daring to do so, getting banished into a cave for centuries and subjected to millions of voices floating out of a pool inside the cave — voices belonging to people of the world, each one in a race with time, some ahead of, and others behind it, but everyone eventually unhappy with it. Finally, after forty centuries (that start with the fall of the Tower of Babel when Father Time escapes doomsday and drifts into his cave), he is spared from his prison and let loose into the contemporary world below, to seek his atonement and end his ordeal for once and for all. He has a simple mission — to find two people, one who seeks more time, and one who seeks less.

Exactly at Nine PM, my brother & I reach IGI, shake hands & I see him drive off. I walk inside, and soon after, am seated inside the aircraft. Thanks to Albom's compelling narrative, my heart has somehow lifted itself out of melancholy by the time my flight pulls out of the runway & into the dark skies, tearing me away from the story of thirty-some years of my life and all those people who featured in it. Sipping a glass of merlot, I think of all my time that's gone by & all the time that lies ahead, trying to imagine where would life take me ten years from now.

The years pass. It's exactly ten years on.

I can't say that time ‘just flew', while describing this decade. It's been a slow & deliberate chunk of life, infuriatingly predictable at places & recklessly heart-breaking at others. Inside this decade I hit forty, and like it happens to everyone, the world around me sped up while I slowed down, when I was passed over for promotions ( or new roles), something unknown to me before, where I damaged my knee & had to discontinue my favorite sport (& accept my trademark half-limp whenever I was tired), and where, among other things, I was also careless enough to lose not just one, but both my parents. However, this has also been a decade of introspection for me as life forced me to peel layer after layer & go within myself. Ten years back, had I been documenting the preceding decade, my list would have comprised of my trophies & the stories around them. This time around, it's different. Let me try. To summarize my top 10 learnings from the last 10 years.

1. You never ‘arrive’ — When I signed up for my new job 10 years ago, my egoic mind was ecstatic that I had finally ‘arrived' and become an Asia Pacific business leader while still in my 30s, a dream for me in my 20s. As I combed through five different roles across different businesses in these 10 years, I had to go back to square one every single time. No longer armed with the good fortune of youth, I also faced curve balls at most junctures, headwinds that mellowed me bit by bit & made me shed my cockiness.

For the first time I started to notice people with slower career trajectories, now that I too had been humbled into my new ordinariness by life, something like getting downgraded to Economy after being used to flying Biz Class for all your life. Humility (the real kind, not just the posturing) is liberating. I no longer aspire to become the fastest rat today (& no sour grapes, this). For me, the journey matters more today than the destination. When a pleasurable destination shows up, I am grateful. When it doesn't, I try to be graceful. I have stopped living the GPS version of my life. I have finally become a traveler who is not dying to arrive anywhere out