IronY!

“Zindagi bhi hamare saath kabhi kabar ajeeb o’ garib khel khelti hai”. This is perhaps Bollywood’s oldest clichés. Even to me, it was no more than a cliché; until a few hours ago.

Let me take you to flashback mode (which happens to be Bollywood’s favourite tool). The year was 2008 - the year when India thrashed Australia in Perth, the year when IPL made its debut and the year when Love Story 2050 was allowed to release. The story is about two great friends – Rohit Chawla and Rahul Saraf (who by the way is me) – both of different shapes and sizes, but both world famous (or rather infamous) college-wide for their well-earned reputation of being PJ stalwarts. The former, the teacher and the latter, a disciple. The former was known for being very slow and the latter just for being ‘low’. Both had to choose between a job offer and an admission offer (in the same B-school). What choice they made is history now. Both lived on with their without reflecting too much on their decisions, for approximately 20 months.

Cut to the present: The fateful day of 4th February 2010 arrived. Rohit Chawla gets a dream campus offer from KPMG – one of the Big Four in auditing (which makes him a direct rival of my sister, and - I have this sinking feeling - of the Shiv Sena too, who off late have a problem with everything). But destiny chooses the same date for the announcement of Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo! HotJobs (which by the way is the property I work for) – subject to approval by the regulatory bodies, which does not include the Shiv Sena.

Now this reminds me of another famous Bollywood dialog which goes as follows (after omitting the lisp defects): “Zindagi mein watt isse nahi lagti ki humne kaunsa rasta chuna, balki isse ki humne kaunsa rasta chchora”

And before the curtains roll, the disclaimers: “Aal izz well”. I’m so happy for Rohit who deserves every bit of his success. And mind you, things are not as bad from my end as have been projected here. I still have the job. And I did misuse some of the literary license to dramaticize the whole affair. And by the way, another story to share – another of zindagi’s ajeeb o’ garib games: Just a couple of days ago, Tanushree (who is one of the very few readers (which includes Google’s crawlers) of this blog) asked me when would the next blog come. I confessed that my life was drab and I have nothing to write about. Well, I had no idea that Destiny so desperately wanted me to write that it would go to this extent.

And just for the records, I don’t have many regrets about the decision made two years ago. As Bollywood would have said “Woh kehte hain na ki jo bhi hota hai achche ke liye hota hai… sahi kehte hain”

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