Of Bala Rao and other termites

My first job, after the MBA, was with a company in Kolkata that is in the business of cigarettes - need we say more? Bala Rao, the chap I reported to on the first day of my career, is now thankfully retired, but presumably still a nuisance to someone, somewhere. When I joined this company in 1991, he had already been put out to pasture at a place in one of the company's offices in Tollygunge. This was Bala's private fiefdom; he was the king and the management trainees, all eight of us, were slaves to his wishes.
I was the first to report to work and spent the large part of my initial month doing his personal work for him such as delivering his share certificates to some decrepit building that housed his broker or writing out a precis of a book that he would never read. He had an opinion on everything I did and was particularly nasty in a caustic, British sort of way; he would say something acerbic and laugh in a series of short coughs, much like a leopard with a hernia. Having been a Wodehouse fan myself, I often rehearsed my repartee in my mind, but was too scared to have a go at him - those days jobs weren't exactly easy to come by and my financial condition was far from secure. What remains a million dollar question is just how he had got into IIM Calcutta - he had the intelligence of a cabbage and emotional development of a termite, without unduly seeming to insult the biological spectrum to which they both belong.

But then that was much before I learnt about how organisations, and the rules of political alignment within them, work. Many organisations actually reward fellows like Bala for being loyal, despite widespread proof of their incompetence. Look around you, irrespective of the nature of the organisation you are associated with, and you will see doctors, managers, civil engineers, artistes and sportsmen comfortably snuggled into a corner of the organisation marked "for idiots only".
Let's come back to Bala. He once told me (and he was dead serious), "There are two ways to do things in this place. There's my way and there's the wrong way."
Possibly the only redeeming feature about Bala is that he gave me enough stuff to fill this blog!

Post Script:
In early March, I went back to Kolkata, after 18 years. I was tempted to meet Bala, to tell him what a worm he had been and how, in the many months that I worked for him, I had had a sick feeling in the stomach that I had never felt before. I let a second thought prevail; drinking a chilled beer on my first evening with a dear classmate of mine, one could think of many things that were pleasanter to contemplate. The need for retribution was past.