I am Bandish Kakkar and today’s my 27th birthday. I have been working in Mumbai for the past 3 years and life couldn’t be any better. Public Relation was never really my dream job profile but I have got to say that it grows on you. Life is tough for a PR manager and the crowd keeps getting tougher every year. But when you are 3 years into the mad-race, you are not a struggler anymore; you can easily hold your own. You must be wondering why I chose this point in my life to tell my story, well that is because I suspect that life, as I know it, is nearing an end…
My story begins in a 2nd floor flat of Sector 46, Chandigarh; which I called home for the first 17 years of my life. I come from a middle class background and was fortunate enough to receive an English-medium education. My parents were very strict in general but they were always most concerned about my studies. I was always good at studies but never the topper. One can say that early on I realized that life is lonely at the top and I actively worked towards staying near the top but never going that extra mile.
It would frustrate my parents that I was never inclined towards giving my best to my education but they were always somewhat placated by my all rounder performance.
After I finished school, I decided to study in Delhi and experience hostel life. So I applied and got rejected and applied some more and got selected in a decent DU college on South campus. Three years of graduation in Mass communication followed by an MBA in Marketing and I was a polished product, ready for any corporate experience!
Now you can not stay in Delhi for 5 years and not fall in love with it. But it happened with me…I loved all my friends and all the good times I had with them but I never liked Delhi. So when I got placed in Mumbai for my first job ever, I was more than elated! I was relieved.
May be I was never meant to seek stability. I know for a fact that I have always had pirate like inclinations for freedom in me. I wonder if my parents knew of it right from my birth and decided to give me a totally anti-freedom name, Bandish! I like to think myself an adventurer and have always taken up new opportunities which life dished out. Life, in turn, never disappointed me and presented me with a satisfactorily smooth journey towards my goals. So two years ago, when I landed in Mumbai Airport at Santa Cruz; I was pretty sure that life has offered me a golden chance to make things tick my way! Being selected as a Management Trainee at Good Concepts PR agency was not something I was thrilled about, but it being a campus placement, I was very much comfortable joining there instead of searching for job elsewhere.
And thus began my journey to self exploration as a PR professional. As a management trainee, or rather famously called “MT”, you are expected to be “empty”; just as the term sounds! But on the contrary you are brimming with (soon to be crushed) ideas, right out of business school. So you become this “Know-it-all” for all the lesser mortals who have struggled their way up the corporate ladder in the company, years before you! Eventually, you learn to move with the crowd and become one of them.
So in the “empty” 6 months of my work at Good Concepts, I was required to do many things I hoped I would never have to! First and foremost of it was traveling by Mumbai-local train! If in some movie they joked about you getting a free body massage when you travel in the local, it was an understatement!!! You get pushed, pulled, gnawed and clawed at…yeah right; I am talking about the ladies’ compartment.
And then there is the ever essential stage in your corporate life when you have to “get the coffee”! Although in India, it pretty much becomes “chai” (tea) and you don’t really get it yourself, you are just expected to arrange for it. Then there is all the shitty office work like taking prints, arranging stationary for meetings, getting appointments for meetings you are not required to attend and learning the corporate life (with a productivity of 2 hours in a 9 hour work day!).
