Tuesday, September 11, 2007

I have decided to post some interesting snippets from the novel. Here is the opening few pages:

Chapter 1

Domes resembling giant crystal balls and spires like upright magic wands dominated the skyline. The wands seemed to have mesmerized the city in a moment from the fourteenth century.
The scene from the window behind me couldn’t be dated quite so precisely: a blameless sapphire sky reflecting the aquamarine of the Sea of Marmara. A huge gull flew past shrieking its primeval cry and a chilly breeze brought in the smell of the sea.
Without turning away from the Blue Mosque I angled my head to let the breeze freshen me. It had snowed quite heavily in Istanbul two days back and the streets had still been covered when I’d arrived at sunrise off a red eye flight from New Delhi. But by now the clear weather had melted the last remnants off the cobbled heritage path on which my hotel stood, revealing a colorful mural: the famous eye under whose vigil no evil could harm you.
With all the intrigue I’d landed myself in I could use the Eye now. I noticed the wall of the newspaper kiosk across the street festooned with clay eye pendants and resolved to pick one up later. My ordinary corporate neck needed some extra-ordinary protection.
From my portfolio I took out the postcard that had started it all and read it carefully even though I knew most of it by heart now.
The first few times I’d had to strain to read the tiny typewritten script but now my eyes flew over the words.
Hello Sanchit,
I write to you on behalf of The Tuning Folks Collective. You may have heard of us. We are a secret guild of management professionals who have come together to harmonize people’s aspirations with the new demanding rhythms of work life.
Work is the centrepiece of our lives. It defines our very existence. We spend more time at it than anywhere else. Voluntarily.
A rational being would show up in such a space every day only if it gave her happiness, energy, carmaderie, learning and purposefulness. Yet, to many of us work means stress; a sense of clutter with too many initiatives; a constantly unsettled feeling due to the incessant flux. We’re always rushing strapped for time, tired, mostly sleep indebted; seemingly drifting without a purpose; and above all beset with a nagging sense of unease that could almost be termed FEAR!
You don’t agree? Consider this. Hundred percent of the people we surveyed fantasize about an early retirement! Only twenty percent said they looked forward to going to work everyday.
Its official! We are getting increasingly tuned out of the new corporate algorithm, an algorithm increasingly driven by the drumbeats of shareholder expectations of unbridled growth.
Why would anyone volunteer for such a fate? Sure we have to earn a living but do we have to give up our lives? Our work-place was meant to be our temple but there are definite signs of it turning into our tomb.
The planet too is on the verge of collapse! Driven by our shareholder owners into maximizing growth in the short term, we are taking perilous decisions that are jeopardizing the earth. Have our new corporate gods forgotten that cancer too is a growth?
The Tuning Folks Collective believes that the entire order is headed for a breakdown unless we rewrite the code that runs the corporatist engine. We are not plugging a communist ideology here; in fact we are against ideologies and isms. All we are saying is give ‘work’ a chance.
We’ve had modest success in our endeavor and you can read all about it in a journal we bring out every month called The Tuning Folks Journal. The Collective also aspires to work in the arena of non-organizational people challenges at community and global level, though our forays into this realm have been even more humble.

We write to you because every year we induct a new crop of core People Tuners into our guild for which we get nominations from all over the world. You, Sanchit, have been nominated for the first leg of The Collective’s selection process. This is based on your nominator’s report on your exceptional one on one people-engagement skills and your contribution in bettering the lot of your workforce. We congratulate you for having made a difference to your constituency and urge you to continue the good work.
For the first phase of your selection process, you are requested to come for a meeting in the South Cappadocia region of Turkey. This meeting will commence at 11:00 hours (Turkish time) on the 17th of February and will last the entire day and most of the night as well. Please make arrangements, at your own expense, to be in Istanbul or Ankara by 15th evening or 16th morning. A convenient night coach on the 16th from either of these cities will get you to Cappadocia in time for the start of the meeting on the 17th. The exact venue of the meeting will be notified in the English newspaper Turkish Daily News where you should look out for the cryptic clue 6 down of the daily crossword. Once you have found the location, please do not try to research it among the locals. This secrecy is important because we would not like the whereabouts of this meeting to be known to our enemies. As you would realize, we have our own set of ill wishers who have been trying to disrupt our efforts for a long time now and have stepped up their operations of late. In fact, you are requested to keep the entire visit confidential, using a tourist visa to enter and leave Turkey.
Though none of the tourist brochures mentions the location of the meeting, it is there on the maps of the Cappadocia region and all coaches to South Cappadocia stop there.
Let’s have some fun.

SEAL



Master Craftsman
The Tuning Folks Collective


Even now, on my…what was it?…twenty-fifth reread, the post card gave me goose bumps. For I resonated with every word on it. And I was sure my colleagues too would agree whole-heartedly with its condemnation of the working condition. The Collective had certainly caught the pulse of their constituency. Of course their ardent followers claimed much more; they said The Collective had got the corporates by the jugular. This, no doubt, was an exaggeration, though even The Collective’s worst critics admitted that they had managed to touch a raw nerve in the corporate body. Whichever side you took, there was no denying the victories they’d notched up in the past decade or so. Neither was there a doubt that an increasing number of folk straining at the organizational yoke considered The Collective to be their messiah. From an underground legend, they were fast turning into an organizational name and many believed they were now preparing for a spectacular innings, which would save work from becoming a curse, a four-letter word uttered with disgust every morning.
Of course there wasn’t any definitive version; just different interpretations of people with different slants. I’d picked up this sketchy log of The Collective’s journey at coffee machines, in the cafeteria and from meeting rooms in the different organizations I’d served. Of late, reams of media stories about The Collective’s stand off with a shareholder caucus had brought some more information about them out into the public domain but things still remained hazy; of late there had been rumors about the murders of People Tuners by shareholders’ agents but they were never conclusive. All this cloak and dagger business had only added to The Collective’s appeal.
The Collective had its own publication, The Tuning Folks Journal, which was widely acclaimed for its tools on organizational development, but it steered clear of any prurient details about the quarrel. In any case The Journal never furnished details of the authors, no bylines, not even the editors’ names, and attempts to contact them were actually discouraged. They took their secrecy very seriously.

3 comments:

Lindley said...

Thank you for sharing your work- I want to read more. Is this a work in progress?

Arjun Shekhar said...

Actually a novel is never finished. But like chewing gum you have to throw it out periodically into the dustbins of the world. So a version was given around to some publishers who have shown initial interest... and then gone to sleep.
I have also signed up an agent (or have they signed me up) in the US but nothing concrete in terms of publication yet.
Sorry for the long spiel but first time authors are pretty full of their woes related to getting published (or not).
Pointedly to your question whether it's a work in progress - the answer is yes. The Baobab, in its current version, certainly needs pruning and nurturing. But like i said i'm pretty much sick of engaging with it for the time being. Hence the walk in blogger's park.

Unknown said...

This novel is very important in humean life.it is a such novel relacted to sush person.
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