Chapter 1 (contd.)

My reread of the letter added nothing further to my knowledge about The Collective. I scrutinized the seal of the Master Craftsman at the end of the letter. It was quite large and graphic. In the centre was a huge tuning fork with a thick trunk and two arms pointing to the sky. Something about the tuning fork made me look closer and as I brought it up to my eyes, it transformed into a giant human figure, arms stretched heavenwards! Around its feet were twelve people, some hitting rubber hammers against the figure’s legs, others measuring the length of the trunk and a few just dancing like dervishes. One figure sat alone on the shoulder of the large human tuning fork, long hair flowing, leaning back against the arm, and playing what looked like a panpipe for the pleasure of the tuners below. It was this figure (obviously the Master Craftsman) that was larger than the others and more surely etched out in the seal.
I wondered, not for the first time, how the Master Craftsman of the secret guild had got me on his radar. Who had nominated me? According to the folk-lore the nominator had to be a core member (limited inner circle who wrote in The Journal) who should have seen the candidate’s work from close quarters for a minimum of two years.
It felt creepy; I had been under observation for so long without knowing it. Who’d been watching me? The Journal was pretty popular in corporate circles in India and the grape wine whispered of many Indian core members but who they were, was of course, a mystery. Legend also had it that if a nominee was not selected, the nominator stood to loose their own membership. So nomination was a serious business and the stakes were very high. Who had gambled with me?
Well I was going to try my best not to let them down. As far as I was concerned, nomination into the list of probables was a privilege, like being chosen into the first sixteen of the Indian Cricket Team. As I locked my hotel room, I reflected on how close I’d come to being a part of that Dream Team many moons ago. If only the blasted match-fixing scandal hadn’t imploded my dream! Aborted it in the womb it did. The enquiry had not been able to prove anything but it had taken its time. And its toll on my career. Having been banned from first class cricket while the enquiry was on (almost eighteen months), my confidence had combusted and my talent had been reduced to tatters. When the committee had declared me eligible for selection again, a few half-hearted innings had produced dismal failures and I’d vowed never to pick up the bat again. I’d put my dream to sleep and had retooled myself to play this Corporate game.
Five years into it, the dream was stirring again. A different game, a different match, but a crack team beckoned again.

Џ

I went down and bought the Turkish Daily News and an eye pendant at the kiosk. I slipped the eye around my neck, opened the paper to the daily crossword and read the cryptic 6 down clue. 6 letters - ‘The azure part of an evergreen rock’. The answer would give me the location of the meeting. I didn’t have too much time to solve it; within three hours or thereabouts the coaches to Cappadocia would depart.
Again I thought of Pause; she was a crossword enthusiast and would have been able to crack this one for me quite easily. I was already missing her and had wanted to talk to her as soon as I landed but had refrained lest it look too eager on my part. Throwing self-respect to the wind, I called from the newspaper booth but her hand phone was switched off. Blow my nose! Now I was in trouble. Clutching the paper against the wind I stared at the clue. Precious minutes later I was still clueless.
The friendly kiosk owner tried to strike up a conversation. “I help?”
I looked up irritated. “You cross?” He asked pointing at the open paper I’d now spread out on his counter.
“You India?” He ignored my attempts to ignore him.
I sighed. “Worry not!” He hurriedly reassured me. “My brother love your country. End of road - his shop. Last but not least. He welcome you special.”
I paid him and walked ahead. Fed with large doses of Europeans and Americans, the locals seemed to find Indians an unusual brown treat. Shopkeepers pounced on me like spiders on a vulnerable colored fly, some to snare me into buying something, others just to play with me. “Hindu?” a stout man lounging outside his stall asked me. “Holy cow?” another one said with Turkish delight writ large on his face.
I walked through the lot without stopping. Until a hand on my chest got too impolite to ignore. I clutched at my portfolio instinctively. Seeing that the one who’d accosted me was a reedy youth, I straightened the shoulders I’d hunched against the cold, uncoiled my spine and reached to my actual height of 186 centimeters.
“Sharukh Khan? You know?” I sighed and slumped back into my usual question mark. Shahrukh Khan wasn’t a topic worthy of my full potential. I actually happened to have studied in the same college at Delhi University around the time the now famous Bollywood actor had graduated. I nodded in affirmation, “Yes Boss…” To my surprise, the reedy young man with gelled hair instantly recognized my answer as the name of one of Shahrukh’s big hits; he grinned, jabbing the air emphatically with his middle finger. If he hadn’t accompanied it with the words, “No. 1”, the gesture would have been deemed obscene.
All of a sudden, inspired by my smile, he broke into a song, presumably from the film, mangling the words into a HinTurk mush that didn’t ring a bell. He urged me to join in but I just blew my nose in reply. Other people had gathered around meanwhile and they were all disappointed I wasn’t being a sport. Three shoeshine boys joined in, presumably to encourage me, but I wasn’t biting. I’d done my bit for this Hindi-Turki Bhai Bhai dialogue; as far as I was concerned, it was now over. All I wanted was to be left alone to think about the ‘evergreen azure rock’.
Thankfully, the song ended after the first stanza as they didn’t know the rest of the words but the effervescent reedy Turk hadn’t quite finished with me yet. “Come shop. Take carpet,” he said.
“Not interested!” I shouted, hoping the volume would convey the message in case he didn’t understand the English. I also waved my hands in front of my nose vehemently to make myself completely clear.
It didn’t work. “Come carpet!” He barked it out like an order this time.
Was he crazy? Did I look like a seth or something? I’d plunged into my savings to make this trip and hadn’t planned on any shopping. “I can cancel my ticket back to India if you sell me a flying carpet for the amount,” I joked.
He didn’t get it. He looked at me dead serious and said, “Turkish carpet must.” I looked around at the crowd for support; I was sure they’d agree it was unfair to expect me to buy a carpet as a payoff for listening to a film song I hadn’t bothered to buy a tape of back home in India. They didn’t! Every single man of them and the three shoeshine boys felt a carpet was certainly in order. A shiver went down my spine and cradled my sparse buttocks.

Џ

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.

The Five Baobabs

Hi,
how goes? Remember me, Arjun Shekhar, i said i'd be back. Yes sabbatical is over and i'm glad to report progress on all the important KPI.s/ targets/ goals for the last six months. Basically i was trying to grow 5 baobabs (its a very tenacious tree found in Africa) - belly (health), baby (getting from and giving Saanjh therapy), buddha (meditating on my spirit), browsing ability (how to experience life slowly), and book (creatively expressing how i am feeling today). The first four baobabs have taken root and hopefully shall fruit in the coming months. It is the fifth of my baobabs that i write to you about. I need your help in nurturing it. Its getting a bit wild and out of hand, you see. Unmanageable, actually because its outgrown the others and is now trying to eat into their time in my mind. I write to you because i think i've figured a way to keep it busy and out of my hair; you see this one is a talking baobab and its forever hungry for a dialogue. so i've decided to take it out for a walk in bloggers' park. It feeds on anything - suggestions, comments, feedback, jibes, vibes any communication will do.
In a way, when you talk to my fifth baobab you will be talking to yourself. Because the hero of my book could easily be any of us. Of course, what happens to him is only something we wish would happen to us.
From his ordinary organizational life of a corporate executive he is suddenly sucked into the secret world of a guild of anonymous superheroes who are out to transform the organizational world. They want to compose a new rhythm (did i say algorithm) for the organizational dance to make it more playful, creative, fun and most important more effectively suited to the emerging reality. The secret society (as you might have guessed from the preceeding metaphor) is called The Tuning Folks Collective.
The book is a ...hmmmm....it's a.....mmm.....it's pretty mixed up actually - satire, mystery, love story all rolled into one, and i forgot funny (which is why this strange post) - basically it's a slice from our lives...not as we live them but as we hoped they would turn out.
So, you will make the time for my fifth baobab won't you? You could meet it at bloggers' park here or in some cases it'll be happy to sleep over. Don't worry i'll post only snippets here not the entire thing. For the sleep over, viz. entire manuscript, you'll have to give me consent and an email id. Say no only if ....you don't have any baobabs of your own that you want to walk my way sometime - kidding! i love trees.
Love,
arjun (and he'll love you back)

Author Bio:
I have been the founder partner of an Organizational Development Consulting organization called Vyaktitva for the last ten years and have worked in corporates in HR for seven years before that. I have experienced different sectors, sizes and types of organizations from within. And everywhere I run into the following paradox. People are getting paid very highly but their dream is to retire early. They want to slog and earn money for a future payoff. They are willing to suffer the pressure cooker environment of the organization hoping that the final dish, which they can eat only when they leave the place, will be worthwhile and payoff for their current stress.
Recently, I decided to take an year's sabbatical to explore this paradox and write about it in an entertaining way. Out popped A Flawed God, a synopsis of which i promise to post here as and when i get around to it or if a rush of comments on my blog pressures me into it, whichever comes first.

My other passion is building in youth socially responsible leadership behaviors through transformatory social action. 14 years ago, my wife and I founded a non profit organization called Pravah that works with schools, colleges, teachers and young social entrepreneurs. I volunteer there a minimum of 2 days a week ever since its inception.