alice's peephole

 Rewatching the Hunger Games as an adult is making me wonder just how much inspiration the author took from Big4 consulting! Let me not be the one to call this revered career path, that affords sociopaths and sycophants alike the opportunity to enter any room believing they are the smartest person there, a total made-up fantasy. But the opening line by Katniss’ mentor and my firm-assigned “womentor” (a mentor for women leaders, obviously ) was uncannily similar – “You need to get people to like you”. Now this may sound quite obvious to many, but for a career “industry” type such as myself, it occurred to me quite late in my switch to consulting that getting people (your partner) to like you was much more important than the work you do, no matter the length and breadth of the KPIs mentioned on Workday. The second piece of Tribute à Victor knowledge imparted was, “you need to find sponsors”. I had in fact been informed of the same during my own Womentoring session. Up until then, I ...

  In my 20s, I worked a lot more hours. It was physically, mentally, and even socially taxing — whether racing through mad timelines for events or whatever came in between those gigs. And yet, somehow, I seemed less exhausted. Maybe my memory is coloured by nostalgia, but the burnout I feel since joining consulting is constant — overwhelmingly numbing, paralyzingly draining, leaving me an anxious wreck. I think I used to be someone who was nonchalant about many things. Lately, life seems determined to teach me to worry about every possible and impossible outcome — and still be caught off guard. After over 2.5 years back in India, having joined Big 4 consulting, I am still aghast at the backstabbing, calculative, “this is normal in corporate” BS around me. I learned long ago that I can be naive, believing in the goodness of people — that I prefer to start from trust until someone proves me wrong, rather than the other way around. But consulting is a whole different ballgame. Wha...

  There is not just one India. And what I have been privileged to experience on my recent travels, there won’t be for a long time. What is it that we do every day in cities? We wake up to an alarm, not the sun or our body clock. We rush to get dressed for work or the gym or whatever is the first appointment of the day. We spend our day in a controlled, man-made environment – air conditioning, phone screens, buildings, traffic, emails and meetings. Two weeks away from this showed me something that I never truly knew about myself. I don’t dislike travel. Everyone is so gung-ho about travel and I always found it overrated. But that might be because for the 10 years I lived in Germany, travel for me meant visiting the city centre of another European city. Cute streets, a pretty church, a peaceful river flowing by, in essence a little “same same but different”. Without a car or a driving licence, those were the only trips I managed to plan. Of everything that I saw in two weeks of...