With over half a decade (just to make it sound nice) of experience behind me, it indeed is a tough task to write about professional experience when asked to. However, I will not shy away from sharing some experiences which could give a fair bit of idea about how my career has been.
There was a pertinent question about my future as I moved out of Air Force in 2007. I appeared for the MBA CET & thankfully cleared it with a good score. The time between deciding to appear & actual exam was less than a month & it was no mean feat is what others felt about getting a good college but till today I continue to thank my luck for it! As I appeared for the Group Discussion, I was asked what I would do post MBA, I would join the airlines sector, was my reply. I did manage to achieve that ambition of mine, joining Kingfisher Airlines in 2009, in the middle of the economic downturn of 2008-9.
During my days in Department of Management Sciences, University of Pune (PUMBA), I kept on discussing with my friends inside and outside the B-School, about how I would end up closing the company I would join. There was a theory which was laughed at even by my colleagues in Kingfisher. I once said, that the industry is bleeding, we should close down Kingfisher and join some industry body and claim that for the larger good of the industry, we sacrificed the smaller good of the company! Little did people know at that time, that Kingfisher indeed would shut down, with the downfall starting from the month I joined with salary payments getting delayed for the first time.
Thankfully I had quit well in time, but this luck continued – when I joined one of the Big 4s in consulting, a close relative called to say that now the company will not close down, the clients may. Well he was true, the company did not, but they did close down the Mumbai office of the division I was working in, luckily again I had left a few days ago and headed to my existing company in Pune, which closed down its Singapore office after my visit few months ago, shifting the sole person to USA – speaking of which I remember how the US government closed (shut-down) for the first time in many years just within days of me landing in USA for my first ever visit in September 2013. When I went there next, in 2014 to Dallas, they found the first patient of Ebola in Dallas, few days after I left!
Personal visits to different countries are no different – The Taksim square riots started after visiting Turkey with my better half and so did the Russian annexation of Crimea and crisis in Ukraine after our visit to Russia in 2013. This trend dates back to 1999, when IC814 was hijacked from Khatmandu exactly a month after I took off from there and the Maoist movement expanded!
I thought the latest travels to Italy were safe because nothing happened in the country for few months until a massive fire led to temporary closure of the Rome airport from where we had arrived and departed.
After reading this myself I am sure I will continue to make a note of these co-incidences and make it a bigger collection to share, I thought of giving you a different account of this half a decade and hope that you do not imagine me the next time you read – “Buri Nazar wale, tera muh Kala”. What else to say but my advice to everybody is to love their job and not their company, which may cease to exist soon!
