Corporate Ladders and…. snakes

If you were walking in Lalbagh in early September, on a Saturday  morning, you would have spotted a bunch of people congregate around the roundabout just inside Lalbagh, near the West Gate of the park. Not surprising you might say -people gather around all the time in Lalbagh. But this group was different- all of them were dressed identically, which is to say that all of them wore the same T-shirt – bearing the proud name ‘EXITE Technologies – , and used the same brand of shoes, and all of them had their smart watches strapped on. There were perhaps about ten of them, and they seemed to be  waiting for someone. 

In the meanwhile, the conversation in the group was intense. EXITE was in the tech business, and everyone knows how intensely competitive that is, so corporate rivalries were always palpable. There was Wilson’s group – the Product Development lot – and there was Shalini’s group, the Marketing lot.  The groups were clustered around their bosses – Wilson had his circle and Shalini had her circle, and there was little communication between the two groups. There were cursory acknowledgements, of course, but there was a curious tension between the groups. 

As EXITE was in the tech business, the Product Development people felt that they were the only people who mattered, and that their great products would have sold anyway without much help from the marketing folks. On the other hand, the marketing group felt that they had the pulse of the market, and knew what the market wanted, and the right way to price their products, and that the tech people really had to just work around  what they prescribed. 

The Product group had been working very hard on putting together a new messaging app, and one that they claimed would replace every similar product in the world. But the Marketing group felt that this was not a tenable proposition, and were convinced that EXITE was putting valuable resources into a product that would really not sell. This conflict was what had brought that white man to India – Headquarters wanted an on-the-spot assessment of the situation.

But of course, beyond the immediate claims of these two key departments, lay hidden the larger question-  who would own the biggest corporate territory.

There were promotions in the offing as well, for it was that time of year, and everyone was keen to put their best foot forward, especially as today, the big boss – let’s call him Harvey Scott – would be present. Harvey Scott was from the US, and he had just arrived in Bangalore, and this was his first visit to India. 

Keen as ever to keep up with his fitness schedule, Scott had decided to meet his colleagues in Lalbagh, and take them out, as he put it, for a ‘corporate run’, putting them through their paces. For this week, he had decided to get the Product Development Group and the Marketing Group together for the Lalbagh run. He would get a better feel for the corporate dynamics there, he thought, rather than in a formal meeting.

The recession in the IT sector around the world had begun to bite, and even distant Bangalore had begun to feel the heat. There had been talk of corporate re-structuring as well, and it was important to be in Scott’s  good books – no one wanted to look for a new job in the middle of this recession. Even if one could not climb the corporate ladder, it was important to be able to at least stay on, and not fall off it, or slip down the proverbial snake.

The passing observer, on his usual sedate walk in the park, would have said to himself, ‘this was a corporate group on one of those team-training routines where everybody was keen to please the top honcho, who was  the only white man in the group’, and he wouldn’t have been wrong!

In the middle of this group of runners was a white, middle-aged man – Scott – and everyone seemed anxious to be the ones nearest to him . There was much jostling and pushing, and huffing-and-puffing among the runners, but Scott seemed unaware of all the noise around. He looked straight ahead, with a smile that seemed to say “I know it all!”. There was conversation of a sort, too, but not too much. The group of runners had got in from the West gate, and were now running slowly up the steep incline near the Lotus pond, when the incident happened.

A fat snake, perhaps because of the heavy overnight rain, decided that this was a good time to cross the road and look for a drier spot. The snake was a pretty long one – perhaps about three feet – and quite stout as well. The screams that rent the air could have been heard all over the park!

The corporate honchos were stopped in their tracks, till one brave lady – Hema, we can call her – who was among them, announced loudly and breathlessly, that this was just a water-snake that had somehow lost its way and wouldn’t harm people  (unless, of course, the humans in her group decided to kill the snake, she thought to herself). 

The snake didn’t slither away rapidly, but looked this way and that, as if unable to decide whether to go down that slippery road, or take the drier route upwards. She quickly moved forward, picked up the snake, writhing in her hands, ran  up to the lake bund and threw it into the water, before anyone else could react. 

There were loud cries of relief, and the EXITE runners sped up the road and on to the tank-bund, where they gathered around Hema. There were exclamations all around, and Scott organized an impromptu celebratory dance. Scott knew he had the perfect story to tell his wife back in the States, when he would talk to her later in the day. India was really a land of snakes and charming snake-charmers! 

When  Hema had got this job at EXITE, there had been celebrations at home. It had been a very long struggle for her as her family was not very well-to-do and her father had had to struggle to put her through college, but she was academically brilliant, and passed all her exams with flying colours, and was snapped up by EXITE early in the campus placement interviews.

When the re-structuring happened and the pink slips were distributed, it came as no surprise to anyone that Hema got no pink slip and instead, got a promotion.

After all, she had grabbed a snake, and the attention of the big boss, and though there were murmurs among her colleagues (for Hema was not very popular in the office, and generally disliked for her English accent and her fiercely-held  views on everything under the sun), Hema herself felt that it was a promotion that was really long overdue. Perhaps she would now get that longed-for trip to the Silicon Valley, and learn what the IT business was really like.

Who would know that she had climbed the corporate ladder by grabbing hold of a snake?