Satisfied with a Clerical Job – Career Memoirs
Let me give you a quick outline of my career journey!
It all started with a strong determination to start working and earning money, driven by a grand illusion I had after being completely captivated by the teachings of India’s spiritual giants. I won’t go into the details of my deep, platonic love story with RIG (Reincarnation of God), but if you’re curious, you can click on the link and read it.
In short, the GodMan (Reincarnation of God, RIG hereinafter) had found God, I had found and recognized him, so naturally, I believed I would soon find God too. It was as if the logic was flawless in my number 5 ruled mind. Now, this GodMan was financially poor, so I decided that I would get a job with a good salary, marry RIG, and live happily ever after!
But, as we all know, the job market was never easy, especially back in the early 1990s. There was no internet, no online job portals, so I handed my resume to numerous placement agencies, hoping they could place me somewhere.
Since I was just a plain graduate, the jobs I landed were clerical in nature. For instance, my designation at Salora International, a TV selling company, was Public Relation Officer (PRO), but my actual job was more of a receptionist. I’d receive calls, transfer them to the right person (there was no EPABX in the office—it was just a single long hall with people at their desks), take down customer complaints, write down names, addresses, and nearby locations on a ‘Call Sheet,’ and hand it over to the Service Engineers.
I worked various jobs pre and post my NIIT degree, but they were all clerical—Data Entry Operator, filing, getting memos signed, etc. So how was I satisfied with such jobs when I knew they could easily be done by someone who didn’t even finish Class 8? There was no real need for an English-speaking honors graduate from Calcutta University to do such work! (And by the way, English-speaking skills were, and still are, quite rare in Kolkata because political leaders here believed that if the general populace learned English, it would be difficult to provide them with suitable jobs. So, the solution? Remove English from the primary section, ensuring most of Bengal would speak Bengali and some broken English.)
So, how did I manage to self-counsel myself to keep performing these jobs?
Well, I had read in Shri Ramakrishna Kathaamrita that if someone is interested in pursuing a spiritual path, they shouldn’t pay too much attention to their profession or job. If they get too caught up in making and hoarding money, their mindset could quickly shift to a materialistic one, and they’d get derailed from their spiritual journey.
(Deep sigh) So, there I was, trying to make money to support RIG’s materialistic needs, but because I was failing to land a good, high-paying job, I self-counseled myself into believing that maybe God didn’t want me to get derailed after all. Yes, life really is all about convenient self-counseling!
