It’s not like we don’t know what working culture in India is like. It’s inhabitable in most places. The situation is such that if you find a good and kind team to work in a corporation that also pays you justifiably, you’re considered lucky. Yes, lucky because you found the bare minimum; because that’s not common. Still, all of us settle for that grind because alternatives to a bad place can be even worse.
But in all the chaos comes a space, a saturation point, beyond which you cannot bear the nuisance. It doesn’t come easily. It builds with one unresolved issue over another and yet another. It piles up every day and you begin questioning how long can you put up with it. This is when you decide you’ll go one day at a time. But soon it converts into one hour at a time and then one second at a time until you reach a culmination point and realise you can’t have it any longer.
But even then, you still try to raise issues, try and have a word with HR, with your manager, with whosoever who’d lend you an ear, but then you realise it’s a corporate and that understanding doesn’t usually lead to any productive outcome and you do the deed – you resign.
What follows next can be best described as a glitch in the matrix. It’s like a load has lifted from your chest. Now, you just don’t have to care. It’s like background music has been added to life. Suddenly, everything is pleasant, everything blossoms. There’s magic in the air, hell, you feel like a wizard. That transformation is better lived than told. Suddenly, the cards on the table flip and you get to take control and release all that was pent up. You get to give feedback and be as honest as possible. Everything around you feels funny.
The notice period can be considered a paid vacation, one of those rare moments you’d actually like coming to the office. You can just not see texts that perturb you at the weekend. You can tell your higher ups how you felt wronged. The best is when an important meeting occurs, and your team is loaded with new KRAs, and you’re a part of that meeting but nothing that was communicated in the meeting applies to you. What. A. Feeling!
The reins are in your hand and you can operate however you want because you don’t owe anyone anything anymore, and that’s the best feeling. It’s like getting liberated from a toxic relationship. You know, there might be a scenario where you actually like your team, and you find it hard to let them go, but then the corporate system doesn’t like you. To this corporate wheel, every part of you is replaceable. And so, you cherish and gather good relationships and decide to move on because you know what you deserve and you know it’s not this, it’s not being exploited.
Of course, it’s sad whenever it comes to this – leaving. Often, reaching that space comes after a lot of turbulence and none of us deserve that. The cost of hard work shouldn’t be giving up on the very idea of living life itself. What happens in our society is that corporations think they own you just because they pay you, conveniently forgetting they pay you for your services. On top of that, they don’t pay you enough. So when you finally decide to move on, the last few days in that company become amusing. Because you see through the corporate bullshit and you know you’ve transgressed and you’re on to something exponentially better. There’s no better feeling than this.
