Break-up

So finally I managed to have the break-up. After almost 20 years of association. No, I am not talking about my marriage. I don’t think it will happen in the near future, my wife has been reasonably nice. Me too! In fact I was thinking of asking her to accompany me to one of the “Kiss-Of-Love” venues where people were planning to kiss in public to protest against moral policing. Good that I put that thought outside my mind, else the divorce would have been imminent. Due to her huge disappointment of me not able to kiss in public to show my intimacy to her and also due to the detention and harassment by the police force – the other ones not the moral ones!

Sorry, I got digressed. What to do? many things do happen around me in this world. How much ever I try, I am not able to deal with the world as it is, not as it should be.

Coming to the original break up, it’s with the BSNL, my telephone service provider. Every other week, the modem used to only blink with no luck for me to connect to the external world through either voice or data. It had been happening for last six months. I patiently waited after registering a complaint each time, like a roshi in a Zen retreat. They used to come and fix the line fault after a week or later and then close the complaint. Needless to say the link was up for me only in alternate weeks. My final complaint in this series took an ugly turn, they closed the request successfully even without fixing the problem.  That was when I decided to surrender the connection. I walked into their office.

“You should have met Narasimha” the lady at the office told me when I gave her the letter. She didn’t utter these words initially even after happily accepting the letter and not even questioning me as why I was taking that drastic step. It looked to me as if she was assigned the task of getting closed as many connections as possible. She was only interested in knowing whether I was returning the telephone instrument that they had provided me free 20 years back which I had thrown away after it becoming defunct within one year of usage! The value of the instrument now is sub-zero. Only when I complained to her verbally that the line has been getting disconnected frequently she mentioned the holy existence of Narasimha!

You may not know who this Narasimha is. I also did not know till then. He is the regional manager at BSNL. In all probability, he would have been that clerk sitting at the desk collecting the application form for a new connection, 21 years back. When I had taken a day’s leave from work to stand in the long queue just to submit the form.  I still remember how tense I was when the clerk was checking whether all documentation was in order, if not it would cost me another day’s leave. Yes, after a year or so, telephone bells rang in my house for the first time, I had distributed sweets to my colleagues to celebrate the happy occasion. So this Narasimha is still in that world, he wants the customers to come and meet him to get their problems resolved.

Yes, it is right, Narasimha is the one who killed the evil demon Hiranyakashipu and no doubt he was very powerful. At that time there was a purpose for Narasimha to be half-nara ( half-human ) and half-simha ( half-lion ) which enabled him to eliminate the evil. But regional managers, named after Narasimha can show more human aspects and less of Simha ones. They can show more passion towards services to their customers by all means  - if needed even by kisses, if not possible in public at least in private. They should change quickly, else people will move to other service providers like what I did. Else no region will exist for Narasimha to rule!