Not a child's play

When aspirational MBAs or CAs that I needed to handle in my career in Mumbai seemed like child's play

In my craft business set-up in Santiniketan, a few artisans are direct employees. Many others, especially muslim women, who are famous for their skills in kantha embroidery, choose to work from home and get paid per piece. Each of the employees at my design studio oversee the work of 25 or 30 women who do the job for us.

Many of the other crafts I work with like, wood, metal, bamboo, horn etc are also not by employees but free agents who work on per piece payments. But Santiniketan being a small place, and I having now worked with most of them for over 15 years, they have become employees almost. They share with me their everyday travails, take my opinion on problems they face and how to solve them and last but not the least, often borrow money to tide over emergencies.

One such artisan, a guy who makes wonderful products in bamboo cane, delivers whenever we order products for our store. One day when we seemed to be in short supply of bamboo lampshades, I asked one of my shop assistants to call him and order more. She looked at me hesitantly and said he is not available. “He is in jail,” she added rather casually. I nearly choked and asked why, because he didn’t look to me like he could say a boo to a goose. “His sister’s husband hung himself in their house,” she explained, and “therefore he, his wife and his mother have all been locked up,” she added.

In my work life in Mumbai, I had handled many a notice of quitting from junior colleagues. But back there, most of them were worried only about their pay packages. Their loyalty to any company or position lasted only till they were offered a higher salary by a competitor. But with many years of practice one had gotten used to handling that. Not that I succeeded every time, but to a large extent, one could stop juniors through counselling. In retrospect, I realise that they were mere platitudes and I wonder now how all those bright youngsters fell for it.

All those years of practice, however, are useless in my present incarnation.  Another recent incident is a case in point. I have a girl who comes in once a week to draw our designs. She is brilliant at her work but somehow incapable of shouldering any responsibility beyond her “drawing” brief. I have accepted that because of her skills in creating new designs and our decade-old relationship. 

Recently, when she did not come in on her usual weekly work day, I called her. She was sobbing as she answered the phone. “I am not well at all,” she said. I was a bit puzzled wondering what could be so wrong with her health to make her cry. Her next sentence left me at a loss for words. “I tried to slit my throat last night, but my maid saved me,” she said. “I can show you the scar when we meet,” she added. I knew that she was depressed and was on and off medication, but this was not at all within the realms of possibilities that I could have imagined.

She did, however, come back to work in a couple of days and the one hour I spent on counselling her made me realise how inadequate I was. Aspirational MBAs or CAs that I needed to handle in my career in Mumbai now seemed like child’s play.