my ruined first-job story

Habits, bad or good, are not easy to kick but I recently managed to shrug off a particularly tiresome one. It was causing me a lot of distress and I had more or less surrendered my life to it. Plus, my near-and-dears were starting to get concerned about my mental well-being. So, all though it was a potential launching pad for a stellar career and the source of a meagre monthly income, I ditched my first job.
I'm aware that twenty years from now, if I were to achieve some modicum of success, I will not be able to tell an inspiring first-job story to youngsters starting out in the profession. I wont be able to speak of humble beginnings but limitless prospects, of a god-father who took me under his/her wing, of that insufferable, demanding boss who "nevertheless helped me become who I am today." Mine will be a story of humble beginnings and humble prospects, of stalwarts who had nothing more to offer me more than their sympathy, of a mentor who branded me as 'lazy' for life, of thwarted chances that were my doing and thwarted hopes that were someone else's doing.
For sure, I did learn quite a few things on the job. Prone to over-confidence, the clerical nature of my work took me down a peg or two. Before starting out I was afraid of ideological differences with the paper's editorial line. On the job, I learned that my superiors wouldn't have given two shits even if i were an undercover Naxalite.
But there were more enduring lessons. I learnt that intelligence is in the eye of the reader, that learning to cover your own tail is a praiseworthy goal, that unquestioned submission to authority is a virtue, and for there to be rockstars in your newsroom you also need sufficiently submisive underlings for them to beat up.
My first-job tale will be singularly unappetizing. But that's just something I will have to live with.

yellowing pages

One week into a new city and a new job and you can be excused for feeling a little rudderless. ACJ already seems a distant memory although it has been less than a month since I graduated. And then there are even more distant memories- engineering college and junior college. Further back is school.So how does one continuously reorient oneself in the face of constantly changing circumstances? Is there anything to be gained from pondering over the change in one’s circumstances?
Technology today allows one to visit all these people and memories simultaneously. One is bombarded by recollections from different periods of one’s life. Looking back feels like sifting through an old dusty book in which every chapter is unlike the others. There are sad chapters interspersed with happy chapters and turning the leaf on a happy chapter is always painful. And one is always left wondering whether the last chapter will be the happiest in the book.
A recent happy chapter is visited again and again. Technology allows us to visit not-so-recent chapters frequently as the people who inhabit those pages are just an index finger-press away. But as the pages keep adding to the book revisiting long past chapters becomes more and more laborious. We bookmark some pages and people for quick reference and leave the others to yellow away peacefully. Technology has, in some senses, made human memory irrelevant. There are enough visual, audio aids to aid memory that it seems like one need not remember anything at all. One need just store in a flash drive or as a digital photo. Technology allows us to freeze moments of time for posterity. But, for all its glories, it cannot arrest the motion of relationships. It can freeze memories of a relationship but not the relationship itself. It can remind us of what certain people meant to us but cannot influence what they mean to us now. Relationships are fluid and certain people become less dear to us as time goes by. And it is this I fear. That I can’t freeze all the relationships from a recent happy period of my life. I must watch as people drift away from me, as they become less dear to me and me to them. I’m not worried about the bookmarks, or the main actors in my story. I am worried about the supporting actors who go a long way in defining a period of one’s life. I might think of them and imagine what their life is like right now. But, they will yellow away and every time I revisit them I will realize that they mean less and less to me. At such meetings pleasantries will be exchanged and good memories invoked. But conversation will dry up eventually, soon enough. And there is nothing I can do about it.