I sighed and turned to Suketu. ‘It’s been a long day, guys. Maybe we should take a quick coffee break and re-group in fifteen minutes to brainstorm on what we ought to do next?’ The creative team brightened up considerably at the thought of a caffeine fix and heads nodded vigorously. I let myself out of the conference room and headed to the coffee machine. I was in desperate need of a caffeine fix myself. As I approached the bright little enclave in the middle of our floor which doubled up as the pantry and informal gossip point, I could hear Varun complaining loudly to someone about my ‘lack of project management skills’.

Typical.

Varun was an ace when it came to passing the buck. That, combined with his non-existent people skills and mammoth ego made him an absolute delight to work with. Unfortunately, he was also my boss and liked to think of me as his own personal slave.

I decided to skip the coffee and headed to the small open-air terrace at the south-west corner of our office for a breath of fresh air. The terrace was a rare luxury in the space-starved city of Mumbai and my favourite place in the entire office. Being housed in one of the older, more decrepit buildings of the city was a small price to pay for this piece of heaven. The efficient office housekeeping team had taken it upon themselves to make this the ‘green zone’ of the office—an array of plants and creepers jostled for space along with a plaster-of-Paris water fountain that merrily tinkled out a soothing gush of water in a corner of the tiny terrace. The place had a serene rainforest-like feel to it, which seemed surreal on the fifth floor of a corporate office block in one of the most crowded suburbs of Mumbai.

I often came to the little terrace to clear my head. Of late it seemed like I had a great many muddled thoughts to clear. For three years now, I had been working in General Foods, a leading FMCG player whose beverage and snack brands had become household names across the country. But in the last year or so, a vague sense of what could only be described as ennui had begun to creep into my being.

It had all started off in a very promising manner—I’d been placed as a management trainee with GF right after my MBA from the Reputed Institute of Management, the leading business school of the country. It was ‘a job to die for‘—as the recruiting HR manager had snootily informed me—and I’d been picked out of tens of aspiring candidates for the honour. The first year had gone by in a heady rush of excitement at earning my first real salary and getting a taste of the corporate world. But that initial rush soon faded away, leaving me with a lingering sense that this was not my life’s true calling. The only problem was I wasn’t quite sure what my life’s true calling was!