The Anatomy of Journey

I have always loved roads, because the very fact that you are on it is a sure sign of you being somewhere and getting somewhere. It is a sign of your hard existence, of a reality that is moving and physical. Roads are the physical representation of the very thin line that exists between being and becoming. If you are on a road it’s either because you are sure of your destination or you are lost, neither of which is bad.

  I must say I have been lucky – we have been lucky, my friends and I. Our destinations have been diamonds at the end of long onyx necklaces of beautiful roads. Roads that inspire prose to be written like poetry. And in our repetitive admiration of such roads, we have slowed down our speed, and our need to reach the destination. Without thinking about it, we touched upon a core aspect of any spiritual philosophy – the total appreciation and acknowledgement of the present moment – the aspect of mindfulness. For this, we are thankful.

  The monotonous whip of the wind and the drone of the engine compel one’s mind to think, to revisit the past and explore the darkness of the future with the multicolored torch of imagination. When one is on a motorcycle and has a long way to go, the mind is the best of friends. And motorcycling, road trips and camping out have all been constant ingredients of my imagination. A long road trip on bikes that would force me to camp out under the stars had always been a fervent wish, always burning deep behind my eyes, flickering brightly every time the possibility of a trip was mentioned.

  My thoughts switched from road trips to the smell of eucalyptus and back to road trips again as we rode into a thick fog. Moham was riding, and I sat behind him, stretching my neck up to the heavens and staring in silent awe at the line of tall eucalyptus trees. The minty scent of scores of eucalyptus filled the air, the fog lifted and we rode into Ooty.

  Experienced bikers will agree with me that over time one develops two kinds of road trips; the exotic road trips – the long ones, the ones that are planned over months and years on paper and in the mind, and the regular road trips – the staple diet of a spiritual biker, the weekend getaways - nutrition for the soul.

  Ooty is one destination out of many in our staple diet list. Kemmangundi is another. Others are all places near Mysore, my spiritual home, the tree under which I found my nirvana. The borders and forests of Tamil Nadu and Kerala are just eighty kilometers from here, and Ooty is a hundred-and- forty. Mysore is also close to Coorg, known as the Scotland of India, an epithet it earns through a mystic beauty. Mysore is close to another gift of paradise – the enchantingly melancholic Western Ghats. Everything west of Mysore has provided much needed fodder for my wandering spirit and has fuelled a million thoughts.

  How can I not be a traveler? Five roads lead out from Mysore. One goes to Hassan, one to Madikeri, one to Ooty and Tamil Nadu, one to Sultan Bathery and Kerala and yet another leads inexorably beyond the Western Ghats towards the Arabian Sea. The Hassan route leads inspiringly north and north-west, towards Belur, Halebid, Chikmagalur and Kemmangundi, and from thereon to some of the tallest mountains in Karnataka. The Madikeri road brings us thickly into the forests and the waterfalls of Coorg, to the iced, green heights of Tadiyandamol and the cascades of Mallalli. The road that leads to Kerala is also the road that takes us to Tamil Nadu, forming a crossroad at Gundlupet, a haven for the road-hungry. From Gundlupet one tosses a coin to decide whether to head straight or take the right turn that leads to Kerala. The straight road takes us through Elephant-infested forests to Ooty. And if you take the right turn, you encounter the Edakkal caves of Sultan Bathery, the Sentinel Rock waterfall nestled amidst tea estates and a wild ghat-section ride that ends at Calicut, where the Arabian Sea wets the city’s sunbaked shore. Like tentacles spreading from an immortal Kraken, these roads spread luxuriously towards the north-western edge of Karnataka, beyond her sky-skimming mountains and acquire a Konkani flavor. It is in the very air, the tastes and aromas and the possibilities that erupt from the mixing of two cultures. Approaching the Goa border, one finds a strangely tolerant mix of hippies and orthodoxy at Gokarna and her sister beaches of Om, Half-Moon and Paradise. My friends and I have explored these roads until Vasco da Gama, a town on the northern edge of Goa and stared wistfully at the signposts that indicate the proximity, or distance, to the borders of Maharashtra.

  On this particular trip to Ooty we could only stay half a day. We needed to return to Mysore by midnight and had planned accordingly. Returning via the Bandipur National Forest at night, we turned our headlights off for a full thirty seconds, riding blind in the pressing silence under the cover of enormous rain trees. In the complete blackness, we see specks of flickering light – fireflies – that hover over the hedges on the edge of the road, marking our path. This is an unspoken tradition, one of the things that unite us. Sometimes, the darkness has been mellowed by the chalky, white light of a full moon, and the effect is ethereal. My friends and I are left speechless at times like these, and the effect they have on our friendship is profound.

  On another such occasion, as we rode with our lights off in the silent white light of a gibbous moon, we were startled by a sudden trumpeting. Two great ivory knives and the sharp glint of a watchful eye made us decrease our speed, and when we turned our headlights back on the yellow lights painted in the darkness the grey form of a giant elephant mother, gently pushing her two kids towards the opposite bank of the road. Our lights and sudden appearance startled her just as she had us, and she released the noose like grip she had on a branch of an overhanging tree before trudging away into the forest, visibly annoyed.

  Once beyond the range of the national forest, the highway is still poorly lit; we slow our pace near a roadside dhaba where we sit down to eat, unusually quiet. The trip has ended much sooner than we expected, and we yearn for more. Left to our own devices, we wouldn't hesitate to travel the length and breadth of India... if someone would only take care of the money involved. And this foreboding thought always brought us back to reality. Responsibilities and realities were knocking at our teen- aged doors, and we could no longer ignore the incessant noise.

  At the time, Moham and I worked for a small Knowledge Process Outsourcing outfit in Mysore called ThoughtFunction. 3 had joined us at ThoughtFunction too, having taken a year off after his graduation. In a fit of adventure, we had all resigned, and invested most of our savings in what was in those days a lucrative business - Data Entry.

  Data entry processes are legal and do occur ethically in places. But outside these places, when it becomes locally available, I'd be wary of signing myself up for it. Because - they are sub-sourced repeatedly and in time they are so deeply sub-sourced that no one knows who originally needed the data and who approached the market in the first place. Sub-sourcing is a phenomenon that occurs when no one wants to do the work but wants to earn the money, even if it is a little less money. For example, if I receive a contract to do 'x' amount of work for 10 rupees, then I can sub-source it to you for 6 rupees. When you send me the finished work, I pay you out of my pocket and send the data onward to the company that pays me 10 rupees. I earn a profit of 4 rupees without doing any work, without investing on computers and employees and offices and internet costs.

  We are riding again. I have taken over from Moham, and he is riding pillion. After miles and miles of journeying together, we have an unspoken understanding about what to do when on a bike. It is automatic now because of years of mechanical but wonderful repetition. We are in mountain country now, and the road descends and twists like a snapped band of black ribbon. Motorcycling on such roads is pure bliss, and I am wondering why Moham has handed the bike to me – he wouldn’t, normally. I feel the bike throbbing rhythmically through the handlebars, and get a better grip on the accelerator. The road ahead is dark and a slow mist is rising, and my mind settles into a similar rhythm.

  We had signed ourselves up as individual 'processors' for small packets of data entry projects. It was all very simple - We pay a certain amount of money up front - 'service charges' - to receive our identification and packets of monthly da
ta. Our job was to enter the data available in a .pdf format into the provided software. The objective - data in the .pdf format is hard to edit and hard to search but when it is converted into a digital format of individual letters, the same data becomes fluid - easy to edit, easy to search, easy to manipulate. You can't do that with .pdf, unless you start out with that intention. In any case, we got the .pdf files and we got the software and we manually entered (typed) all the data into the respective entry fields provided in the software. About 5000 .pdf pages had to be entered with 98% accuracy in 28 days. We'd get our paycheck on the 45th - which felt like a nice deal, so we signed up and worked through insomnia-inducing days while still working overnight at ThoughtFunction. It was only after we received the money from our first two or three submissions that we decided that we could risk ‘up-scaling’.

  One fateful night in March 2010 – these things always seem to happen to me in March - I met Moham on the terrace of the four-storied building that ThoughtFunction held in ransom. We talked about outsourcing. The idea was simple - We'd pay for 10 'individual processors' contracts. We'd employ 10 persons to come in and work for us eight hours a day to enter the 5000 pages in 25 days. The remaining 3 days before the submission would be for Quality Analysis, in which we'd ask our employees to check each other’s databases for any errors. It was highly important for us to achieve 98% accuracy, as anything below that would cut our payment by half. If we dropped below 90%, we would end up with nothing. The employees would be paid 4000 Rupees per month, and an extra 100 for every hour of overtime, which was the going rate at the time in a tier-2 city like Mysore.

  'How much money do we need initially?' Moham had asked.

  'Let's see - 80,000 for the 10 contracts, 12 computers at 500 per piece per month, an Internet connection at 1000, and a place to rent at 5000. That comes to 92,000 rupees.'

  'We are renting the computers?' 'We’re renting the computers.'

  'Okay. Who has that kind of money?'

  Good question. I didn't. Moham didn't. We needed a financier, an angel investor who'd see the logic of our calculations and give us the money.

  '3?' Moham asked.

  ‘3,’ said I.

  I knew 3 since our school days. But by the time I was in ThoughtFunction, 3 and I were hopelessly out of touch and hadn't even seen each other in 7 years, which is saying a lot considering the size of Mysore. We roped him in to our project, and he was ready to invest (risk) about 50,000. When he agreed to the plan, Moham and I decided to cut our figures down the middle and submitted our resignations. This way we'd need fewer contracts, lesser employees, fewer computers and lesser space to fit them all in.

  This would have, should have worked. But it didn't. We lost everything that we invested - money, time, energy and emotions. Why? One reason - we were after easy money. Another reason - we trusted the wrong people.

  Data is everywhere. It does not matter what kind of data needs to be input in what kind of software, as long as people are made to believe that the contracts they've paid for will fetch them a thick stack of papers that needs to be typed into the software. With time and publicity, enough people had paid an initial amount to access the data. They were paid for their submissions regularly by the 'company'.

  Everything was going fine - until they reached critical mass. By this time, the company had made enough money from the initial deposits of the hundreds of people who had paid to receive the data. Enough to market data entry, enough to pay the first few months of submission money, enough to re- generate the data, enough to maintain the outlook of a legal company. Once critical mass had been reached and enough people started complaining about irregularities in corrections, they packed up whatever profits they had made and disappeared overnight. By irregularities in corrections, I mean the ploy the company used when they didn't have enough money to pay for the submissions - they said that the data you submitted was worthless to them because it was less than 90% accurate. There was no way you could prove it because the data was not released back to you. If you asked questions, you were told to read the contract... that you'd signed. All neat, all quasi-legal.

  I relax my grip on the bike. My thoughts have taken me into the past and the motorcycle has taken me farther away. The gang has stopped near a small tea shop for a cup of tea and a cigarette, and I lean the bike left off the highway to stop.

  “What’s the total damage?” I asked 3, catching up to him as he sat down on a wet concrete bench that was placed under a giant rain tree. The ‘bench’ was once part of a long electric pole and now had been cleverly recycled. Three or four other regulars hung around, watching us remove our riding gear.

  "Eighty thousand", he said, blowing smoke from his nose.

  "How are we going to pay the Internet bill? That alone is costing us 20K."

  "We'll figure something out. Let's talk to Moham - he'll know."

  Moham was our goto man for anything criminal, underhanded, slinky and kinky. He was our stationary store, our man Friday. And he was at the moment speaking to someone on his cell phone. I watched him lean against the trunk of the tree - he is twenty-nine, older than the rest of us. He is thin and short and strong as an ox, with good, dark hair and a straight, thin nose. He is one of those friends you could rely on to come help you out of a situation at any odd hour of the day. He is the oldest and also the funniest guy in the group, making us laugh and allowing himself to be laughed upon, which is the essence of all friendships, really. It is the sweetest sacrifice of friendship - that you allow yourself to be laughed upon. You allow some few selected souls to puncture through your ego and laugh at you, laugh with you.

  We watched him finish the call and slowly walk back to us.

  'That was Ashok,’ he said, pointing at the cell phone in his hand.

  Uneasy ripples spread through our stomachs. At least, they rippled through mine. I don't imagine anything ruffled 3. I have rarely seen him lose his cool.

  'What did you tell him?’ I ask.

  'I told him we'll pay the bill, but it will take time. I told him that our project was cancelled at the last minute, and we're out of money - I gave him a version of the truth.'

  'How are we going to pay the bill? We don't have twenty thousand rupees.'

  'We have to get it from somewhere, or we have to cut and run.'

  'You mean not pay at all?'

  'Yes. It's just 20K. They won't miss it. They’ll threaten us for a month or two with court cases and money-collectors, but they can't do anything beyond that.'

  'Is this do-able?' asked 3.

  'Yes it is. Except they know where the company is set up - they have our address.'

  'Is that a problem?'

  'Not necessarily. We need to make them believe that we’ve moved from the original location; that we no longer work out of that address. And when they start sending people down there - which they will - we need someone to tell them that the company moved shop a long time back without a forwarding address.'

  'They can't send a court notice to the address in general?'

  'It's a private house – with two separate families living there - they can't do that.'

  'Hmmm...What do you think?' 3 asked, looking at me.

  I considered. 'We don't have a lot of options. If we are sure of this, then we should do this completely - no half measures. Stop receiving calls from Ashok, stop responding to his e-mails and letters.'

  ‘Dude, it’s just a telecom company. You make it sound like we’re planning to murder the President.'

  I gave a sheepish grin - I've been known to be dramatic.

  So we went ahead with it - our first great crime! We avoided Ashok for a month, until he came down to the “company’s” address himself and tried to speak to us. We were, of course, long gone.

  Eventually, he stopped trying.

  I was nineteen at the time. My personal goal of coming out of this entire project clean became impossible now. Exposed to the underbelly of the Indian IT scene, we had grown up quickly and sudd
enly. In the blink of an eye, we had gone from being naïve and enthusiastic to wise and enthusiastic, which is perfect, but only in retrospect. And those cold January mornings saw the three of us disappointed and staring at a gap in our resumes that needed to be filled. I remember being confused, as if I had lost the plot somehow. How did we manage to come out dirtier than we had gone in? I think we needed time then. We needed time to think, to understand in their entirety our actions of the past few months. True, our sins were nominal in the wider view of the sins of the world, but the fact that we had sinned put us in the leagues of men, not children, not teenagers. It disturbed us to think that we were no longer clean, no longer not-responsible for our actions. Suddenly, the world was no longer simple - no longer black and white. New shades of grey had been introduced to us and this fact troubled us the most. If the world wasn’t cleanly divided into black and white, what else were we wrong about?

  We gained from those ten months of struggle and eventual failure a tight knit friendship that survived through a lot of acidic things that usually eat into the core of good friends. When we came out unscathed, it gave us an abiding confidence in each other, and in our friendship. We managed to get back on our feet soon – 3 enrolled to do an MBA in Finance, Moham re-joined the real-estate business he was part of before he had started working for ThoughtFunction, and I got a job with IBM in Bangalore. Things were looking up for us, but the fog in the mind remained, the doubts remained.