​The amazing variety of offices I have toiled in for forty years tells a story not unlike the Stations of the Cross.
 
Out of the university, I joined a tire company as a management intern and for months shared grimy tables and grimier chairs with the shop foreman in assorted production departments. I felt like Grand Panjandrum when, after a year, I had a clean table of my own in the central office.

​I sat among an army of clerks in a hall for another year, till the Personnel Director took a fancy to my work and moved me overnight to a corner of his cavernous office, to work on a special project for him. Months later, he decided to keep me on as a Special Assistant, and, to everyone’s surprise and the dismay of my peers, I had suddenly ‘arrived’ – in an office of my own.
 
A few years later, I joined another company as the chief of a division, and was rewarded with, not just an absurdly large office but also a private restroom. Three years later, the ownership changed, and the new chairman wanted me to fire all the old guard, despite their contracts. When, purely by chance, he did not get sued, he moved me to an even larger office, with a view of the park.
 
Things changed dramatically when I joined the diplomatic corps. I had imagined attending cocktail parties in white ties and tails. Instead I was sent to Haiti to track human rights violations and provide asylum to refugees. My virtual office became ramshackle churches and dilapidated hovels where hunted people hid, the only respite being my alternative office on coast guard cutters that retrieved fleeing refugees from sinking boats. I next went to Nepal, where for days my office was 9000 feet in the Himalayas, trying to find American hikers and mountaineers who had survived an avalanche.
 
Meanwhile, the digital revolution had come and stayed. When I joined Big Blue, they gave me a laptop and in effect told me to forget about an office, unless a client wanted me to sit in their office. I loved the new freedom and wanted to make it complete: in two years, I gave up the job and became a consultant. 

​I now have a client whose office is in the Washington Marina, in sixteen boats. I write this as I sit in a beautiful, gently undulating boat, sip my coffee and look out the porthole at the ducks in the rippling water and birds in the cloudless sky – who have never aspired to an office.

​When I joined a large company as its newest personnel chief, the first thing I noticed was the strict class differentiation. Executives thought themselves vastly superior to the clerical staff, entitled not only to their many privileges but also to treat the junior staff cavalierly.  They spoke disrespectfully even to older clerks, who had served the company devotedly for many years, and did so in public.
 
I had told the Chairman, who had handpicked me, that I could be effective and produce results only if I had a free hand and was allowed to reshape staff matters. My first order of the day was to change the way we treated our 500 junior employees. In the first meeting with my six section heads, we reached an agreement to operate in a new way with subordinate staff. First, we would inform them of all major decisions, to make them knowledgeable and gain their support for our action. Second, we would consult them before taking such decisions, both to use their large pool of experience and to give them a sense of participation. We would do these with utmost respect. 

​Other senior executives I spoke with, over coffee and lunch, began to see the wisdom of such changes and fell in with my plan. With a sole exception. Verghese, the Publicity Manager believed in a more feudal style and insisted that he needed to “keep the clerks in their place.” I had already heard of his habit of talking rudely to his underlings, and some in my department took offense at his impertinent behavior when he spoke to them.
 
Brojo Babu, a tall elderly clerk who had worked in our department many years, was a meek bespectacled man, in charge of scheduling. He always spoke softly and humbly, and did his job with care and caution. One afternoon he sought an interview and, after considerable hesitation, told me that Verghese had brought him nearly to tears by talking rudely to him in front of his young colleagues on two occasions. I told him that I could talk to Verghese, but it would be more effective if he himself told Verghese that impolite behavior was not acceptable.
 
Brojo Babu pondered this and told me that he was not sure he could do it. I then said that I was no longer advising him, but ordering him to tell Verghese, or anybody else for that matter, he would not accept rudeness. Brojo Babu pondered some more, but could not still tell me that he could carry out that order. Flustered, I then asked him to open his notebook and write down a brief four-word message. I instructed him to memorize the message and deliver it anyone who dared speak discourteously to him.
 
A week later, Verghese came down to our department in a tearing hurry and wanted us to attend to some problem immediately. It was his misfortune to accost Brojo Babu – no doubt because he had found from past experience the modest clerk an easy person to bully – and, when he was told that he had to wait, shouted obstreperously that the clerk was worthless. Brojo Babu meekly said, “Excuse me,” and made a signal for Verghese to wait. Then he opened his notebook and haltingly read out the dictated message, “Please go to hell.” 

​The message was delivered in a large hall, in front of forty employees. Verghese could not believe his ears. He stood shell-shocked for several seconds, and then retreated wordlessly to his office.
 
That afternoon I met with Verghese and the Chairman in the latter’s office at his request.
 
He asked me, “Did you intend to humiliate Verghese publicly?”
 
“Rather,” I said, “I wanted him to stop humiliating my staff members publicly. They had been insulted too many times for me not to seek some remedy.”
 
The discussion ended amicably.
 
I was pleased that Verghese was never again rude to Brojo Babu or anybody else in our department. Rumor had it that he had started talking differently to clerks in his own department, where the story had spread.
 
Spread it must have, for I noticed that when executives came to my department they behaved with an extra dose of courtesy.
 
I was even more pleased that Brojo Babu became overnight a new person. No longer the meek, mealy-mouthed clerk, he walked with a new confidence, his head held high and a new spring to his step. He came to tell me privately that he did not disclose to his colleagues that I had dictated the message to him. They considered him a hero.
 
He added, “Never have I done anything like this in my entire life. I am a different man, sir.”

In my entire life I have only met two people who read Shakespeare. One does not count, because he teaches English literature and must read the bard for his job. The other is a resolute politician, who made a New Year’s resolution to read all of Shakespeare’s plays one year and achieved it with gritted teeth. You decide whether he counts.
​
I feel a bit of a freak because I read Shakespeare, believe it or not, for fun.

Let me tell you how it started. On second thought, I should first tell you how it didn’t start. Like uncounted other hapless ones, my first exposure to Shakespeare was in college. Macbeth was a mandatory text. My first instinct was to like it as it began dramatically with scary witches, whose slogan “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” seemed pretty much to sum up the world as I saw it. But a dyspeptic professor spoiled it all by expatiating endlessly on Shakespeare’s humanism and his concept of justice. I couldn’t care less about his virtues of head and heart.

The second professor, teaching Julius Caesar, sounded a trifle more enthusiastic about murder and mayhem, but quickly switched to a profoundly boring exploration of the poet’s erudition in ancient lore. I too switched to sitting in the back benches and surreptitiously reading Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories. The Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes education as ‘sterilization,’ and I know of no finer illustration than the merciless mauling of literature in our universities.
​
Then I had a lucky break.

A young doctor I had met through my brother who was in medical school invited me for lunch and a Hitchcock movie. The lunch took longer than expected and we were late for Hitchcock. I was very disappointed, but the doctor said, “Come on, there is an excellent Laurence Olivier film too.” Only when the film started, we realized it was Shakespeare’s Richard III and settled down dejectedly for two hours of boredom.

Now came the shock. The screen parted to show a crooked, deformed Richard, standing in a plush vestibule, looking directly at you, and declaring, darkly and defiantly, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by the sun of York.” It was like a punch in my solar plexus. I thought I had never heard more beautiful words, spoken more beautifully. I sat mesmerized. The two hours passed like a dream.
​
When the doctor dropped me at my home, the first thing I did was to go direct to my father’s library and pick up a book I had seen many times but never bothered to touch, Shakespeare’s collected works. It wasn’t easy-going at the start. People spoke in a curious way; some words were unfamiliar; some scenes took a while to warm up. But once you get used to Shakespeare’s style, the guy knows how to grab your heart and choke your throat. I suppose he had to learn how to fill the seats in his theater or go hungry, but he learned it well. Once you get accustomed to his lingo, his plays do no less havoc on your soul than Hitchcock’s movies, to say the least.

What intrigues me most about Shakespeare is not his humanism or mastery of ancient lore, but how incredibly contemporary he is, how much his plays seem to shine a light on our life today. Whether I love or hate, when others love or hate me or just show sheer indifference, Shakespeare helps me decipher it all and bear a part of it. I think of him as a great story teller of course, but also as a friend and a guide.
​
If this sounds farfetched, try not Hamlet or Macbeth, nor Julius Caesar, plays you already know about, but Shakespeare’s less known plays. Pick up Two Gentlemen of Verona, a very early play about friendship and fidelity, or Timon of Athens, a story of greed and generosity. You could even try Coriolanus and find surprising insights into Trump’s USA.

If reading Shakespeare still seems heavy going, one can always take the easy way, as I did, and watch the numerous films or recorded plays. There are good old ones, like Orson Welles’s Macbeth, and scintillating new ones, such as Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. There has to be one that will strike a chord with you.
​
Long ago, prompted by a very romantic novel, I tried reading the love poetry of John Donne and found it esoteric and forbidding. By a strange coincidence, I received an amazing Christmas gift that year: a disk of the love poems of Donne, recorded by Richard Burton. I listened in wonder to the golden voice of the Welsh actor for hours, and instantly I understood and loved Donne.

I would not eat noodles without chopsticks. Never. Not just in restaurants. Even at home I keep some chopsticks in case I order or heat some Chow Mien or Ho Fun.

Just out of the university I took a job with an international organization in Kolkata. We had a large corporate office on a busy corner and I found a pleasant Chinese restaurant two blocks down. Peiping became my favorite place for lunch.
​
It was a big restaurant, with many tables and cabins, but one large cabin was always reserved, barred for clients. Promptly at three in the afternoon a sign went up: the door was closed for fresh clients. Clients already dining could finish their meals at leisure, but they would no longer be served.

That was the hour for the owner, manager, chef, sous-chef, assistants and servers to sit down in the large cabin and have their meal. It was a family restaurant and I believe all of them were related in some way. The owner was a fiftyish woman of commanding presence, no longer slender but strong and sprightly, constantly crisscrossing the hall and making sure the diners were well looked after. Madam – nobody dared to say her name – was affable but not easily approachable. Incurably curious, I had asked others and found that she had come as a young girl from Shanghai with her father and uncle, who both worked in the Grand Hotel, and, after a brief, unsuitable alliance, had started Peiping with her uncle’s help.

Peiping was a smaller restaurant then, but had quickly picked up a devoted clientele, for its prices were reasonable and the quality excellent. Eventually Madam bought the adjacent shop, expanded and renovated the restaurant, and established herself as a prime restaurateur on the city’s busiest and most prestigious corner.

I ate with knife and fork, as my father’s British friends and colleagues had modelled, but I was impressed by the elegance of the Chinese diners who wielded their chopsticks with incredible aplomb. On a less busy afternoon I approached Madam with trepidation and humbly begged to know the secret of chopstick sorcery.

She laughed. “No magic. Just practice.”
​
I persisted, “How do I learn? I want to do it well – like you.”

She melted at last and invited me to join her meal with the family. So there I sat, with a pair of gold-rimmed chopsticks in my hand, surrounded by ten of Madam’s employees and family members, all enthusiastically showering me with instructions and encouragements. I had to hold the first chopstick between my middle finger and thumb base, keep the second on top between the index finger and thumb, and then open and close the chopsticks to ‘pinch’ the food at a 45-degree angle. The trick was to hold the bottom one immobile as an anchor, like a pen, and move only the upper one to grab morsels of food.

“Even grab rice like that?”

“Even a pea,” replied Madam.

When I left, she gave me two bamboo chopsticks to practice with and also two gold-rimmed chopsticks, she said with a twinkle of her eye, “for your girlfriend.”
​
I wanted to practice without being noticed. In the office I kept two long pencils, both held in my right hand in the Madam-approved manner, and kept practicing grabbing paper clips and binders, as I held the phone in my left hand and answered calls. Over weeks I improved steadily: I learned to grab the rice gently, not too softly to let it drop nor too hard to squish it.

Even my etiquette improved under Madam’s vigilant gaze. Take up your chopsticks only after the eldest at the table has done so. Keep the food furthest from your fingers; it is elegant. Never point at anything with chopsticks, not even food; it is gauche. Above all, never plant your chopstick in the food upright. It is the height of impropriety, for it reminds the Chinese of incense and funerals.

Months later my tutelage came of some use when I acquired a Japanese girlfriend. Alas, she did not think much of my vaunted gold-rimmed chopsticks. Instead she got both of us a pair of ivory Japanese-style chopsticks. They were pointed, and she lovingly explained that the points were useful in piercing certain types of food. I did not have the heart to tell her that Madam would have considered ‘stabbing’ food an insult to the chef.
​
Last year I took a walk from Free School Street, now called Mirza Ghalib Street, where my office was, down Park Street toward the Chowringhee. There were some uninteresting shops, but there was no Peiping. There was only the memory of Madam and her stern but affectionate lessons in chopstick wizardry.

​She taught literature in a college, but her ambition was to sing on the stage. She did not get the chance: when she appeared for an audition she got a non-musical role. That was easy to understand. She was pretty and striking, with luminous eyes and long, flowing hair. She kept acting and developed a reputation.
 
Then she got a role in a movie. This was a good break for her, but it came with a problem. The shooting was often in the evening and continued until late at night. This was not acceptable to the nuns who maintained the hostel where she lived. She had to return early or move out of the reasonably priced room she had.
 
She had struck a good rapport with the well-known lead actor and mentioned the problem to him. Coincidentally he was an old friend – I had stuck with him during a long phase when he was an alcoholic and a nuisance – and he asked me if I could help the young actress.
 
At the time I lived alone in a beautiful three-level bungalow-type house, with a large guest room with an attached bath, infrequently used by a visiting friend or two. I had a personable cook who also acted as a very competent Jeeves. Did I want a woman, an actress, in the house? I was not sure.
 
My friend pressed me hard, and came with her to visit me – and to show her my home. Tina had an innocent, adolescent kind of charm that was disarming. She modestly assured me that she would never be in my way. She seemed to have a wonderful way with domestics and even visited the kitchen to talk with Jeeves. The latter was quite mesmerized by her and went out of his way to tell me later that she would be no burden for him.

​I gave my consent. Since she would use my place mostly when she was late at work, I assumed that I wouldn’t see much of her. Normally I left for work early and often I left earlier to row in the lake before going to office. It didn’t turn out that way. As I worked during the day and taught in the evenings, I did all my reading and writing at night, frequently until late hours. She would come into the house quietly, using the key I had given her, and she could retire to her room. Instead she would tread gently into the living room, where I sat reading, and sit down without a word.
 
I would look up, greet her and a conversation would ensue. Soon Jeeves would come with two cups of tea. I could not help noticing that, though she had said that she had had dinner, Jeeves would invariable place a pastry or two next to her tea.
 
By the time I had shaved and showered in the morning and gone down to the dining room, I would find her already sitting there, nursing a cup of tea. She said she was an early riser and, in any case, she wanted to join me for breakfast. A bowl of cereal or a prosaic toast suddenly seemed to taste better.
Our nightly conversations became regular and started lasting longer. Her parents lived but she had never been close to them. She was friendly with professors who taught along with her in the college, but none appeared to be on close terms either. Her real family seemed to be her theatrical group, where the members were as fond of her as she was of them.
 
I once asked her, “If you had an accident or were seriously ill, whom would you call?”
 
She named three members of her troupe and said, “I know they will come immediately and take care of me.” Then she surprised me by adding, “I might even call you!”
 
I did not know if the accompanying smile was to signify a joke or to soften the surprise.
 
I knew things had changed a bit when, one particularly late night, she walked into the living room and, not finding me there, followed the light and braved my bedroom, where I lay reading and making notes.
 
“Are you not well?” she asked.
 
“I am all right. I am just tired.”
 
“I am tired too. Do you mind?” She unfurled the magazine in her hand, lay down on the other side of the bed and turned on the other lamp.
 
“Would you like to stay for dinner?” I asked after a while.
 
“Would you like me to?”
 
“Of course, I would. I rarely get a stretch of time with you.”

​I had a small dining table. We sat facing each other, the light glistening on her undulating hair and silver nails. Knowing her partiality Jeeves had a bowl of sliced fruits, along with, for full measure, by some Panna Cotta.
 
“Are you free this weekend?” I asked.
 
“What do you have in mind?”
 
“Would you like to come to my rowing club Sunday morning? I could take you out in a boat and you would meet my buddies?”
 
That Sunday morning the club’s helper was taken aback when I didn’t ask for my favorite scull and instead took out a heavier boat. I took the oars and Tina stepped nimbly in and took a seat at the opposite end. She had on a plain white dress and a turquoise muffler round her neck.
 
“I hope you aren’t afraid of the water?” I said as we neared the middle of the lake.
 
“I can’t swim, if you must know,” she laughed nervously.

​I paused pulling the oars and peered at her. A gust of cool wind sent some strands of her hair flying with a streak of turquoise. A tawny sun was rising at the other end, placing a curious glow on her morning-fresh visage. She was still smiling, and her eyes looked more luminous than ever. Heavens! A misty dawn could not be any better.
 
I sat on the plank of the boat like a petrified adolescent. I did not want to row back to the shore.

​After nearly ten years of work in a Silicon Valley giant, my friend LR – he preferred to go by those initials – founded his own technology start-up in 2000. He spent all his savings, borrowed from his family, and took a loan from his bank. But few knew of what he considered his biggest resource.
 
LR was a deeply religious man. He certainly didn’t have the aspect of a pious person. He was a flamboyant guy, who wore tailored suits, sported expensive watches and drove the latest Porsche. He hosted parties at fancy places and drank us, his friends, under the table. He had a reputation for shrewd packaging and sharp negotiation. Yet he was a scrupulous church goer and active on several church committees.

​Many people go to church for social reasons, but LR believed deeply in divine guidance and dispensation. He told me that he would never have started his business if he did not believe God wanted him to work independently, offer jobs to other people and use his bigger earnings to help his church and his community. He saw a clear link between piety and prosperity.
 
That kind of faith was not my cup of tea and I remember pulling his leg by broaching the well-known problem of a camel trying to negotiate the eye of a needle. He laughed, but said that providence was showing him the way to double his employee strength the following year. That proved correct: the software his team had developed for construction companies was picked up by some major companies and his enterprise more than doubled. 
 
It was an extraordinary story of success in the following years and I saw his picture on the cover of two business magazines. When I congratulated him, he spoke graciously of his colleagues, but did not forget to add that a benign divine hand had helped him choose just the right kind of people who could help him carry out his vision.
 
Then came the bust of 2008, construction froze, and I heard from friends that LR’s company had downsized significantly. When I got in touch with him, LR said ruefully that the business was no longer viable and he had been forced to sell its remnant to a larger group.

​We met for lunch six months later. LR was now an adjunct professor in a business school and spoke enthusiastically of his students and courses. He had moved into an apartment and no longer drove the Porsche. I asked him if he missed his earlier life when he was a model of success in the business world.
 
His reply stunned me. He said he had enjoyed the excitement of starting an enterprise and taking it to the pinnacle of success. He felt, however, that kind of busy, bustling life was good only for a while. He did not care for a life of sustained tension, but did not know how to take his hands off the helm of his company. God had shown him the way by creating circumstances where he could move, step by step, to a simpler, quieter and happier life. He was now at peace and very grateful. I was amazed.