One year at Novartis.

Exactly a year ago I started my journey with Novartis. When I look back at my life now, I can see that I can divide it, though not always very neatly, into different phases and compartments. My employment at Novartis is certainly one of them.

Working at Novartis has been a special experience not only because it is my first corporate experience, but also because it brought me back to my country. After living for six years in the US, I was again back in India, to be submerged in its sea of humanity and be a part of the 21^st century Indian dreams and aspirations.

Working at Novartis over the last few months I got to observe closely and also learn the discipline, demands and distinctiveness of the corporate culture. I understood that at most times appearance counts as much if not more than the substance. Among others, these last twelve months impressed on me specially the value of timelines, the worth of crisp communications, and more interestingly the shrinking of geographical distance. The effortlessness with which we are integrated to our colleagues located at Basel, Switzerland and New Jersey, USA, geography seems almost to be a  deception.

There is also a congeniality in the atmosphere of the workspace. The employees, most of them young, confident and self-assured, look more or less happy and content from what it appears, though during crunch times some tension is perceptible too. The café is a colorful, and at times also a cheerful place, though I cannot claim to be completely satisfied with the taste of the food on all days. Perhaps my Bengali taste buds are still far away from making peace with the South Indian spices.

One of the best things about working at Novartis is the new friends I have made, and the old friends with whom I have had a chance to reconnect. The last few months have been personally rocky for me. Surely my friends and colleagues have helped me in cruising over the internal waves of confusion and conflict in a considerable way.

But among all the good things, one thing that worries me is the disconnect that slowly but surely creeps in with working from a sanitized high rise with wide glass walls. Standing at the edge of our seventh floor wall, sometimes when I look out at the expansive contours of the city, I wonder, am I not slowly getting sucked up into the bubble of a soft comfortable lifestyle and a superficial corporate culture, separated from the seething, swelling, swaying mass of an overwhelming majority of my countrymen? The globalized workspace and the demands of the corporate job, is it not taking me away from my Indian roots in an imperceptible way? Am I not slowly falling in the groove of the upwardly mobile Indian middle class, and in my aspiration for a successful and secured professional life, am I not bartering away the spirit of adventure and exploration that I cherished in my youthful heart? 

The picture of a fluttering tricolor on the ramparts of the Red Fort, covering an entire wide wall of the corridor on the seventh floor, helps in no way in letting the old embers die down.