Ground Reality

As a freelancer, I have been involved with many different projects in the past. About a year ago, along with a couple of friends, I was assigned to create and launch an advertising portal. My main role was content creation, though, I took up anything that came up, from formulating concepts to site updating. It was a novel project, at least in the Nepali context, and we were quite pleased with the initial response that we received from our visitors and the advertising fraternity.

Being a close knit group, and involved with something new and interesting, we put in our efforts without a receiving a single paise in advance. Since we knew the people we were working for, it was granted that we would be paid for our services when the time was ripe. The arrangement went on from a month to two and then to four, at the end of which it finally dawned on us that our effort so far may have been in vain. Our employer did not have the best of reputations as a paymaster, but we were banking on his better side. Well as this story goes, it has been almost a year now and we have almost given up on our hopes of seeing even a fraction of our rightful remuneration in out hands. And, this was not a one-off incident. Sometime back I worked on creating brochures for a reputed software company just prior to CAN-Infotech 2005. It was not a big deal at all, and taking the size of the company, a miniscule expense, but it took me over a year and countless emails to finally get them to part with what was due to me. And then there was a school magazine I edited three years ago – I did my job well, the magazine came out good, but the director and the principal conveniently forgot about my remuneration.

Well, this has started as a crib, but that is not really the point I am making. I am regularly in touch with youngsters who have big and blown out aspirations. I wish I could tell them how different the ground realities are from what they study or think it to be. I especially hate reading the Wednesday supplement of a popular English daily that comes out in Nepal. Yes, they do fill it with a lot of strategic stuff, debates and profiles that would do any business and management book proud, but putting them into perspective, they are nothing but bloated and hollow ego-boosters implying that Nepali business and industry is ‘professional’.

Our industry leaders can make bold and moving statements, but ask them to make something as simple as on-time payments and they will buckle. Our articles and quotes are liberally sprinkled with theories and ideas from luminaries like Peter Drucker, but the only theory that really works here is, ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’. Delaying payments is the corporate pastime, and ‘relativity’, the hiring principle (if you are a relative, you’re in).

Salaries are abysmally low, not that living costs and standards are cheap, but the employers just refuse to let go of the lot they make. Beware ‘internship offers’ and shun all pep talk. Interns are basically ‘free’ workers and a very good cost cutting measure. Pep talks, well, I have had first hand experience with it – in fact I sustained on it alone for over four years in a company I worked for before finally coming to my senses and quitting. There is an inverse relationship between the money you get and the pep talk that you have to bear with.

Infidelity is in – not in marital terms, but in employment. If you think of ‘lifelong-relationships’, get ready to be ground to the ground. ‘Hop, skip and jump’ is the best and the surest way of climbing up corporate ladder in Nepal. Dedication is essential where you are, and in what you are doing, but don’t get tied up and attached to your work or company – you lose if you do.

It is wrong to generalize, and there are many organizations where things run differently, but I think a lot of people will agree to what I say.

We portray ourselves as a poor people belonging to a poor nation. I disagree – we are ordinary people impoverished by a few poor-at-heart.