Via an email right from the top, the team that I work for has asked us to stay at home, and not come to office unless absolutely necessary. And while I laud this step taken by the company in our collective fight against the Covid19, it kinda takes the fun away from playing truant.
C'mon, we all know what I'm talking about. Those mid-week treats you give yourself by saying - "soch raha hoon aaj WFH kar loon". Not the kinds where you email your boss stating the same. But the times you discreetly message a colleague - "aaj boss aaya hai kya?" Or, you log onto your messenger to track exactly when the dot against your boss's name turns from red to green or grey. A quick decision is made. A few emails are sent out with an all-important CC list. The rest of the day goes periodically checking your inbox, and praying that the said boss doesn't call you. And if all ends well, there's a sense of triumph at 5:00pm. That's what I call a WFH. Not this.
I guess WFH is the closest, albeit by a huge distance, that a responsible adult can get to the thrill of playing truant from school. Or, bunking, as we called it back in the day. That was a different ball game altogether. A rite of passage, almost. I know I'm gonna be super proud the day my son bunks school for the first time, although a bit disappointed that I actually found out. And then years later, when he's a responsible adult himself, I'll tell him all my bunking stories.
I'll tell him about the first time ever. When Debjit and I went to watch "Himalay Putra". Well, there was this other movie that the two of us intended to watch, one with the big capital A on the posters. But we chickened out when we saw the security guard staring at our school uniforms.
I'll tell him about the time Sayantan and I went to watch "Godzilla", and sneaked in to the theatre a can of cold beverage that wasn't age-appropriate. It opened with a loud hiss, and the person in front turned to look. Sayantan whispered to him - "surround sound".
I'll tell him about the time Chandradeep and I had already made plans to go watch "Josh", and his dad suddenly decided to drop us to school. But hey, a commitment is a commitment, right? We walked gingerly from the car towards the school gates, and then took the fastest U-turn in history.
I'll tell him about the time when almost forty of us, in different smaller groups, all in our school uniforms, found ourselves in the same long queue outside a movie hall, for "Mohabbatein". I can't remember why or how we all chose the exact same showtime, but then again, this was a Shah Rukh Khan movie and that was the late 90s / early 00s.
Okay, I'll stop before I implicate my best buddies any further. And you start thinking all I did in school was bunk.
Tomorrow onwards, I'm "working" from home.
