Sorting Out Sid Read Online Free PDF Page A

Uncle’. But since she had ranted and raved and made things worse, he stayed firm with his ‘not-ready-for-a-child-yet’ stance.
    No wonder then that she had withdrawn completely, refusing to have any physical contact with him. How like a woman to use sex as a weapon – or rather, the lack thereof. Typical and frustrating.
    While a part of him could kind of see Mandira’s point of view, another part felt like replacing her Colgate toothpaste tube with a tube of Odomos and hiding somewhere nearby with a camera.
    Lovely, this whole marriage deal was, he thought, as he stared at himself unseeingly in the mirror.
    Just lovely.

4
    Sid@Work

    S id felt like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Bloody Delhi roads, bloody Delhi traffic, bloody no-good Delhi Traffic Police. If it weren’t for the fact that he was an under-confident driver and not as well-built as most of those bloody-aggro-Punju-gym-obsessed Delhites, he would have demonstrated the road rage he felt. Instead, as usual, he let everyone cut in front of him, grit his teeth and smiled as motorcyclists bumped against his side mirror and cursed only silently when that Lady Driver suddenly swerved towards him, causing him to nearly ram into the truck on his left. Slow and steady wins the race, slow and steady wins the race, he repeated to himself, trying to stay calm.
    An hour on the road already, and he was still only about halfway to his office. But still – slow and steady. Turning onto a relatively quiet road and progressing at a decent pace, he started to feel a little better, at one with his trusted WagonR. He took in a deep breath and exhaled with an Ommmmm … I’m so Zen right now, I should get a Maruti, he thought to himself and chuckled a bit at his own joke, filing it away for future use. And then the unthinkable happened.
    As Sid casually glanced out of his car window, he noticed that he was being overtaken again, this time by a man riding a bicycle. The worst part was that the man looked at least sixty-five, and a poor and undernourished sixty-five at that. Normally, Sid would have felt only a vague sense of sympathy for such a fellow, but now an icy-cold rage gripped his heart. He muttered the worst Hindi swear words he knew, and gave the man a withering look. The fellow had been riding along blissfully and neither heard the curses nor saw the look. He was only surprised when the WagonR, which had thus far been crawling along, suddenly revved up and shot off like a bullet from a gun, leaving him in a cloud of dust. Spoilt, upper-class, young brat, he thought. ‘Gadhe ki aulad.’ He spat philosophically on the road and continued cycling.
    And so it was that Sid reached his office in Noida in a fouler mood than usual. But of course, he didn’t plan to show it. It was time to switch on ‘Work Sid’.
    Work Sid was a savvy corporate character. He used phrases like ‘value addition’ and ‘passing the buck’ as well as ‘let’s just take a call’. He still told jokes, but they were the clever, corporate ones. Sid was the life of office parties, but while the ‘Casual-Party Sid’ didn’t like to share centre stage, ‘Work-Sid-At-An-Office-Party’ always made it a point to laugh at other people’s jokes, particularly those of the bosses, regardless of how bland they were. Basically, Work Sid was a bit of a prick, and Sid knew it.
    It had worked well for him, and at a young age Sid had clambered ahead over the shoulders of most of his colleagues and stood fairly high on the corporate ladder. Over the last two years he had been heading the marketing department for Kollin’s, the multinational best-selling range of toilet bowlcleaners. It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded. In fact, he was often repelled by some of the gorier requirements of his job. Of course, he always played it up in conversations with everybody as a great opportunity to learn about a new and important category, and to play a role in eradicating