Workplace is a space of understanding and compassion

Musings of a Corporate Voyeur by Sriram Iyer, a collection of short stories, is a welcome change from the ‘finance professionals dabbling with writing’ bunch of writers who have been subjecting us to their supercilious style of writing, while serving us tepid plots about boardroom chicanery. This country has unfortunately plumbed such depths in corruption and corporate duplicity, that even the most sinister outputs by the business /marketing post-graduate types can at best get a ho hum from readers today.

Iyer has a markedly different perspective with an underlying sense of compassion that make his stories extremely readable even if they involve happenings in the office space, like the very first story, The Survey, which has staff reacting to outsiders who have come in to take up plum postings. When this new executive team undertakes a 270 (evaluation) of itself, quite a lot of resentment shows up.  But damage control by HRD means reading the results differently and counseling the staffers, who are deemed as not being of stable mind at the time of doing the 270.  

High on Dreams talks much about presenting mathematical models in the conference room, but in the final analysis, it probably the presence of a swami and the serving of opium-laced food that clinches the deal. The names Randy Pi and Arjun Singh as protagonists run through quite a few of the stories. Read them all and enjoy the good prose.

‘Arjun, life is all about having dreams. Accountants like you perhaps believe that all advances in life are sequential, that to fly, you need to run, and to be stable, one should not look up but look down….’

Musings of a Corporate Voyeur
by Sriram Iyer
Alchemy Publishers
Rs.195