By Bineeta Fialok

Leave“Raavan tuney Sita deni ke nahi deni? Nahi deni? To ek chutti de de yaar…”, goes the latest Mirinda advertisement. It’s a matter of great surprise and wonderment for me that how these advertising industry people have their fingers right on the pulse of the market and people’s latest concerns. They know them and they use them to perfection.

In the corporate world, asking for a leave is nothing less than climbing Mt. Everest. Especially if you are one of the junior employees. You really need to have an imagination which can produce a riot of fool proof ideas at the drop of a hat. After all you can’t just barge in and say to your boss, “Hey dude I am off for tomorrow”, unless of course you have just heard from the Naukri.com guys.

I had the lucky chance of coming across a particularly hilarious specimen of such excuses. An acquaintance had to take her exams and needed roughly twenty days off. Unthinkable, isn’t it? Unless of course you have Jesus as your boss. So, the lady hit upon an ingenious plan of faking a leg fracture and disappearing for a month. Well, the plan was working quite nicely until one of her colleagues decided to suddenly drop in to ask after her health and she was found walking about the house!!! I was told that the colleague was somehow fooled into believing that there was just some problem with the tissues and she didn’t really need to wear a cast. I do wonder though if they could actually convince her colleague completely.

Now, some of the most clichéd ‘faking it’ excuses come from our maid servants. Yes, the people without whom we can’t imagine our lives. Our legs start shaking the moment they talk about going to their village for a month because we know that after a torturous month when we would be eagerly awaiting their arrival with about ten inches of dust on almirah tops, the postman would silently drop us a postcard as if sympathizing with us in our period of tribulation. The contents of the postcard would run something like this that there’s a cousin’s wedding or a parent is on his/her death bed. That’s another matter altogether that they come back after knocking at death’s door almost every year and only God knows how many more cousins need to be married in the near future.

The most brilliant example ever of this ‘faking it’ phenomenon is to be found in the Amol Palekar starrer ‘Golmal’ whose storyline I don’t need to tell you people as the movie itself is a legend. Instead, what I’ll tell you is something from my own life. Well, I’m also a human being and definitely not immune to the ‘faking it’ syndrome. I have this tendency of taking an off on Mondays and I try and device a new excuse every time. The thing has become so conspicuous now that my colleagues have started believing that I’ve a boy friend who owns a showroom in one of the markets that remain closed on Mondays and I take an off and go to see him. I think I desperately need to do some shuffling as far as these Monday leaves are concerned.

I.P.L. too contributed in its own way in organizing this ‘faking it’ business a little. The other day there was an article in the newspaper about employees pre-deciding the excuses and dates on which they were going to take a leave for watching a certain match so that there won’t be a mass bunk and hence the bosses won’t be able to really take any action. Truly, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

All this pondering over the ‘faking it’ phenomenon has given me a crazy sort of idea. What if I start a firm which provides people with brilliant excuses, no boss can see through or refuse, at a nominal cost of course? The only thing stopping me is that who would save me from my brilliant employees’ excuses?

Yours Always,