I started this blog in January of 2011 during my first job. As a management graduate in New India I was technically living the middle-class dream. In a city 500 KMs from home and an office 30 minutes of rush hour traffic away from my apartment.
Balancing the intrigue of corporate hierarchy with the late bloom of Indian puberty was a heady mix. I fell back on my familiar coping mechanism; writing. I had started writing way back in college circa 2006 AD. Years of relatively anonymous posting never deterred me. Putting things down on paper was cathartic in itself.
With the same motivation, SlavesInc was born in a new era in my life. Initial feedback was that Slaves is too negative a name for something you are so dedicated to. But that is how I saw and still see jobs: modern day slavery. Art; in the very least, has to be unflinching. All other aspects of life are sugar-coated beyond recognition.
I kept typing away week after week based on experiences which were very personal yet a treatment that was global. And the blog did develop an audience that was across continents and numbers that were not underwhelming by the standards of those times. We even made it to the WordPress homepage a couple of times.
Quarters rolled into years and years into a decade. My writing evolved from terse prose to lucid poetry to now an easy conversation. The daily corporate grind is gone and so are the small impetuses to explain idiosyncrasies of cubicular life. But the big questions remain, they always do.
I now write for a living through stand-up. An Olympian dream at the time of starting this blog. The mind is much more at ease but the spirit is still aching to know more and topple over more whys.
But there is no ultimate resting place. The world is inherently unfair and humans are tragically unworthy of justice. A perpetual feedback loop. The artist suffers more because he sees more in every cublice and every street corner.
That he gets to address it by expression in whatever form is the only blessing that keeps him from going insane. Whatever audience she gets for it is a bonus. Everything beyond that is business and vanity.
If you dear reader have even for a moment felt connected to a piece of my writing, know that we have shared something fleetingly beautiful, even by RomCom standards.
Writing saved me and it is the only ideal I am gladly slave to.
Peace.
– Punit Pania
