Chapter Two: The Corporate Takeover

THE CORPORATE TAKEOVER

Being the further adventures of Hanuman Murali and friends

I’m a light sleeper, but sleep catches up to me only during the early hours of the morning. It was one such morning that my editor called. His voice was normally shaky something like a tuning fork which could never make up its mind as to slow down or speed up, so there was no chance I could decipher there was a major problem.

I was asked to be in office by eight, when I reached by nine fifteen there was hectic paperwork being done, no one minded my silent entry nor my pleasant greetings; which was again usual, so still I couldn’t think the magazine was going to go through a crisis.

The meeting was scheduled at ten, what meeting nobody had told me and I hadn’t asked, I thought it was the editorial meetings we would have once in a while to review sales statistics, it wasn’t. And it wasn’t even something pleasant but it was something that every pseudo intellectual low on circulation online magazine has to go through at one point of time, the corporate takeover.

The meeting room existed as an annex to the editor’s office, it was as the same size as the other office rooms and consisted of seven plastic chairs arranged one over the other, today nevertheless the chairs were placed as how chairs should be placed during a meeting and mysteriously from some place a table had appeared and so had a swivel chair. I took my place, the only one without a person.

Everest & Kailasam was an eighty year old paper company, started sometime in the first twenty years of the twentieth century by an Indian born Englishman William H Everest in the foot hills of the Nilgiris, he was right in thinking and the company was joined in later by Tamil business man and doyen of the silent film era Kailasam.

It wasn’t a company that everyone talked about every day, but something which had made its name on its own and its existence was silently acknowledged by the usage of paper. Paper being paper always has its uses.

Ever since the white man left the country, E&K has been managed by the company’s Indian partner and his family now in its third generation, the third of the family now occupied the central chair of the meeting table, he didn’t look the age that made a man sit on the all important chair.

Kailash (named after his illustrious grandfather but the name slightly aryanized to suit the times) sat there legs crossed, his father still managed the company and was the brain behind the takeover but had sent his son to ‘learn it all’. The meeting was everything but brief, our usually forthcoming editor looked blue and sang silent praises about the takeover, the girl next to me who managed the accounts signaled to me with an air knife over her thin neck and tongue out.

Suddenly a philosophical question popped into my head, “is this the end of literary journalism as we know it?” before my resources could answer the question, Kailash had begun to speak.

Considering the thickness of his neck, the sounds that came out from it did not match, “Hello folks, I’ll be your Director starting from today; we at E&K are quite aware at the abruptness of the takeover and I think you all will be given enough time to take in the changes…”

“Changes?” everybody’s face had the same expression

“We are Asia’s fourth ranked Paper Company, but I admit media is something new to us, it is part of the wide vision of my grandfather and now my father and industry demands of course. You must all consider yourself fortunate as we are not sending any of you guys home and you will be exposed to the best of corporate atmosphere, well… yourselves and your editor will agree that your journal is not entirely exciting..” he said looking at the saintly face of our editor.

That sealed it, Kailash had completely taken over our small but happy place, if he would make it happier; I was not willing to believe, it was being pushed into a house painted according to the whims of the painter, now we had a new name. The words “JAZZ” was etched on paper in a kind of electric blue, if I had liked blue before I had begun to resent it.

“JAZZ will from now strive to be the primary arts and culture magazine in the city and I will directly look into everything you write”, he said pointing at me and shifted his finger in a semi circle covering the whole group.

“Make things more interesting and, write more about film stars, we will be sure to get advertisers and have someone to cover the party beat”

My heart had sunk, I had just written two of Hanuman Murali’s adventure and my editor had found it interesting and I was hoping it would grow into something better, now that would have to go. I looked up imagining the scowl on Murali’s face, but Kailash had seen my head up and called “You must be…” he said my name, I nodded in acceptance.

“I must say…the adventures are turning out quite good, I just read through some back issues…keep it going but make it funny you know” he said. I breathed and the scowl vanished on the imaginary face.