Page 123 of 12 Years
Alok looked visibly shaken at my rare outburst of anger.
‘Fix it,’ I said.
‘Yes, Saket,’ he said meekly.
‘Now!’ I yelled.
‘Calm down, Saket,’ Mudit said, grabbing me by my shoulder. ‘Come, let’s go to your office.’ Mudit took me back to my office and shut the door.
‘What’s the matter with you? Had too much of your pre-workout supplement today?’ he said, sitting on one end of my office table.
I sank into my chair and let out a sigh of frustration. ‘Our server and website crashed. Do you even realize what that means?’ I said.
‘Yeah, I do,’ Mudit said, rubbing the back of his neck.
I checked the site functionality on my own desktop. We were still down. In anger, I banged my fist on the table.
‘Control, bro. What’s with all this aggression?’
‘This stupid Alok,’ I said. ‘Should I fire him? Maybe I should. It’ll send a strong message.’ I stood up to go out.
‘Stop it,’ Mudit said, physically restraining me. ‘He’s a kid. Sit down.’
I paused for a second and sat down again.
‘Alok is just a geek you hired from Bangalore. He made a mistake. It happens. We’re growing gangbusters, bro. Nobodycould’ve anticipated this demand. The team will fix it by tomorrow.’
I nodded and took several deep breaths.
‘What’s going on with you?’ Mudit said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t sound okay. This is not you. Chill a bit.’
‘You don’t build a unicorn by chilling. You have to work hard.’
‘You’ve always worked hard. But you have these anger issues now. You’ve become hard.’
‘Hard?’
‘We used to do comedy. You made people laugh. This is not the Saket I knew. That Saket would’ve made three jokes by now about me using the word “hard”.’
I smirked. ‘Comedy. What an idiotic phase that was.’
‘It wasn’t idiotic. It was you being authentic and following your heart.’
‘If you want to fuck your life up properly, follow your heart.’
‘So, what do you want to follow now?’
‘Money,’ I said, and turned to my desktop again.
‘When did Saket become all about the money?’ Mudit said. ‘The same Saket who gave almost everything to his ex-wife just to be free and come to Mumbai …’
‘When Saket realized that without money, a man is nothing,’ I said, clicking through the process logs from right before the site’s failure.
Mudit leaned forward and switched off my monitor.
