No closure with bosses from hell

I attended the FICCI Frames conclave in Mumbai in October. It was to educate oneself on the goings-on in the media-related industries, to notice what gestures the government was making since talking up India’s ‘creative’ sectors, and terming them, in the PM’s words, the “orange economy”.

There, after two years in one case, and thirteen in another, I saw two of my former bosses, septuagenarian men. One was a former vice chancellor. The other, the baron of a once path-breaking Indian magazine that is now a rag, shepherded by his daughter, who was my reporting boss’s boss. I met both men, separately, and it led to a spiky, small scene, whose details I shall spare. It caused me to reflect on the nature and structure of their toxicity, the institutions they sullied, leading to employees leaving them steadily.

Allow me my bias. I’m far from a ‘good’ person, and may not even be the ‘ideal’ employee. But what I do know, and have honed over the years, are some core competencies. Over 25 years of employment, a decade in the media and a little more than that in higher education, I know what value I may bring to an organisation, and what I don’t. Over these years of traversing spheres in different print media and higher education, I’ve come to conclude that toxic bosses are now the norm and not the exception. Of course, rarely are two people or bosses toxic in the same way. Yet the one quality they all possess, in my experience, is that they always know better than you, the employee. It’s worse if your work specialism isn’t theirs: even if you may have spent half a lifetime on an aspect of your niche, they know it better than you.

That time, moments before walking up to the media baron, my thoughts surged back to the showdown in the UFO-like Noida office in early 2012. On how his daughter, who runs the group, is known to scream at the office staff. How her rage often enraged a well-known senior editor (also a cinema reporter), who’d pass that rage down to cogs in the wheel like me. I recalled how their magazine sent me to cover the Kumbh Mela of 2012, briefing the photographer and me to only interview non-Indians (read: white people), as that’d make for “good copy”. How I had failed in that mission. How, after my reporting editor screamed at me on the phone since the baron’s daughter had screamed at her in the office, saying I was no good on the job, I forced a young white man at a ghat to forcibly give me a byte and concede to a photo.

That man, two years later, scoured the Web and wrote me an email saying how offended he was that I had broken his spell of silence. I had taken a racist pitch and did a racist story online, invading the privacy of a fellow human. My photographer colleague chose to sit away from me on the flight from Varanasi to Delhi, unable to bear my controlled, invective-laden mutterings directed towards my bosses. He’d survived in the organisation somehow, and what was happening to me had happened to many employees there. I returned to the Noida office from Delhi airport with my bags, but didn’t find the baron or his daughter there. I saw and stared down my reporting manager who’d shouted at me on the phone, raised my voice to a shriek demanding an apology for her behaviour, which didn’t issue forth, and I quit full-time journalism since.

The higher education man, now a retired vice-chancellor, taught electrical engineering most of his life. As I left the university he founded, I remember the last two months of my time there getting squeezed at work and writing a 3,000-word exit letter detailing my fifteen months there, and how it may have led to the months-later exit of my immediate (also toxic) boss and the vice chancellor. Toxic bosses often have minions who act like their twins. They owe people like me the minimum of an apology. Knowing them, that shall never happen.

The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.