5). SDP: No man makes a more favourable first impression than the 55 year old Prabhakar. He is tall at over 6 feet, fair in complexion, dresses like a groom, with a mustache thick of fur like a squirrel’s tail. He would dye his hair to the last strand, adjust his tie till it nicely covers the strap of the belt, use a male perfume and if that is exhausted use his wife’s but not venture out without that damn perfume. He is meticulous to the last degree.
At work the meticulousness is observed almost to a military discipline. He arrives on dot at 9:30 in his red Santro and after a clasp at the statue of Sai Baba sits on the table to attend to those infernal calls. The phone will start ringing and he would talk six to a dozen and drown people at the other end with this endless verbosity. With a convent accent and prim English, he is a treat to watch as he meanders through all the objections and may even make the sale. But the poor fellow would have suffered a lot of vocal energy. His mouth is not one to ram past but again a slow and consistent drib full of punctuation marks.
In a working day of 9 hours, he will be on the phone for 5 hours and his stamina for more will not flag. In real life, he is like the motor-mouth Harsha Bogle setting up shop two hours before the match. When a person speaks a cultured mind is not too over-elaborate on the pretext that the other is such dense until confirmed.
Another work he does with religious sacrosanct is signing all the production requests. He will check each column and then follow it up with factory on the materials availability and schedule. He is the master of follow ups. When any prospects call him, he will take the contact details and pass it to the concerned sales guy without even losing the next breath. Expert Delegator!!!!
Prabhakar at times would seem an officious government clerk insisting on all the documents for an aggrieved parent claiming the body of their child in a mortuary. But then he is a master survivor in an office environment and above all, he will do nothing that would endanger his job; a measure of abundant caution.
He is far too busy correcting proforma invoice and arguing for hours on end as to why the taxes were not added. SDP is a genius for the trivia: he can find mistakes where none exists. Should he ever copyedit Shakespeare and Dickens both would be so chagrined as to flee from the writing trade. That eagle-eye for mistakes is a genius that is embedded genetically in SDP.
As a family man, he fares far better. His marriage of over 3 decades has still a lot of romance and dutiful to his married daughter. Financially, he is never in want and leads a comfortable upper middleclass existence. With friends he has a devastating wit and he is gifted with a mind to accept differences more readily than others I have seen. I would humour him each time with a “how is your recurring deposit going? (his salary is so superfluous that it might as well go to a bank deposit in entirety) or “the water problem in Madras is due to a lot of Telugus here”. He takes them in his stride in full grace.
SDP is a nice friend to have especially in a crisis and as a conversationalist, world class.
Verdict: SATTVIC
Lesson to be learnt: Remain friendly with such characters even if they are like a non-stick pan.
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