Chicken Sanju Baba

‘If you want loyalty buy a dog’, a statement given during an exit interview when I was trying to retain an employee who was serving notice. Maybe he wasn’t really convinced with the idea of been loyal to the organisation. Post this dialogue even I lost my interest in retaining the employee. Needless to say that I gave him my piece of mind as well. While I never documented this dialogue in the exit interview form, but retained it within myself.

I belonged to a generation where I felt sandwiched between 2 extreme generations. My previous generation were my parents and their contemporaries who spent their entire life into one job and maybe the same role as well. The only exit they were aware of was retirement and their pride remained in the PFs, gratuities and the pensions they had.

In sharp contrast had a ‘generation next’ who didn’t believe in spending more than 2 – 3 years in any organisation.

Millennial have a reputation for job-hopping. Unattached to organizations and institutions, people from this generation -- born between 1982 and 1996 -- were said to move freely from company to company, more so than any other generation.

The data supported this. A recent Gallup report on the millennial generation revealed that 21% of millennial said they've changed jobs within the past year, which was more than three times the number of non-millennial who reported the same. Gallup estimated that millennial turnover affected the U.S. economy by $30.5 billion annually.

Millennial also showed less willingness to stay in their current jobs. Half of millennial -- compared with 60% of non-millennial -- strongly agreed that they planned to be working at their company one year from now. For businesses, this suggested that half of their millennial workforce didn’t see a future with them.

Since many millennial didn’t plan on staying in their jobs, it made sense that they are hunting for new positions. Gallup found that 60% of millennial said they are open to a different job opportunity -- 15 percentage points higher than the percentage of non-millennial workers who said the same. Millennial were also the most willing to act on better opportunities: 36% reported that they would look for a job with a different organization in the next 12 months if the job market improved, compared with 21% of non-millennial who said the same.

Time flew and I kept meeting more and more people who were more interested in the Performance Linked Incentives than Loyalty/Retention Bonus. Even the Offer Letter annexures started projecting more of performance based pays rather than Gratuities and PFs.  

With the advent of newer forms of networking and sociability even the new age relationships started getting measured and affected by performance than loyalty. Loyalty compromised seemed more acceptable as long as the current performance was in the acceptable range. Frequent break-ups and patch-ups have become the outcome of performance based relationships.

Amidst this chaos of loyalty getting overshadowed by performance, one place that comes to the rescue is Bollywood fandom.

One news that caught my attention in the recent past was of a hard core fan of Sanjay Dutt. A deceased fan of Dutt left all her belongings for him.

Mumbai's Malabar Hill resident Nishi Harishchandra Tripathi left a detailed letter about her valuables and a nomination form to the Bank of Baroda's Walkeshwar branch a month before her death to the name of "Film star Sanjay Dutt", Mumbai Mirror reported.

Nishi died on January 15, after battling a terminal illness. The 62-year-old homemaker lived with her mother and siblings in a 3-BHK flat worth around Rs. 10 crore. The family was clueless about Tripathi's will and they got to know a day after her prayer meeting when their legal adviser informed them. I am sure this lady would have had Sanjay Dutt as a teenage crush which eventually got converted into a lasting fandom full of loyalty irrespective of the ups and downs in the life of the actor.

While few intellectuals may term Bollywood fans as crazy but the fact remains that they are a classic example of loyalty that is firstly long term and secondly beyond the rights / wrongs of the person. It’s indeed heartening to see fans gathering below the houses of Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, SRK etc. When Salman was jailed in Jodhpur for close to 3 days his fans travelled with him from Mumbai to Jodhpur, stayed there for 3 and returned upon his release and return to Mumbai. These folks are actually beyond rightness / wrongness of the person, they just love them and choose to be loyal. That’s about it. Period.

One more long standing relation between a fan and an actor was between Khalid Hakimi and Sanjay Dutt. Sanju always been into controversies and a pure border line case of been good or bad. He was a patron of Noor Mohamadi restaurant for decades and once he happened to share a chicken recipe with the owner named Khalid Hakimi. Hakimi immediately introduced that dish in his menu and named it Chicken Sanju Baba, While Sanju was on top of stardom the dish remained on the menu and even when Sanju was jailed still the dish remained on his menu. Rather on the day Sanju got released from jail Hakimi announced free serving of Chicken Sanju Baba to all the guests of that day. Hakimi’s loyalty for the actor remained rock steady even amidst the ebb and flow in the actor’s life. Many more examples that depicts the loyalties of these fans.

All these stories are actually reassuring amidst the performance based and practical approach of the younger and intellectual lot.

The irony of the situation is all these folks who talk about performance based work and relations giving least importance to loyalty factor end up having or aspiring to have a pet dog at home. While these folks don’t believe in loyalty themselves they prefer to have an animal which is an icon of loyalty.

People seem afraid of expressing loyalty and expecting loyalty but not to forget that come what may, loyalty will never go out of fashion.