All these years.

Back in 2007, I was a copywriter with McCann. Things changed and the urge to write stopped after I quit working. Had my reasons to quit but I still loved my choice. The feeling was as ecstatic as the day I had drafted my first ad. So in 48 hours after putting in my papers, I was on a dam site making concrete structures over water. Extracting water. Stopping water. Transporting water. Filtering water. Grey was officially the color here. In short, I got busy doing things that I had never done before. And from the copywriters point of view, this is what adding salt to the gonads was all about.

A haiku I wrote back then is reproduced here. Well, not exactly a haiku but still captures my mind probe.

I build them over water.
Then they measure. 
The unit is wad.

That was the first year though. Some wads lost. And I learnt how to negotiate without losing my head. And my wad. By 2010 I was building Intake & Outfall System for power plants. When you are doing a business in places that never had a business before you know it is sparta. Either you hunt. There is no “or”. And the experiences since then till the present day have been great.

So what did I learn? A lot infact. Learnt the fact that it is a must to have a strong footing legally in big contractual dealings. And that arbitration is something that gets you big money — sometimes twice the amount of the contract value.

So what did I do. I and the team built that thing. It’s a part of the intake structure. Took me 18 months to build mm-perfect hydraulic structures like the one above. And in all these years I have realized that my true calling would be to build niche things such as these.

I could go on and on but let this new journal of mine be a post-by-post thing. Until then, a haiku today for all the experiences.

Wolf in sheep’s clothing
Sheep in wolf’s clothing
FCUK.