I wish I was..

It was inside one of the numerous hotels around my office that I first saw Loganathan - may be about 20-24 - who looked a little too odd to be a waiter. He had been serving me for a week before we stuck up with a conversation outside the hotel. I would have missed this smartly dressed lad if he hadn't come up to me himself. He was completely different from the uniformed waiter that I was used to, in neatly pressed formals and a shiny black pair of shoes.

The first few meetings were like, I did most of the talking showing off and he used to just listen with a smile. Slowly as we got along, I found out he was a lot better at talking than the trash I was doing and from then on, I started to listen. He speaks with vigour of life, failures, hope, dreams, hard work and success but with a tint of sadness when it comes to his personal life. From then on everytime someone came to me needing hope, I had the real life story of Loganathan to pull them up. Even when my sister failed to clear her first three interviews I told her the same story over lunch.

Working at a Bicycle repair shop simply wasn't exciting enough for him that one day he runs away from his home town in south Tamilnadu with about 500 Rupees in his pockets and some clothing. In his four years at Chennai he says he has spent days together without food, slept on roadsides, jumped jobs, gotten ways lost, learned to read and write, made friends and for now found a decent place and way to live. A part-time waiter he spends most of the time and all of his energy on the new marketing platform MLM (Multi Level Marketing). Being a waiter he said helps him because he had a place to stay, something to fill up his stomach (he never says eat!!) and of course he has the time to be with his business.

He works twenty hours a day taking breaks during the time he has to travel. He always moves around with a file, the first page of which says ' Loganathan - first croun ambasador of India' (actually meant to be Loganathan - First Crown Ambassador of India) in blocks. I vaguely know that the Crown ambassador is someone who is at the top of the Marketing group.

His Immediate aim he says is a six digit Income per month that he believes he would achieve by 2008. He speaks of Bill gates, Vivekananda and Thomas Alva Edison like he knew them all his life. Any good car on the road would make him smile and he would say " One day I would own a Mercedes". Every time I told him my job sucked, he simply would say, "you should either do only what you enjoy or try and enjoy what you do, otherwise you are lost". The first thing he says every time he picks up your call is "pray you get what ever you wish" and for the amount of life and hope he has, you would only wish he becomes the man he wants to be.

Very recently when he had, as usual lost his job with a hotel because he was down with fever, he refused my offer of buying him a meal even after he had spent a day filling himself up with water. Two days later he treated me with a meal as he had found another hotel to help himself out.

For someone who has not even been to middle school and someone who takes more than a minute to write down your mobile number with the worst spelling you can imagine for your name, his thoughts and ways simply baffle me. I tried to fathom, why with some education and a job I feel so insecure and he with literally nothing looks at life so differently, but in vain.

He sometimes tells me when I am frustrated, that the day he makes it big he would offer me a job that suits me and we would laugh aloud, although both of us know he is not joking.