Fish Market Merit and the Small Republic of Honesty
Acronyms used here: AI means artificial intelligence, the software machinery now making pictures, songs, essays, predictions, mistakes, miracles, and occasionally very confident nonsense. CV means curriculum vitae, the little document in which a human life is boiled down until it resembles hospital soup. IT means information technology, the trade of making computers behave just well enough for humans to blame each other.
The strange thing about merit is that it is sold to children like Horlicks and later served to adults like leftover cabbage.
In school they tell you, study hard, keep your marks up, read books, behave decently, and the world will open like a grand old door. They do not mention that the door may open into Kasim Bazar Fish Market at eleven in the morning, where the air is thick with scales, bargaining, bicycle bells, fish blood, and the quiet knowledge that everybody is trying to survive with one eye on the price and the other on spoilage.
I was never the class wizard. Let us settle that case before the prosecution becomes excited. I was not the boy who made mathematics purr like a well-fed cat. But I did well enough in Cossipore English School and later St. Xavier’s, among the usual fifty boys in polished shoes and private terrors. I was curious. That was my real defect. Curious boys become readers, readers become inconvenient adults, and inconvenient adults are not always invited to the buffet.
Many of the boys I studied with are doing very well now. Considerably well. The kind of well that comes with glass dining tables, clean dental work, children in better schools, and holiday photographs where the sea looks better behaved than most people I know. With success comes a certain refined invisibility. They do not exactly avoid you. That would be too dramatic. They simply develop the skill of looking through you, as if you are an old poster peeling off a wall near Shyambazar.
I do not blame them entirely.
Status is a nervous animal. It startles easily. It does not like reminders of what might have happened if the bus had taken another turn.
And I am, admittedly, not a decorative reminder.
Life has left me looking like one of those thin, suspicious figures who stand near the fish market with a cloth bag, a bad night’s sleep, and a private argument still running inside the skull. My cheeks have withdrawn from public service. My eyes look like they have been proofreading municipal documents in a dim room. If I were cast in a fantasy film, I would not be given the ring. I would be given the receipt book.
A tormented Gollum, yes, but without the precious.
Or even the semi-precious.
Yet here is the irritating little twist, the one life hides in its lungi knot: this may have been useful.
When the varnish goes, the grain appears. When comfort leaves, flattery becomes harder to perform. When you have failed enough times, been ignored enough times, and watched enough cheerful mediocrity sail past with flags, you stop wasting energy pretending the boat is a palace. You say, no, that is a leaking boat. Nicely painted, perhaps. But leaking.
This is not a popular skill in India.
India loves truth in the abstract, the way people love exercise equipment they never use. In practice, we prefer the truth to arrive wrapped in cotton wool, dipped in syrup, and addressed to “Respected Sir.” If a thing is broken, you must first praise its vision. If a plan is foolish, you must admire its boldness. If a project has the structural integrity of a wet papad, you must call it “early stage.”
I am bad at this.
In interviews, the ritual begins politely. Someone shows me a project. It has slides. Slides are the modern incense stick; they create smoke and suggest spirituality without proving anything. The project usually has ambition, buzzwords, and a missing spine. It wants to be a platform. Everything wants to be a platform now. A tea stall with a QR code is probably a beverage platform.
Then comes the question.
“Can you improve this?”
This is where a sensible man smiles and says, “Absolutely, very promising.”
I say, “The foundation is wrong.”
There is a silence.
Not a dramatic silence. A corporate silence. The kind with air-conditioning.
I try to explain. The idea is not bad, I say, but the assumptions are cracked. The users will not behave like this. The data will not arrive cleanly. The workflow has been imagined by someone who has never stood in the queue, filled the form, argued with the clerk, lost the token, and gone home with a headache. The front end is not the problem. The problem is that the entire thing is wearing a borrowed suit.
Then the door closes.
Softly.
Efficiently.
Forever.
This is how honesty becomes unemployment with better grammar.
The employer does not want a liar exactly. That would be too crude. He wants a truth decorator. Someone who can place flowers around a corpse and call it transformation. Someone who can say “strategic opportunity” when the correct phrase is “small disaster with Wi-Fi.” Someone who can nod at nonsense with the devotional expression of a man watching a temple bell swing.
I have tried. Honestly, I have.
But my face betrays me. It was built by committee during load shedding. It does not know how to arrange itself around false enthusiasm.
LinkedIn makes this worse. LinkedIn is where human anxiety goes after wearing a blazer. Every week somebody wants to help me optimize my profile, unlock premium insights, improve my reach, build my personal brand, and become visible to recruiters who are apparently looking for a man of twenty-five skills, four certifications, three clouds, two foreign accents, and one permanently wagging tail.
I remain on the free tier because I cannot afford to pay for the privilege of being ignored in higher resolution.
This, too, is apparently my fault. One must network. One must engage. One must comment, “Insightful post!” under a paragraph written by a man who has discovered, at age forty-six, that teamwork is good. One must congratulate people for career moves, funding rounds, anniversaries, promotions, leadership lessons, sunrise photographs, and the deep moral courage of attending a webinar.
Meanwhile, in my corner of Calcutta, the morning has its own notifications. The fish seller shouts. A scooter coughs itself awake. Someone’s pressure cooker releases a whistle like a tiny steam engine losing patience. A boy in a school uniform walks past eating something bright orange from a packet. A stray dog considers philosophy and abandons it. Somewhere a neighbor’s television explains the nation to people who only wanted tea.
The world continues.
Not nobly.
But stubbornly.
That is one thing Calcutta teaches you. Survival is not cinematic. It does not come with violin music. It comes with a plastic bucket, a leaking tap, a cheap phone, a little rice, a little fish, the electricity bill, and the private arithmetic of how long money can be stretched before it becomes transparent.
People speak of carbon footprint. Mine is very low, not because I am some enlightened monk of sustainability, but because poverty is the original climate policy. I walk. I reuse. I postpone. I repair things past the point where objects themselves begin to feel embarrassed. My shoes know more about the neighborhood than Google Maps. My wallet is so thin it could be used as a bookmark.
There is dignity in this, but let us not romanticize it like a foreign documentary. Poverty is not charming. It is not earthy. It is not spiritual. It is a mosquito that has read your schedule.
Still, it clarifies.
You begin to see the absurd machinery around you. The leaders shouting. The followers repeating. The experts blooming like fungus after rain. The motivational prophets selling courage in downloadable installments. The small powerful men demanding obedience and calling it culture. The fashionable cowards calling caution wisdom. The professional flatterers collecting invoices.
And the rest of us?
We stand in line with our cloth bags.
The funniest part is that I still believe in work. Not performance. Not branding. Work. The solid thing. The thing that remains after the meeting ends and the slogans are swept away. A table should stand. A bridge should hold. A sentence should mean what it says. A system should not collapse when one tired clerk takes leave. A claim should survive contact with evidence.
This belief is now treated as eccentric.
Possibly dangerous.
Certainly not leadership material.
I sometimes think of Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya, where the job interview becomes a small theatre of absurdity. Ask the young man the weight of the moon. Watch him sweat. Test not his ability, but his willingness to be humiliated politely. The moon, by the way, has a mass of about kilograms. I looked it up, because curiosity is a disease and I am not recovering.
But the point is not the moon.
The point is the room.
Every generation has its room. A table. A few men. A young person hoping to be allowed into the machinery. A question designed less to measure knowledge than obedience. The room changes its furniture. The ritual remains.
Today the question may be about AI. Yesterday it was about management. Before that it was English fluency, family background, caste, college, city, accent, salary history, confidence, obedience, haircut, shirt collar, and whether your desperation had been properly ironed.
You think the system rewards merit.
Not quite.
The system rewards usable merit. Merit that bows. Merit that smiles. Merit that knows when to stop seeing.
That is where I fail.
I see too much, and then, disastrously, I speak.
This is not heroism. Let us not build a statue. Much of it is temperament. Some of it is damage. Some of it is loneliness. Some of it is the old reader’s disease: once books have taught you how arguments work, bad arguments begin to squeak like bad ceiling fans. You can ignore them for a while. Then one day you cannot hear anything else.
Fish worries me now, too. This is middle age. The body becomes a committee of complaints. You look at lunch and wonder whether it contains nutrition, poison, inflation, memory, and a small government conspiracy. Fish is praised for omega-3, scolded for mercury, fried for pleasure, and priced like it has done postgraduate work abroad. I eat it anyway, because I am Bengali and therefore not entirely free.
Perhaps the mercury made me strange.
Perhaps the city did.
Perhaps failure did.
Perhaps books did.
Or perhaps the strangeness was always there, waiting like a cat under a parked Ambassador.
I am not finished. This must be said plainly, because self-pity is a swamp with excellent acoustics. It makes every groan sound profound. I may be broke. I may be bruised. I may be socially misplaced, professionally inconvenient, and spiritually allergic to applause on command. But I am not finished.
The future may yet improve. Not magically. Magic is for advertisements and election promises. Improvement, when it comes, will come like a municipal repair: late, noisy, incomplete, and still welcome.
I may move from this place.
I may earn better.
I may write something that finds its readers.
I may build again.
I may even learn to say “interesting” in interviews without my eyebrows filing a dissent note.
Until then, I have the fish market, the books, the cheap tea, the long walks, the stubborn brain, and the small republic of honesty where I remain, for now, both president and unpaid clerk.
And if the old classmates still cannot see me, never mind.
The fishmonger can.
He sees everyone clearly.
Especially when they ask the price twice.