Now that I am free, now that I have resigned and am lying flat on my bed and staring at the ceiling, now that contentment is seeping from every pore, I find myself remembering the last six months with an air of resigned good humour. That, however, is wrong. It is a deadly trap. A dulling of the outrage with time. If I encourage it, I think...nay...I know that I run the risk of ending up back in a steel and glass corporate powerhouse, feeling helpless as Excel sheets slowly suck my lifeblood away. Therefore, for the future me - for the me I am sure is still lurking underneath there somewhere - is a list of reasons why I should never ever in my life again attempt working for gigantic MNCs in Delhi that have nothing to do with publishing. The few good friends I made in the last few months are really not worth all this.

1. Timesheets. No. I mean, no. EVerytime I had to fill one up in the last few months, detailing how exactly I had spent every minute of every day in my office, describing in painstaking detail how I stared at Excel Sheet number 346 from 3:45pm to 4:13 pm, the voice inside my head started shrieking, and did not stop till I got home.

2. Long commutes. Very good on paper. Awful in real life. Even if one has the luxury of an AC car to oneself.

3. Yo yo honey singh. It is like this. Every new person I met in the last few months was a fan of this man. They sung their songs in the washroom, they hummed along with him while working, they listened to him intently on the one hour drive back home - flipping radio channels impatiently until they located a honey singh song. I attended an out-of-station wedding of a dear colleague/friend and these were the only songs the wedding guests were dancing to. I attended an office party in Jaipur, and everyone around me was swaying to punjabi rap. It was my very own version of patriarchal, North Indian nightmare...and I couldn't get out of it. There is only so much that Beatles on the headhone can do, if the air all around is saturated with everything yo yo.

4. Corporate lingo. No, I will not revert back to you. Neither shall I streamline the deliverables by EOD. I shan't touch base with you to verbalise anything, and I shall especially not ideate while you do knowledge transfer about cross-utilization. I might throw my laptop at you for process optimization though.

5. No language stuff. I have realized that if I can't write, rewrite and play around with words, I die a little bit inside. Let's just say that there were a lot of deaths in the last few months.

6. No book stuff. I was asked whether Salman Rushdie is a cricketer, whether Chetan Bhagat is English literature's pinnacle and whether wasting one's chidlhood reading storybooks lessened one's earning potential as an adult.

7. Shiny clothes. I cannot in any which way think of a time when I shall voluntarily dress up everyday to go to work. A clean shirt, a pair of jeans and combed hair I can manage. Perfect make up and stilettos and pencil skirts, I can't. And when it is obvious that my unstraightened hair and Sarojini nagar top is directly affecting how my work is being evaluated, I have to physically restrain myself from wearing shorts and a ganjee to work the next day.

I shall add more as and when I can. However, for the time being, remember these, future self. Remember these and shudder.