46) The environmentalist

I am a placement consultant handling software recruitments based out of Bangalore. The software industry never had it so good though short on talents; we consultants are stretched sourcing the right talent.

I first met Sahiti Bharadwaj when her resume was short listed for a Sr. Business Analyst profile for Wipro as she had some prior experience in the telecom vertical. We invited 10 candidates for the client interview and the offer was made to Sahiti after a grueling couple of days work: arranging and coordinating interviews, seek candidate confirmation, run the preliminary skill tests and at last have a candidate placed.

In the interview, Sahiti came across as a soft spoken and cultured person, married to IIM graduate with an infant baby to manage.

Six months passed by and there was a similar profile needed for IBM and so my office called her once again. Sahiti seemed content with Wipro and wouldn’t hear of another move within 6 months.

She said,” That’s ethically wrong”.
In my line of work, we only see opportunists and this one seemed so morally upright.
At Wipro, she was on a CTC of 12 lacs and IBM would have been only too glad of a 50% hike. But she was having none of it.

She said,” Sorry Mr.Anwar. Thanks for calling but no thanks for the offer. Are you by any chance interested in planting trees?”

This is as far a tangent as it can get. I was polite and heard her, “I belong to an association that plants trees just before the onset of monsoon. Last year, we had a camp where 12 volunteers planted over 500 trees in Kochi and this year we plan to carry out the exercise in Hyderabad.”

I was getting interested,” How does it work?”

She couldn’t contain her excitement,” First we identify the stretch of land that needs green cover. We prefer to have trees in residential areas and we gather the residents and hold a seminar for enlisting caretakers. We advise them on nature of soil, plants that will be conducive and how to take care. Once, we have a sufficient number of committed caretakers then we start the planting. It takes three years for one to take care of a plant before it can take care of by itself. We draw a schedule of watering these plants for the volunteers”.

I asked, “For how many years have been involved in this?”

Sahiti said,” This will be my fourth camp and we have covered Chennai, Mysore, and Kochi and now it will be Hyderabad”.

I said,” I’ll take part in the Hyderabad round”.

She was effusive in her thanks,” Once, you see a fully grown tree after 3 years from a sapling, the pleasure one gets is unmatched and anyway it’s the least we can do for the future generations”.

Sahiti does all this despite managing a grueling job and a one year old infant.