Of dogs and dog tags….

Everyone would agree with me that’s it’s a dogs life out there. You spend all your life trying to appease God alone knows whom and at the end of it all, you are left panting with your tongue out and tails between your legs with nothing to show for all your efforts.
As if to buttress my belief that it indeed is a dog’s life, there is an invention called a dog tag, also called as an identity tag. Like the leash that a pet owner lovingly puts across a dog’s neck, every man, woman and child who has been institutionalized i.e. has some affiliation to some organization – either for work or study – there is not much difference between the commonly understood meaning of the word and my interpretation of it - has one around his or her neck.

There used to be a time when an employer knew most of his employees. There is the famous story of how the ever great Mr. J.R.D Tata, saw her waiting for her husband, the now famous Narayan Murthy and stood waiting with her so that she would be safe. I can’t imagine that happening now in any organization – large or small. Similarly when I was in school, not only did the teachers know all of us by name but also our parents, their profession and which part of the country we came from. As we have progressed and evolved and expanded and grown in numbers, it has become necessary to hang an identity tag around the neck – as if to proclaim to the world, I EXIST!!!

A tag has various purposes and sentiments attached to it. If you work for a MNC, you proudly wear your tag. It kind of gives you leverage among lesser mortals who are employed in ordinary Indian companies. Even within Indian companies, there are the giants – the Reliance, the TCS et al and then there are the never heard of companies. When you enter a social destination – a shopping mall, a restaurant etc, you proclaim your presence by your dog tag, you command the respect that your employer commands, never mind that you spend all your working hours on naukri.com and monsterindia.com looking for a change in your job and bitching about every aspect of your work.

The tag is quite stylized now a days – there are clip-on’s, there are tags which hang to your belt and then there is the traditional around the neck tag. Identity also comes in nice packaging now a days…..

You put on a tag when you leave your home in the morning and it becomes such an integral part of your identity that you forget to remove it even when you are home. Only when you finally change – your clothes and most often your personality – you realize the presence of this yoke around your neck and you remove it.

Surprisingly even with all the identity tags in the world, you still don’t know your next door neighbour, you don’t know who sits in the cubicle next to you, you don’t know the name of the colleague who shares a bus seat with you on the company bus and to top it all, inspite of all your tags, you still remain as anonymous as ever – no one knows who you are!