Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Two Short Stories on Love and Business

I was speaking to a friend a few days ago about the new business venture she was embarking on. I congratulated her — she was smart, had put in a lot of thought into the idea, and I knew her as someone who would give it everything she had. She was that kind of person. Then she told me who would be partnering her in the venture: her boyfriend (for want of a better word), someone she had got into a relationship with a few months earlier. And despite knowing — from all that she’d told me about him — that he was a good guy and treated her with kindness and respect, it gave me pause. I wondered for an entire minute before doing what I always do (usually to my own detriment) and said what I felt needed to be said. “Think a bit before getting into a business deal with a romantic partner,” I said. My friend, used to my ways, gave me her defence. Good guy, he’s got expertise in the field, makes economic sense, good venture, good opportunities, etc. Like I said, she was a smart woman. But I said what I thought anyway. And this, in a nutshell, is it: When one is embarking on a relationship, any relationship, one should have clarity on how one defines it. And, most often, one should be able to encompass that in a word. He is my boyfriend. She is my boss. He is my colleague. He is my friend. She is my partner in business. She is my sister. She is my editor. And so on. Whenever one tries to combine these two, like, say, she is my friend and my colleague, one of those relationships is going to take a backseat. Especially when there is conflict. And how can there be relationships without conflict? And when one of those relationships is affected, sooner or later, chances are, so will the other. The important thing to note here is that one has to be all the more careful with a new friend, a new girlfriend, a new boss or a new colleague, to make sure you don’t assign another role to them too quickly. Clear, well-defined, non-dual relationships themselves are hard to navigate and maintain. How can it make sense then to prematurely assign two roles to the same person? That’s unfair to both assigner and assignee.

(NB: I met my wife at a publishing house where she was editor when I was a freelance illustrator. And she actually gave me work. And we have been partners at work from pretty nearly the day we got married. So there’s that, too. )

On another occasion, I was speaking to a friend going through a relationship crisis. Some time earlier, she had become romantically involved with a person she was working with. While the early part — like all early parts — was good, she said, she found that she wasn’t in agreement with his ‘working style’. As expected, this led to conflict. And she found herself giving her partner/collaborator more rope than she normally would in similar circumstances. Mainly because she found that he was caring and affectionate with her in their personal time. After a few months of being part of this off-kilter equation — where the professional part was full of conflict while the personal was all chocolate and cuddles — her first realisation was that she couldn’t work with the person any more. And that in the interest of their relationship they needed to stop working with each other. But her next realisation — one that few get — was the important one. Having terminated their work relationship, she figured quite quickly that she couldn’t be romantically involved with him any more either. How could she, the wise woman said (as I applauded silently), when she didn’t respect his work ethic. That is key. We mistakenly think we can break up the human beings in our life into their different roles, like businessman-brother, financier-father, advocate-sister, doctor-friend, and tell ourselves that, as long as someone is a good brother, father, sister or friend to us, how they conduct the rest of their lives has no bearing on us. But I have always wondered how anyone could love a person they didn’t respect. How is it love then? Doesn’t it mean that you don’t respect yourself? I am exacting on my family, friends, colleagues, and even passing acquaintances. And I encourage them to be exacting with me, too. For me it is important to know that you treat everyone — from wife to waiter, from CEO to chauffeur, from publisher to waste paper vendor, from poet to plumber — in exactly the same fashion. That’s probably the reason I shed people like a Lab sheds hair.