Problem of the middle ones

Problem of the middle ones

Early in the morning, a friend of mine threw up a contentious point of debate in our whatsapp group – discussing about the injustice done to our particular batch of officers in a public sector bank. As per his research, the couple of batches senior to us and a few junior to our batch, were much better placed in the overall hierarchy.  Is it true that we were the only ones who were wronged – questioned my friend.

We – the middle ones -  seemed to have been sandwiched between the two pillars of success.  And that brought back my childhood memories. We were three brothers – and no prizes for guessing, I was the middle one.  And in all those Chandamama stories that I read in my childhood, I always observed that the King would have three sons.  In order to pick the smartest of those princes, he would put them to a test. And invariably, it was the youngest one who would win the contest.

And then there were those old style bollywood family movies, where the elder brother would make all the sacrifices and the younger ones would go astray. In the end, in a melodramatic way, the younger ones would realize their follies, repent and then would fall in line. The elder one will heroically smile through the last frame of the movie.

So, there was goodness around the elder ones and there was smartness around the younger ones.  And we, the poor middle ones, were nowhere in the count of those writers.  And as I grew up, I even observed that at the airline check-in counters, people pleaded for the window or the aisle seats, no one cared for the middle ones.

The trauma of the middle ones doesn’t end here. You speak to a fast bowler in cricket, the sparkling stars in his eyes while talking about ‘hitting’ the middle stump is something special that you don’t see if it were to be a leg or an off stump. I don’t know why bashing the middle ones gave them so much joy. In football, the mid-fielders are made to do all the hard work but they rarely get a chance to shoot a goal and do not enjoy the prominence of a goalkeeper either.

In the corporate world, the juniors play innocent and novice, the senior management does half its work on the golf course and it is only the ‘middle’ management that ends up toiling to earn bread for both these layers. No respite for the middle ones here too.

But there is a silver lining.  We have a very talkative friend and we once jocularly made a suggestion to him to always block the middle seat in the aircraft. In case the person sitting to his left got bored of his talking, he could always turn towards the right. He acceded to our advice with gratitude and lived happily thereafter. So, perhaps, someday the writers will write stories on the middle brothers; the middle management will have the highest paid roles in an organization; the mid-fielders only will get to score goals; and the ICC will mandate the middle stumps to be made of concrete – that can never be shattered. Amen.