It has been almost a couple of months since I joined Frappe. To be very candid, I tried my best to divide the time here up in well-defined concrete phases. An initial phase, an adjusting phase, a phase where I slowly find my foot in the office, and the final phase where I feel like I belong in this office which feels the set of an art film. But that wasn’t really the scenario.

Instead, it has been a spiral of phases: I observe and learn, I adjust, I feel I know what I am doing, I start feeling a bit lost, and then back to square one.

Set of an art film feels like an understatement to describe the office

Life at Frappe has felt less like a job and more like learning a craft. A slow deliberate one. I have observed people care deeply for things most people would label as insignificant- the padding on a small button on a webpage, arranging the coffee cups by height, returning all the books back from where they were picked from on the shelf. These moments helped me dawn on a realisation: this place runs on attention.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, to quote Murakami “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking”. There is something deeply Murakami-esque about the manner in which work unfolds. It feels unhurried, resistant to convention. The emphasis is on doing them right.

The other thing which stood out to me was the transparency here. Information flows freely, everybody knows what the other person is focusing on, and even the smallest of decisions go through a vote. It’s one of the things that has made me, a newcomer, feel like my voice matters, and I will always be grateful to the culture here for that.

At one point over the course of the short time I have been here, work has stopped feeling transactional. It stopped feeling like a list of tasks I have to check things off in exchange for monetary compensation. Instead, it felt like participation in a community activity- the activity of achieving excellence.

I came in with a quiet fear that I might lose interest in organizing events, something which had already taken up a huge chunk of my college. Instead, the work I have done here has gave it a new shape. I started thinking about my decisions more, I wasn’t just executing do-ables from a list anymore- I was learning to care differently. Somewhere along the way, I also reignited my love for writing( and from that comes this feeble attempt to write a blog).

If there’s one thing these first couples of months have taught me, it’s that growth doesn’t need to be dramatic. Sometimes it’s subtle, uncomfortable, and feels like someone is going around in circles.

Here’s to hoping that, in the months and years from now, I can look back at the work I have done here and say without hesitation that I am proud of it.