Tag - fiction

Are you my mentor?                 Apparently, Sheryl Sandberg doesn’t like anyone asking that question of someone else. Yes, I’m still on about her book Lean In. Go read it if you haven’t. She encourages her readers to ‘excel and you’ll get a mentor’. As I read that line, I bit my lip knowingly. I plead guilty to asking that question because I once had a mentor more than a decade ago. My first job was at an NGO geared towards encouraging and supporting entrepreneurship amongst youths and adults. To facilitate its numerous programmes – classes, workshops, mentorship, trainings, etc – it recruited volunteers from all works of life in their professional capacities to share their expertise, to teach, to mentor, to consult. And whenever there was a workshop taking place, most staff pitched in to assist the department responsible for organizing it. Often, I’d offer to register participants or write up mini – bios for all the speakers. That day I chose to write. His resume was the second amongst the small sheaf of papers given to me. As I put his qualifications and experiences together, unconsciously my mind wandered a bit. Blame it on the work environment then and all that talk about the importance of a mentor. I knew him vaguely. I knew what he looked like and had formed an impression already. However, it had been his written words on paper that had made me sit up and take notice. (He had helped the organization conduct interviews and some of his thoughts were blunt, abrupt, harsh…). Later on, I walked down the corridor towards a colleague’s office and saw him being interviewed by the press, just before he was billed to speak. My mind wandered again. This time deliberately. By the end of the workshop, I had wrangled out an introduction from a friend of his who was also a colleague of mine (one of the workshop organizers), and he had invited me to dinner with them. I still remember the moment I asked him: ‘Would you be my mentor?’ as”more