Spring in DC is a fickle season. One day it’s cold and rainy and the next it’s mid-summer hot. Today was of the sneaky hot variety and temperatures around town hovered in the mid-eighties. Coincidentally, my firm was hosting a large group in our conference room – a room notorious for its impossibly bad ventilation. This got a few of us talking about last-resort cooling systems, which reminded me of punka wallahs.
For those of you unfamiliar with punka wallahs, they were manual fan operators particularly popular in Raj India. The punka is a large, overhead, swinging fan and the wallah its power source.
It’s not so difficult to imagine Victorian British at dinner in their Bungalow, dressed to the nines, with a grumpy, mustachioed coolie sitting to the side, pulling the cord for their luxurious fan.
After losing myself in a Siege of Krishnapur fantasy, I returned to earth with this rather solid idea for the office. Let’s hire an intern and get them a pullin’. There is no reason they couldn’t answer the phones with one hand and power the conference room punka with the other – common sense if I say so myself.
So, if you’re looking for a summer internship with a Washington PR firm, or know someone who is, I have a “unique opportunity” for you.
