Benched

Tanya Tarneja has been in IT consulting for forty-seven hours. The client already thinks she's an expert. This is not good.

Twenty-six, foul-mouthed, catastrophically underprepared and blessed with the professional survival instincts of a cockroach in business casual, Tanya joins one of India's giant IT consulting firms with no project, no working laptop and only a vague understanding of what a cloud Landing Zone actually is.

Then she accidentally joins the wrong client call.

One unfortunately unmuted opinion later, Tanya goes from the bench to a multimillion-dollar cloud-migration bid, where everybody else appears to know what they're doing.

They do not.

There's VK, the practice head who can turn somebody else's mistake into his own methodology. Shruti, who could weaponise Excel. Kabir, the maddeningly quiet cloud architect who communicates mostly through curd rice. A retired server owner called Gary. A mysterious accelerator nobody has actually seen. And Tanya's mother, who manages her daughter's marriage prospects with better governance than most enterprise programmes.

When confidential proposals start leaking to the competition and Tanya becomes the client's favourite person entirely by accident, surviving the project will require every skill she doesn't have.

Fortunately, Tanya has something better.

Bad judgement.

Excellent timing.

And an extraordinary ability to say the wrong thing exactly when somebody needs to hear it.

BENCHED is a fast, irreverent workplace comedy about Indian IT consulting, cloud migrations, utilization dashboards, office politics, arranged-marriage spreadsheets and one young woman discovering that nobody in corporate life is quite as competent as they look.

Some careers are built. Tanya's happens to her.