One life, live it

Photograph : Avik Chakraborty, Infosys Technologies Limited, Bhubaneshwar

I’m writing this in the wake of the tragic incident of a number of trainees ending their lives in our campus after flunking the last test of training. Failing in the last test means they can no longer continue with the company (an IT major). When they have survived till the end of training, they must understand that they are talented enough. Flunking in one test should not be the reason to take such an extreme step.


Our educator shared this incident with us. About two years back, his friend who was a super performer flunked in three consecutive modules in the final phase of training. He was so brilliant that he did not take more than ten seconds to solve a code snippet. Extremely dejected that he failed, he took a drastic step of committing suicide right before our educator.


The assessment here is very stringent and qualifying criteria is a little warped. In fact, some of our educators themselves admit that the trainees are under immense pressure to master concepts in very short time. They say they took years to comprehend these subjects in depth. I jokingly tell my friends “of course, the training is world class. But the torture is Taliban type”.


I do not have any plans to continue either in this firm or the IT field. Still, I feel the pressure. It is not a comfortable environment when you are not doing very well and the people around you are only speaking Java or Oracle even during lunch break and while walking back to hostel. Sometimes I plug in my earphones and play music loud enough to jam the voices around and happily google.


I do not blame the company for the kind of filtering they do during training. Based on their business requirement and strategy they are selecting the kind of people they need. In case you do not fit in here, there is always something else that suits you.


One need not feel that he is worthless just because he could not successfully complete this training. There are a lot of opportunities outside this IT company. And you never know - being thrown out of this firm could be the best thing that ever happened to you. I know that it is easy for me to say this. But I feel being alive is lot bigger than a job at a highly reputed company.


Recently my mom called one early morning just to hear my voice. She had a terrible dream the previous night. She did not say what the dream was about. “If you don’t like the place just came back home”, she said. I could grok why she was scared as I frequently groan about the assessment and I am a very sensitive specimen. I assured her I was fine.


If a bad dream can petrify parents, how will they live through the tragic demise of their kids?