The story so far

(I wrote this a couple of months ago)

Whenever someone says “Vow, you work with XYZ! That’s great! So, all set”, I feel like screaming “you do not have a clue what I’m going through. I hate this job. In fact, I do not want to work already. I want to study. What have I put myself into? :( ” Only I am responsible for my current state. I was not compelled to start off with the job. Don’t know what I am holding onto here.


I do not want to write code for banking applications. I really do not care what the web page looks like to the customer. I’m not interested in writing queries to find out who has salary more/less than a certain amount. I’m sick of hearing the words ‘business requirements’ every day. If someone utters these words once more, I will scream. The company’s numerous policies are grating. I do not understand any of those; whenever I get a mail related to a policy, I just hit ‘delete’ key.


You may find this absurd – I still do not know the last three digits of the salary figure. There is no pull to find out either. I have not even seen a salary slip yet. There is no sense of earning at all in me. I felt no different when I got to know that my bank account was credited with the first salary. Well, I have not really been working. I’m undergoing training and the salary is more like a stipend.


My relatives say “Oh, you have LCD in your room! And huge food courts with so many varieties of food; heard the non-veg food is great… super cool recreational facilities... Must be like heaven!” I wanted to reply saying “yeah, right. I spend most of the time in the GEC (training building). I go back to room only to catch few hours of sleep. Screw the LCD. The AC room is suffocating. Coming to food, the vendors do not even know the difference between bisi-bele bath, vagi-bath and pulav; and I’m a veggie”. Food deserves a separate post.

But then, I just let them assume that things are going great for me. Better to be envied than pitied you see :)


The bank guys are eager to update me with their new schemes in investment. I cannot comprehend their language. They frequently call on to let me know of the different kinds of credit cards I’m entitled to ‘based on my position in the company’. Why don’t they understand that working with an MNC does not mean I get the CEO’s salary?

Looks like the world around me thinks I’m in sync with it, which is incorrect.


Guess, after college I was still not grown up to be decisive. I always knew that I wanted to study further. But, was not certain of the subjects I wanted to study. I needed some time on this matter. In the meantime, I naively joined XYZ because I had an offer; and I landed myself in the place I never liked.


When you are still in the sixth semester of engineering, you just want a job offer because everyone in your class will have one, or two. The placement cell is happy to see the bulletin board that proudly displays the details of offers made by the so-called big organizations. Nobody bothers to find out your aptitude and guide you. Well, it’s your own job to find and do what you like…


Speaking about my workplace, it is a venerated organization. They have the best people in their Education and Research department. The standards set by this firm in the IT industry are exceptional. The quality they maintain is paramount.
They earnestly strive to conserve natural resources. They allocate a good proportion of capital toward ergonomics. All their campuses are beautiful. The Mysore campus is a paradise.

But, I do not belong here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Status: I’m on ‘quit XYZ movement’ since a while now. And I’m all set to study further; on scholarship! :)
Yippee :)
PostScript: I still do not know the last three digits of the salary figure, neither have I seen a salary slip yet. :P :D

Customer Delight

Yesterday, I went on a long ride on the pretext of fetching vegetables. Riding a bike on the streets of Bangalore Saturday morning is sheer joy. It had been a long time since I was home. I was just enjoying the ride.

On the way, I spotted a coconut vendor and I stopped by to treat myself to tender coconut water, my favorite drink. As I was not keeping well, it would be the ideal victual. I was dissatisfied since the shell had little water. I thought I’d buy another one later. Standing there savoring the coconut meat, I watched the vendor cut away the husk of a coconut and to my surprise, he offered that to me. He didn’t have to do that. It was not his fault that the shell had a small amount of water. By offering a customer an extra fruit, he was losing the price of one coconut.

I paid him for both the coconuts and returned home, amazed at the gesture. This is called Customer Delight.

First Major Heartbreak

February this year, I fell in love. I could not help it. I fell in love with this university and applied to it for a master’s program. Through the entire correspondence with them, I strongly felt I would get into this university. I thought I had good chances of getting a call since my entrance test scores were much higher than what they required.


Unfortunately, it was destined to be a short affair. My application was rejected. It came as a shocker to me. The ground beneath caved in. God, rejection hurts. Hurts real bad. Hurts even more when I’m already wedged in the wrong job and am away from home. I felt as if I had lost the battle of life. An all night’s snivel followed.


The next day (it was Sunday) I woke up late and got ready just in time for lunch. Our campus food courts strictly follow timelines. You don’t get lunch after 2 pm. I had less than fifteen minutes to get myself a decent meal. But, bad luck comes in truckload. Otherwise, how do you explain choosing the wrong one in a huge campus with six food courts? And choosing the wrong vendor there? Usually the food is just fine to blunt my hunger. This day, it was terrible; not a morsel went down my throat. I bitterly cried within myself.


My friend says “If you love somebody (I say ‘something’) set them free. If they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, spank yourself and move on”. I was trying to do that. There was nothing I could have done about the application. I had to face the truth and take it. Over time, I was getting back to normal life.


Two weeks later my brother called to say that the university sent home a mail. I already knew what was written in it. But I have this habit of keeping a frail hope alive in adverse situations even when I know that it is not pragmatic to think that something that’s already gone wrong and beyond my control, can be fixed. Some corner of my heart felt that may be they reconsidered my application. Bro read out the letter for me. The fact remained unchanged. They didn’t really have to send me a mail… It only reminded me of the denial. Another day of ‘rona-dhona’ ... Then, I had to move on.

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?

Critique

Being a novice blogger, I get excited about any comment on my posts. Guess I was on cloud nine after so many of my friends said that some posts were good. Comments from a friend woke me up from the dream. This friend’s suggestions were:
1. Improve your writing.
2. Very lengthy posts. Keep it short. May be your friends could read it because they are your friends. Nobody has patience to read through the entire thing.
3. It’s newspaper like.
4. Facts already available elsewhere need not be put up here.
5. Don’t always write in points.
6. Second post was like a biography, it was not necessary to write that.
7. At the first post - Don’t waste time in writing these things.

How I took it:

@1. Yes, definitely.
@2. True. Your friends think you are a good egg even when they know that you are slightly cracked :)
@3. I didn’t know that.
@4. This was about the ‘smoking’ post. My argument was that that many people may not have read about these topics.
@5. May be the engineering style of writing in points has continued here. Even this post is written in points!. I thought it was necessary to demarcate …
@7. I’m a dreamer.

I solicit your suggestions :) . Please write in to help me better myself.

Why not to smoke

Did you know that cigarette smoke contains more than 4000 different chemicals? Some of these chemicals are the ones that are used in toilet cleaners. Imagine what these substances can do to your poor lungs.

Some of the chemicals in cigarette smoke:

Benzene(petrol additive)
- A colourless cyclic hydrocarbon obtained from coal and petroleum, used as a solvent in fuel and in chemical manufacture
- A known carcinogen associated with leukaemia.

Formaldehyde(embalming fluid)
- A colourless liquid, highly poisonous, used to preserve dead bodies.
- Known to cause cancer, respiratory, skin and gastrointestinal problems.


Ammonia(toilet cleaner)
- Used as a flavouring, frees nicotine from tobacco turning it into a gas
- Often found in dry cleaning fluids.

Acetone(nail polish remover)
- Fragrant volatile liquid ketone, used as a solvent, for example, nail polish remover

Tar
-Particulate matter drawn into lungs when you inhale on a lighted cigarette. Once inhaled, smoke condenses and about 70 per cent of the tar in the smoke is deposited in the smoker's lungs.

Nicotine(insecticide/addictive drug)
- One of the most addictive substances known to man, a powerful and fast-acting medical and non-medical poison.
- This is the chemical which causes addiction.

Carbon Monoxide (CO)
(car exhaust fumes)
- An odourless, tasteless and poisonous gas, rapidly fatal in large amounts.
- The main gas in cigarette smoke, formed when the cigarette is lit.


Others
- Arsenic (rat poison)
- Hydrogen Cyanide (gas chamber poison)




Source: An article in Deccan Herald (some years ago) and Health Education Authority (UK) – Lifesaver
If you still want to smoke, please do it while non-smokers are not around.