It’s just that moment when bells start ringing in the minds of Indian engineering students. Not of Christmas, I tell you. Begin the dying months of their bachelor’s pre-final year; bells-in a swerve in their style, and preparations for the Common Admission Test rigorously pile; just to, as they say, ‘bell the CAT’; so they finally land in one or the other of the top B-schools in India. It’s a common practice here, or maybe, just a hype; an ego, an obligation, or simply a trend, which makes one follow the other, blindfolded. Since, why on earth would anyone, exactly, waste four precious years of his life, acquiring and polishing his technical skills, if he ultimately plans to merge into the management stream? Seems seriously insane! Anyway, I’m not here to guide you through your careers, neither do I have any sort of plans to interfere. I guess we all are ripe enough to be right.
Continuing, if Electronics and Communication is what you are pursuing, oh boy, you’re in for something bigger. Coinciding with this CATastrophe, there exists, a confusion regarding the six-month-internship. You generally are caught in conflicting thoughts-whether to go for the kill; assassinate your internship with complete devotion and desire, or to settle things out; punch a few warm-up-blows at internship and keep the real strength reserved to pounce back upon the CAT. And some Bonds tend to have the best of both worlds! (Better not to mention such people here, for the words might turn highly harsh and offensive.)
Time and again, I keep confronting people, who already have in their brains, a blueprint of what they are going to do in the coming 10-12 years of their lives; education, job, career, marriage. Oh Jesus, turmoil! Bless these young little visionaries! ‘Just listening’ is what I could bring out the best at such times.
My idea behind this reference is certainly not in favour of making a life waver aimlessly like a ship set sail in a storm. The idea is to reduce the complexity involved, nothing else. Success is sweet, no doubt. But it’d have been sweeter if were attained simply; no nerves, no midways, and of course, no dark circles. Let me quote an instance here, which I think befits this idea:
The selections for the interns started with Goldman Sachs arriving at our university. Oh dear, what a scene it was! There were speculations about the procedure of recruitment, about the genre of the qualifying test, about the level(s) of interview, about the stipend the chosen ones would be getting, and finally, who those chosen ones would be! I too was swept away by this tide of hullabaloo and hysteria, for my name, though somewhere in the end, was in the list of those probables. And then, after asking every other on the list about what to prepare, I found myself in an interesting situation: I had to revise almost all I had studied in the past two years……and just had a night at my disposal. Getting aware of this fact, I could manage out only a grim smile. The task was practically undoable, and as expected, I left it to God’s will. But a stress always remained there in my mind….an anxiety always annihilated me….an envy always made me wonder what others would be up to, at this hour. And then a friend, who had not applied, called me up to ask if we’d be having classes the next day, since the selection was to start in the morning itself, and a large number of people were opting for it. Shocked, I asked her the reason for the same, to which she replied that if there wasn’t any class the following day, she could just well go back home early that weekend. That was the limit! Soon, I spotted the difference between the mindsets of both of us. How simple and easy the things were for my friend at that moment! She was totally calm and composed, which in turn, led her towards hope and happiness. My being almost the opposite of her at that moment- frustrated with fuss, tied with trouble and drenched with dilemma- made me itchy and stressed-out. And if you think that I at least tried to succeed despite such pains, then you might be wrong, for I never came anywhere near to clearing the test. Coming back to the phone call; a real smile finally returned to my lips. “No, there won’t be any class tomorrow. Off you go, little fellow,” I said to her.
There were a few other incidents earlier when I had felt somewhat similar, but had discarded them as meaningless. But as for now, I hope you and me, both got the ‘idea’ I was talking of some moments ago. Things continue to become complex as long as we let them be so. Lesser are the choices, more are the chances that we take the right decision. And more is the probability of us being successful. And guess what, success achieved this way is simpler. It is better. And it is sweeter.
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