Just
as we reached the last topic of our thesis, we all heaved a sigh of relief. It
was the same feeling that I used to enjoy on Friday afternoons – few more hours
in the office and then two days off! We thought of ordering pizza, coke and a
mocktail of lime juice and nectar.
Just
as we all were thinking of the content for the last and final chapter,
Chitragupta received a phone call. He looked a bit tense while talking to the
person on the other side of the phone. “I will call you back”, Chitragupta said
and abruptly disconnected the call. We got worried with his expression and
asked him what was wrong.
“My
nephew Chotagupta had just called up. He is twenty years old and weighs around a
hundred kilograms. He had been to a temple near his house this morning. He told
me that while he was reciting some mantras, an aged woman came up to him and offered
prasad. Chotagupta is a good boy; so
he took the offering and said, “thank you aunty” to that woman. Hearing that,
the woman shouted at him in the presence of all others, “Do I look like an
aunty to you? You elephant!” and went away. Poor Chotagupta must have been
crying for very long because his voice was still so choked. He called me up to request
me to fudge the account of deeds of that old lady in her existing afterlife. I
might demote her to Hell…”
I
then explained to my team that while I was on earth, even I had faced a similar
dilemma – whether to call a lady behen or didi which means sister, or aunty. Before Chitragupta could take
any further action, I asked him whether we could do a social experiment to find
out whether any woman even in heaven or hell (just like earth) gets angry on
being called an “aunty”. Chitragupta agreed and requested “Big Boss” to present
before us forty-five women – right from the age of 20 to 65 – a mixture of
women from heaven and hell. They were made to stand in increasing order of
their age. So, the left-most woman (i.e. No. 1) was twenty years old and the
right-most (i.e. No. 45) was 65 years old.
No.
1 was asked how she would address No. 2.
No.
1 smiled and said “didi”. No. 2
smiled too.
No.
1 was asked how she would address No. 3.
No.
1 smiled and said “didi”. No. 3
smiled too.
No.
1 was asked how she would address No. 15.
No.
1 hesitated a bit and said “hmm… I…. okay… I would call her didi”. No. 15 smiled back with relief.
No.
1 was asked how she would address No. 18. Now she started hesitating even more
and finally settled on a new relation “elder
didi”.
We
all were puzzled, “what the fuck is an elder
didi?” A didi is itself a synonym
for an elder sister. So, elder didi
meant elder elder sister. This made no sense; but we didn’t want to make her
uncomfortable, so we okayed that answer.
Now,
No. 1 was asked how she would address No. 20.
No.
1 said with a straight face, “Aunty, of course”.
You
should have seen the anger on No. 20’s face! Seriously, she could not control
her anger and shouted, “What the hell is wrong with you? You call a 38-year-old
woman didi and woman only a couple of
years older to her an aunty? From where did you learn Mathematics? Huh? The
difference between 38 and 40 is only 2. And if you take the ratio of that
difference and my age, it comes to hardly 0.05. So, just because of that small
difference, you are calling me an aunty? How dare you call me aunty?”
No.
1 started crying and finally said, “Sorry No. 20 didi.”
“That’s
better”, replied No. 20 and the matter was settled.
We
continued our experiment to see whether there exists a concept called “Aunty”.
Now,
No. 1 did not want to risk her life more than she already had but we did not
spare her the horror. We asked her how she would address No. 25.
No.
1 meekly said, “Aunty”.
Just
as the word “aunty” was uttered by No.1, No.25 started belching out the
choicest of words from the bottom of her heart. The normal MC, BC, C#$#ya, etc.,
are nothing in front of what she started spilling out. Her logic was simple –
if you call a woman ONLY 5 years younger to her a didi, then she should be called the same.
The
experiment went on till No. 45 and till the end, No. 1 was on the verge of
virtual death. You won’t be surprised to hear that even No.45, i.e. the eldest
among the lot, the 65-year-old woman was just a didi, too. Hence, proved- Aunty is just an abstract concept. There
is no female – dead or alive; in heaven or hell – who can be termed as aunty.
After
this experiment, Chitragupta hurriedly sent all those women back to their
respective places and we lay down for a siesta. I thought of completing this
chapter by myself. Life of an engineering student after graduation is as
abstract as the ‘Aunty’ concept. You will have no clarity on what you are going
to do after five years. You will trust your fate and take the best opportunity
that comes your way at that time. You start walking down the road of a foggy future.
When I was in X grade, I was told by my parents, uncles and aunties that I
should become an engineer so that I would secure a good job and get a beautiful
wife by the age of 25. I was also told that girls go crazy after engineers and that
was also given as one of the potential reasons to become one. The thought of
being swarmed by crazy beautiful girls made me study harder, secure good marks
in XII grade and I got enrolled in the best engineering college in Mumbai. The “Beauty
x Brain = Constant” equation is so damn true! Before reaching hell following an
accident in my Skoda, I was a 29-year-old software engineer and still single!
That should tell you what happens after graduating as an engineer.
So
what exactly is the life of an engineering student after he passes out of
college? Let me paint two extremes of what your life would be after becoming an
engineer. Most of the times, your life will oscillate between these two
extremes.
The
Best Scenario:
1) You
get placed in one of the biggest and most famous companies in India.
2) Your
salary is good enough to rent a fully furnished flat near your office. You wake
up late, walk for five minutes and you are in the office!
3) Your
company doesn’t believe in keeping bulky desktops and hence each employee is
assigned a laptop.
4) Your
company believes in the true potential of its employees and hence doesn’t block
any site! You can post photos on FB, chat on Gmail, blog on Wordpress, and do
lots more.
5) On
reaching office, you directly head to the canteen and face the problem of
plenty! You have around fifteen types of snacks to choose from. You take a pic
of those options and post it on Facebook via your iPhone 5 and ask your friends
what you should eat!
6) Your
friends start suggesting what breakfast item to choose; but you ignore them as
you didn’t care a damn about their feedback in the first place! All you wanted
was to flaunt your problem of plenty!
7) You
go to your desk and open Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo and a few messengers and then
open Microsoft Outlook to see if you have any work to do.
8) Fortunately,
you are on bench, i.e. you have been recruited by your company with the hope of
using your expertise for a project that is supposed to be won.
9) You
keep forwarding funny emails to your friends and reply to their mails
instantly!
10)
It’s noon now and time for a lavish lunch. Since you are working in such a
lavish office and your salary is also very good, you choose to go to a nearby
restaurant for lunch.
11)
After spending around an hour and a half at the restaurant, your friend tells you
that it’s time to leave for office and you say, “Chuck it, man! Anyway we don’t
have any work in office. So chill, bro!”
12)Finally,
you lift your lazy ass and go to your desk only to start chatting on FB and
messengers!
13)
The clock strikes 5 and it’s time to head home!
14)You
ask your girlfriend for a movie and then a nice dinner. That’s the perfect way
to end the day!
15)
On occasions such as festivals, your company gives you huge bonuses and your
mother flaunts your gifts to Mrs. Sharma, Mrs. Chaddha and Mrs. Verma. After
your mother leaves the group, these three mothers crib about the kind of
pathetic lives their kids live!
The
Worst Scenario:
1) You
get placed in a small but aggressively growing company. The company’s motto
might mean something like “Our employees will work their asses off but we will
make sure that our clients are happy! For us, clients are Gods and employees
are just bonded labourers! We give them salary and hence we own them!”
2) Your
salary is not good enough to rent a fully furnished flat near your office. You
are already burdened by home loans, bike loans, etc. You travel to office by
trains and buses and waste more than two and a half hours one way every day!
3) Your
company feels that employees do better work when they are under surveillance of
Project Managers and it also believes in keeping bulky desktops. Laptops are
assigned only to Managers and employees more important than that.
4) Your
company believes that the more an employee sits in front of a computer, the
more he works! The company also believes that since it pays you to work, not
even a single second of your office time should be wasted on Facebook, Gmail,
etc. You come to office to work and that is the only thing you should do!
5) On
reaching office after a tiring two-and-a-half-hour journey, you directly head
to the canteen and face the problem of scarcity! You have around four types of
snacks to choose from – upma, meduwada,
poha or omlette! You take a pic of those four options and post it on FB via
your cheap phone and ask your friends what you should eat!
6) You
wait for fifteen minutes to see if anyone comments. And then suddenly you find two
new comments: “Subah hui nahi ki shuru
wapis rona! Chod de na fir wo company” and “Mummy ko bol dabba ghar se. Rotlu saala.” After being chided in the
public comments as a cry-baby, you end up deleting those pictures and comments
in order to save face in front of those who had not seen the pictures till
then.
7) You
go to your desk and open Microsoft Outlook and pray to God that client didn’t
have any problem with your delivery last evening.
8) As
per Murphy’s Law, if something bad has to happen, it will happen. You find your
mailbox flooded with an escalation from the client. Since an escalation from
the client is a big problem for the company, the Delivery Head asks the
Delivery Manager for an explanation. The Delivery Manager asks Project Manager
for an explanation. The Project Manager asks your Project Lead for an
explanation and he in turn asks you, “You fucked this one up again?”
9) You
try to save your ass, but in vain. You stare at Microsoft Outlook wondering
what bad deeds you must have done to become an employee of that particular company.
To add to this pain, your friends from other companies will keep forwarding you
“Good Morning” mails or Jokes or funny pictures and they also plan an outing over
the next weekend.
10)
It’s already two hours past your lunch time and you are still struggling to
solve the problem faced by your client. You finally choose to halt and take a ten-minute
break to eat a bowl of vegetables, one piece of cucumber and four chapatis – the tiffin packed by your
mother.
11)It
is a law of office life that your boss will come to your desk only when you are
not there. Just as you come to your seat after the brief lunch break, your boss
pokes at you, “You are never at your seat when I come to ask for an update.”
You just look at him and wonder what to say!
12)
The clock strikes 5 and now it’s officially the time to head home! But wait,
who will complete the work? So, you just stick your ass on that chair till you
complete the work.
13)
Your girlfriend has been pinging you on your phone since morning that she wants
to watch a movie with you in the evening and then go for a romantic dinner.
Since you are busy as usual, you refuse to go ahead with her plan. Since she is
a normal human being, she reaches the threshold of her patience and types the
words that you don’t want to read: “You don’t have time for me. So suck your
$#@# yourself! I am blocking you on FB, Gmail, Whatsapp… everywhere!” You just
keep staring at those words and suddenly your boss comes and asks for a status
update one more time! Since you were busy with your phone, you should be ready
for another dressing down!
14)
While your friends from other companies are busy enjoying festivals with their
respective families and friends, you are busy in office.
15)
On Diwali or other such occasions, your company gives you a packet of dry
fruits – 25 gms of almonds, 25 gms of pistacheos, 25 gms of resins and 2 small bars of
chocolate! Your mother sees that gift and curses your company yet again! Mrs.
Sharma, Mrs. Chaddha and Mrs. Verma of your society flaunt the various sweets,
gifts and bonuses that their kids got from their offices while your mom looks
at them with moist eyes! You go to sleep to wake up again to follow the same
routine!
Since
this is the last chapter in our thesis on the life of engineering students, we
thought of being a little serious and talk about whether “To B.E. or not to
B.E?”
When
our parents were growing up, i.e. in the mid or late 1970s, B.Sc., B.Com., or
B.A. were the most popular options available for them to graduate.
“Engineering” was for the creme de la
crème. Also, the number of engineering colleges was very less and as a
result, most of our parents could not become engineers even if they wished to.
But, that desire didn’t quite vanquish from their hearts. As it happens in
every generation, kids are made to (or at least coaxed to) achieve what their
parents could not. I am not saying that parents are selfish or anything. No!
All I am trying to say is that parents think that ‘engineering’ was the best
option back then and hence the same is applicable in current times, too. I am
very sure that most of the adults in the current generation who could not do
MBA from the IIMs or the best of colleges in India would make sure that their
kids get a chance to be postgraduates from these business school and hence live
a better life than the kind of life they lived. I personally know a friend who
is fat, intelligent, never cared for his fitness and couldn’t do MBA from IIM
Ahmadabad. He used to tell us (his friends from earth) very often that he would
want his son/daughter to be IIM A graduate and a national level champion in karate!
Engineering
is a science and a skill which has to be studied diligently and with interest.
You need to know how to implement what you read in the four years of
engineering. Learning by rote the problems from Electrical Machinery by P.S Bhimbra or C ++ programs from Let us C ++ by Yeshwant Kanetkar won’t
help you become a good engineer. You can pass out of an engineering college
with good marks and join some software company, go abroad, earn in dollars and
pounds and have a good life; no doubt about it. But, that will not justify your
becoming an engineer. I would like to take my own example. I am an electrical
engineer. But I never took interest in understanding how an electrical motor
runs. Frankly, I didn’t care! All I cared about was a good job at the end of my
degree. I was fascinated about going abroad and hence joining some software company
seemed to be the best bet. I have spent eight years in the same industry and
have authored two books. The fact that I did something different by writing two
books gives me a much bigger sense of achievement in life than becoming an
electrical engineer.
The
point is that it is necessary for you to figure out what you want to achieve
from your four years of engineering. Some people might ask you, “Then why the
hell did you waste an engineer’s seat?” Look straight into the eyes of that
person and say, “There is no fucking guarantee that that student would have
done justice to the engineering seat, either! It’s my damn life. I worked my
ass off to become an engineer and now it’s up to me to do what I want to do in
life. So, please fuck off!” and show them a middle finger!
You
and only you are answerable to yourself. Do you want to become a software
engineer even after learning the in and out about Civil engineering or do you
want to design the best of cars after becoming a mechanical engineer? You will
have to figure out the answer by yourself. Your friends, teacher, parents, etc.,
will be there to guide you.
As
the saying goes, “you are the sculptor of your own life”, you need to decide
what you want to do after engineering and not hesitate when someone asks you
“To B.E or not to B.E.?”
--------------------------------------
“I
love you Dipuu…” Vidya held my hand tight, not being able to hold her feelings
anymore! “Will you marry me?” she asked.
“Hell, yeah!” I blurted out!
“Hell, yeah!” I blurted out!
“Will
you marry me?” Aditya asked Veena with some hesitation.
“Hmm…
Okay… But there is a disclaimer!” said Veena.
I am sure Aditya could have said yes to any damn thing in the world at that time and said the same, “Anything for you, baby.”
I am sure Aditya could have said yes to any damn thing in the world at that time and said the same, “Anything for you, baby.”
Chitragupta
looked at us with a smile. This thesis had brought four hearts together. Who
says we live a life only on earth! ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment