Outside -In the real world

While we are in college, we long for the world outside that beautiful world free from boring lectures backbreaking assignments and memory cramming syllabus. Once out of college we come to know the harsh reality in the market.
As Bill Gates once said
“If you think your teachers were cruel, wait till you have a boss”.
Moreover, how right he is. We never try to value our college days thinking instead of the future rather than living in the present. However, once we are out, we realize that the scenario is not a bed of roses, but a sea of thorns and it is essential to walk or rather run bare foot on it to achieve success. Some learn this truth the easy way, but most of us learn it the hard way. As Aamir Khan says in the movie Rang De Basanti,

""Campus ke andar hum zindagi ko nachate hai

Campus ke bahar zindagi hame nachati hai””

The same situation was seen by me .Maybe that I underestimated my post Btech experience or that I underrated the market waiting out for me, the reality of the world,
blew me away. As the people knowing me may be aware that I took CAT coaching after my engineering, in the hope of getting a seat in one of the top 20 colleges for management across India. When it became clear that that dream would be a dream at least for at least one more year, I started job hunt in late mid March.

Irrespective of the job profile and other such important stuff, I applied to whatever job that sounded good to me. God knows how many zillions of resume edits I did to change my career goal from
“Securing a challenging position in software field “in one company’s application to “Contributing my technical skills to personal development “in another to “Get a chance to showcase my management skills for the development of individual and the organization” in the third application. By the luck of the draw , I finally got an interview call which I easily converted and joined, as a management trainee on April 1st, yes my friends on APRIL FOOLS DAY. My main aim was just to get some job experience and meet different people, understand their mentality and develop my social skills. And what an experience it has been. I met people from different walks of life .Both affluent and not so affluent, MBA’s to undergrads, engineers to pure science students and married to unmarried too.

All of them have only one thing in common .They are working towards a very lucrative, but challenging vision of running their own company. Boys and girls between the age group of 17-25 , trying to live their dream and making a name for themselves was an entirely novel and exciting experience for me and at the same time it is hard for me to keep up with my so called colleagues there.

I saw people who had run away their houses and fought against the society to make it big. Meeting them gave me a strange feeling, which was a mixture of awe and stoic regard for their efforts. There were people who would literally walk from their houses to the office to save those few rupees, while some people like me would sometimes blow away 25-30 rupees for an auto when the bus could have sufficed. It made me realize how fortunate I was to have such a good family who went to the worlds ends to make my wants meet. Coins were not as fortunate to them as they are for us, but they did not stop working lamenting their background instead they look forward to the rosy future which we all dream to have.

I would and still sometimes curse myself of my fortune, that such people, who are so committed and so sincere on his job had to endure so much hardship. Not that am not committed and sincere, but even then, I hope the readers get the difference. Sometimes we feel ashamed that in spite of having all the facilities and all the comforts, we fail to use them to do some constructive work.

Then there are some, working tirelessly, not for them but for their team leader so that their leader achieves success in their life. Not that they are not ambitious, but they literally adore their leader, that they will do anything for them. As they say, “A great leader can galvanize even a group of sloths (no comparison meant)” These people work as true team members, as they say in cycling they work in a PELOTON to achieve their common goal. And when the team achieve their goals, they would calmly go up to the team leader and say” Congratulations boss. However, maybe this job is not my cup of tea. I just stayed around so that we, as a team could achieve our goals and now that it is done, I should take leave. All the best.” They are the truly selfless kind, whom anyone would wish to have in their team.

Also, there were people who were doing this job just as a stopgap arrangement .Like why to sit idle at home, when we can do some good to the society, get some job experience and at the same time earn some money. Or maybe they were doing the job just because they wanted to do some job and not the crap what we said in the job interview that “This is exactly the kind of job am looking for”.” This is my dream job”.” I would do this job even if I had to do it for free”. All this is nothing but wild boasts, through which we try to impress the interviewer but most of which is caught clean by him, the only reason being that he has seen so many honchos like you.

Most importantly, this new job has given me an opportunity to start a new life afresh, a life free from the life I had in my engineering days. Not that I hated my engineering days, on the contrary I miss those days of playing football , commenting in our teachers class and lazing around in the college campus. I really miss them very much and those who know how much emotional I am or lack of it would agree that this is indeed a great show of emotion from me. In the four years of engineering, my mates knew all about me or rather all that I wanted to reveal to them and it was kind of bittersweet experience to begin a new chapter in my life.