Is life a Zero Credit Course?

Another day, another semester and a whole set of new courses to study. The problem is not coursework but what is to be included in the course. I chose my electives, do I care to study why Dove launched a certain marketing strategy or do I study why Tata took Corus or should I be studying why Gold follows a certain price trend. So little time and so much to absorb before I leave this place in about four months now, I worry thinking what will do when I won’t have a sound 12 hours sleep or what will I do when I wont be going home every 4 months.

No matter how aloof you want to remain, the truth is that hostel life teaches you a lot something’s directly onto you whereas something’s subtly but certainly. I couldn’t have imagined spending days holed up in a 10*10 room but I do now and much to my enjoyment. I care about my own soap and shampoo supplies and food too. I have to take care of dirty linens, even though my room looks much like a bachelors abode I try incessantly to clean it. And more so I am responsible for my own security and safety, specifically I would like to remind you at this stage that one of rooms here had a problem of the ceiling fan dropping down every now and then because of poor plastering. Given the size of the room and mine and the fan, I would prefer to sleep in the balcony even if the college provides me a life insurance of a million dollars.

One of most interesting financial and operational activities in a hostel is “Borrowing”, well no one wants to lend but still borrowing happens – don’t ask how. Whether it be your best pair of shoes, your business suit, your t-shirt that your girl gifted you or even some green backs from your wallet, they always disappear into the crowd and the next time you meet them you may not even be sure if you have met them before. Let alone the petty stuff like matchboxes, cigarettes and other food stuff specially sweets. I don’t smoke but still I have been asked so many times for a matchstick by my cigar smoking neighbor that I actually started stocking matchboxes. One of my friends stocks sweets but keeps an empty sweet box to show people who come asking for a fatty recharge. While some also manage to bring cartons and cartons (I am not exaggerating) of aloo bhujia of a specific halwai in Calcutta, some barely survive on the monotonous flavors in the mess. No matter what the mess cooks, it all tastes the same.

Half past the night, when the actual life in a hostel begins you may have a buddy coming over to ask for some alcohol or some chakna to go with it. And to tell you the truth, this happens most on the days when the night café inside the hostel is closed. At two in the night if you manage to walk past the warden’s room you can still hear the photocopier buzzing, and the printer running. From morning ten to night ten, the barber never stops shaving and cutting. Doesn’t he get bored, its his job I am told but then I wonder is mine going to be similar in terms or routine, I hope not. I would like a lot of movement within and outside the office, flexi-hours, lots of good stuff to eat and loads of time to sleep.

And one of the best things to learn from is the travel back to hostel, it takes me two hours to fly back from Delhi to Hyderabad and almost similar duration to travel from the Hyderabad airport to my hostel. Even if I come by train which takes 26 hours the journey only ends after 28, I constantly view city followed by a village and jungles and is the same pattern here. And what to say about learning when you meet 40 national level athletes in your train bogey travelling without a confirmed train ticket, its like a track field you can see long jumps happening, track and hurdles races and relays. As much as three managing to sleep on a single seat wasn’t a demonstration of a gareeb rath that lalu started, but it was definitely showcasing the poor halaat of sports authority of india. One of the fellow grumbles “Just once let me get a medal, I will teach the f****** system a lesson”, and I only guess his agony and help him onto my berth for a few hours of sleep before he runs for the medal. Probably his innocent eyes can see the difference between the sweet lime soda he gets and the two glasses of fresh juice his coach gets paid for him...

I am learning all this apart from the electives and I don’t get credits for this in my GPA, when I pen this down I am merely writing a dissertation on my life and times for which I have no one guide assigned to me. Better be back to my books or they will find other readers, hang on and shout your thoughts for I will be back soon….

Redemption in the Pursuit of Happyness

Often have I felt my grip loosening over the thing I have wanted the most for the moment. What we call as fate or destiny most often comes forth once the failure happens. Last one and a half years I had been living a life completely reliant on fate, but to be true with time your faith in yourself reduces so did mine. The things I thought I was much capable of were now turning to look alien to me. My outer self projected a confident personality but within I was a scared individual who was waiting for opportunities. Now opportunities mean results in the end, and what I was most scared of was failure as I am sure most of us are. While most of my colleagues at the b-school were reading through newspapers, magazines and economic journals I was preparing myself mentally. I did not hesitate in sharing this with anyone I knew in return for some general knowledge; the exercise was always good as the other party felt mentally strong while I had figures and numbers to talk of. When I saw motion pictures like "The Pursuit of Happyness" or "The Shawshank Redemption", I felt motivated but the truth was that I wasn't in the protagonists shoes.

One thing I had judged from my past experience in appearing for interviews was that the panel looked for smart talkers who could be trained and molded as per their requirements. The more I entered the room the more I knew what made a perfect disposition. I could pleasantly say no to things that I wasn’t aware of, and possibly diverting their interest to things that I was more confident with. One question I always asked myself before entering the interview room was “Am I supposed to know everything??...” If the answer ever came “Yes” then I told myself that I have no reason to be here….I came here to learn and will learn for days and times to come. I recalled what my boss during my summers always said “It’s not about putting forth the right answers, it about asking the right questions”. And to be truthful I stuck on to this, while my peers learnt answers I prepared myself for asking the right questions.

This alone did not mean that I wouldn’t ever lose. Infact to my utter dismay I finally wasn’t selected in my first application to one of the most coveted i-banks of the world after several rounds of selection process. The first response one gets from everyone he/she knows after the failure is “there are better things in store for you”…were there or not I wasn’t sure, but definitely I wasn’t dying and there was another day and another battle. This time around I was to appear for the strongest and the biggest bank in the world. I took a cue from the Director of the company who came for a brief talk, he said “Most of us can get away from the hardest situations if we know how to speak and how to react”…It was again learning till he said “but not here in our company”…. I wasn’t sure if I would succeed given this time the battle started with a situation where I considered myself weakest. None the less after 10 hours of process and constant pep talk by other interviewees I was able to convince myself to settle for nothing but the best. The announcement of success was not at all scintillating; I sat on my seat, no tears of joy or no shouts in excitement. The glitter was more felt in other's that in mine. Probably I was just numb, well I wouldn't say that I could not absorb the success…I had but certain times in life you just fail to equate what you lost to what you regained. Redemption is not all that easy…In my heart I thanked my family, I thanked my girl and I thanked all who believed in me but yet I guess there are there are more mountains to climb, more chasms to jump across and more dreams to relive before I rejoice this moment. Good luck to all my friends and peers who still await a worthy challenge…

The Jungle Diary...

Again I’d begin this piece with a question.Which animal do you like?..Dog, Lion, Gorilla or Monkey??

This entry is not an outcome of a visit to the Nehru zoological park or an Animal Care center but a result of the last 15 months spent in a jungle. They call it a village but I am more content at heart calling it a jungle. You would ask Why? Well, how often do you wake up to find a chameleon sharing the bed with you…Hey don’t laugh, I actually meant a ominous looking younger brother of an alligator and a cousin of our house mate lizard. I did sleep with it a couple of times. And spent another few days living with a mouse in my room, bathed in a shower accompanied by a species of frog that could climb the wall, and shared reading the newspaper while sitting on the pot with another frog. For some reason I have had a testing time with them, not to mention that I am a great lover of dogs and want to co-direct a documentary on the dog habits in a b-school which a close friend is working on. Again I am referring only to dogs – as in the four legged ones…

Spiders often come out of my trouser pockets which were left hanging by the hook in the cupboard and an odd visit by a dragon fly or a cockroach is enough to send me running for my slippers. I am saving the Economics Times for my placements, otherwise what better purpose could it have served. To top it all I say the morning greetings to atleast a million centipedes and crickets while on way to the academics block every morning. I had the pleasure of sighting a kingfisher, a raven and some wild hens some days back while going to the nearby shack restaurant “Sardarji da dhaba”. And the last time there was a powercut and I was walking on the highway, I could spot some glowing flies too. Some of us friends had a jolly time chasing a mole in the hostel corridor for two hours past mid-night last semester, it was an awesome break considering I had a Economics exam the next morning. One of the female batch mates had a baby monkey sitting in her balcony which was enough make her go bananas. Buffaloes, Goats and Cows are a common sight anywhere in India so I’d discount them from detail.

After all this I wonder that living in a city that boasts of India’s largest Cobra (snake) population I seem to have come far from just being a management graduate…maybe they could do with introducing an extra elective on Zoology or even veterinary science. We have a vet doc and lotsa zoology grads here who can oblige with a few lectures. I can’t say much about going to a zoo but atleast I save time from spending on the Reptiles show on Discovery…. I must confess that this place is not much exciting for ornithologists as it has been time since I looked at a pigeon or a house sparrow.

I guess I saw something scampering across the rough patch near the drain, guess it is a goosebump…while I shut off my doors ‘cos I sure don’t wanna sleep with this one, you make sure your pockets have only what you have put in and not something which may have crawled in....ha ha ha

Catch me if you can.....

What do you see when you release a mouse off from the trap? Ever felt the agony and trauma of getting locked up in a 3 sq. ft. box room...all you want is to get out..and once you get out you just never want to get back, the sheer memory of the incident pinches you down in the heart. I came across a book in which a disciple of Socrates asked him “What do I do for success; I don’t seem to feel motivated?” Socrates takes him to a river and goes with him waist deep into it, and then plunges the head of his disciple in the water forcibly. He doesn’t pull him out until he is out of breath, does this again and then asks the disciple how did he feel? The disciple replies I just wanted to get out and could do anything for it. That was the answer that Socrates wanted him to realize. When you want something then it should take each bit of your best effort. Similar is lore about Arjun seeing only the eye of the clay bird on being asked by Dronacharya.

“Never settle for anything less than the best you can do and the highest you can reach”….is the lesson I get from it. There may be hundreds of stories like these if you actually start searching for them. The task is not to do that, it is to make the realization in our souls happen. We fail in our goals due to lack of effort, sometimes due to luck and sometimes we are cheated but someone who remains his composure through all this has probably learnt the Art of Living. You need to beat the hell out of life before it beats you. But do respect the fact that until you get beaten the feeling never comes, we get beaten by margins of time, money, effort and what not but not until tears wash out our corneas we just don’t get the rush.

I want to rush with my dreams far ahead of others…I want not just to run but to do a “Usain Bolt” and just like him I would want to slap my chest and feel the wind before I hit the finishing line. Now for all of you there who have ever tried to pull someone down, I’d say “Catch me if you can” for I am going to beat living daylights out of you and beat the cheetah within me this time....

Complexity of life....

One thing that has always intrigued me is that we try to escape from whatever is destined for us. The basis why I write this piece on my blog is that this time I came across the wallpaper above. Though I do not consider myself old enough to comment on the topic at hand, however the 23 springs my life has seen do have some reflections on the basis of my experience. When I was doing school I enjoyed the timeliness of things but always thought what it would be like to wake up an hour later each day and have a hearty breakfast. This happened because school started early and I was always rushing out grabbing a jam toast to catch the bus. And I couldn’t do much but comply with whatever went on.

Finally I went to college after 12 years of structured learning. Now I study what I wanted to, even bunk classes and watch a movie with friends, get up late and skip a class, more so I even could have a girl friend – a possibility either I never thought of or more honestly I let fate have the say. Though I enjoyed college, I somehow was raring to enter the corporate world. I provided tuition's to senior classes for mathematics to fund my pocket expenses. I enjoyed the economic freedom from home which reduced accountability. The first few positive cash inflows meant more than money, like a pair of branded sneakers, a new sling bag and more. Then I started working with an internet based firm only to spend a lot of time before the computer. I even skipped classes at times and was considered a bit geeky by my friends. More I worked more I wanted to, I just wanted the remaining months of college to rush by. Finally I did get a job a month before I finished college. Work brought money, creative satisfaction and happiness. But one off sad incident in office would make me say “It was better back in college”, somewhere within I had started missing college. I was out of touch with a lot of old batch mates. It was now that I started considering seriously my prospects of doing a masters degree. In a year from when I began, a lot happened and finally I found myself sitting in front of the chief bank manager requesting a massive loan. My economic freedom was to end, I would be paying off my hard earned money for more than 3 years. But then I looked forward to some enjoyment in college.

Once I was here at my second college, I did enjoy attending business lectures, participating in intellectually stimulating talks and more. As I found time I would dig into books, movies and almost ever overcasting sleep. On days I slept 4 hours and sometimes even 15 hours!! I saw some unprofessional attitude unbecoming of b-school students each day. The picture I had drawn of Mona Lisa wasn’t even what Picasso could have done. I was overjoyed when I was taken in for an internship with a consultancy. I loved being back to work (though it meant sacrificing sleep!). Three months sped by in an incredible hurry and I was back to school. Some days of the internship when the manager wasn’t happy with the deliverable it came into my mind that school was better, you had the freedom to experiment and explore but here you had to be bang on.

Now still at school, half my days are spent applying to jobs, searching on job portals and talking to people to build corporate contact. Somewhere in all this I have missed sitting back to enjoying life – if that ever was an opportunity. I could have done so much while I kept myself so complicated. I try to convince but more often than not counter arguments win. I let myself sleep a lot, you’d ask why….not because I have time but because if I cant see the light with my eyes open or rest on the bondi beach then why not in my dreams. I sleep to structure my dreams, my visions are taking shape atleast somewhere. I am not missing life…I am living each moment even if u may call it virtually. I may be losing but may be I am just raring to hit back with a big bang….complex isn’t it?....leave it..have a nice day…