Live and let live!!
Nostalgia running inside and choking the throat once in a while is norm for me. But sometimes, the throat choke is not due to sentimental emotions, it is also due to the anger and frustration of some of those memories. In the view of having attained a lot of mindful maturity, I now honor myself with several of those incidents and so I decided to pen down one of those here.
It was that time when I had just finished my engineering and gotten into a job the day after. This was also the time in 2004 when the CET counselling for the new batch was in progress and there were several nail biting moments for the grown up “kids” who were looking for the right seats in the right colleges.
I was in a good position of being a successful Electronics and communication engineer who was placed in a nice job right after the day out of college in a company in Bangalore. That is all mattered at that time, at least to me; or that is what I thought mattered to everyone. Unfortunately, I realized our society had a bigger magnifying glass and did more scrutiny on my life than my family and I did.
“I heard your daughter is placed in a company” asked the aunty who was walking down. “ya. She joined the job already” beamed back my mom with a broad smile from the balcony where she was watering the plants. “ which company?” asked the aunty. “openstream, it’s a start up you know” said my all-knowing mother who had just heard the word start up one week ago and was proud to say that she was fully equipped to answers questions now. “she got this through campus interview?” asked the aunty again. “ no actually her college did not have campus recruitment as it a new college. So this was outside of that”. “ I can understand what you must be feeling. She could have got through a good Infosys or wipro if she had studied in a good college with campus interviews. Don’t worry, things will get better” she said and left leaving the 1000 watts glow on my mom’s face fade away like a fused bulb.
I am sitting in the balcony reading a book, witnessing this, thinking to myself, “ there goes my glory of having gotten a job so quick !!”
The next day the aunty is my house with her son. I am wondering why she got her son to our house having discussed the impression she had about me. My mom anyway welcomed her in, placed a plate of chips in front of them and went in to make tea. I was not sure why the lady was there and what she wanted me to do?
She started” this boy is just not ready to listen to me. He is refusing to take up a good subject in the college and I am fed up trying to explain to him. Can you try to tell him and put some sense into his brains?”
I was startled for a moment and I still dint get why she was asking me, supposedly a failure to talk to this guy. Anyway, I asked the boy what the issue was. I learned that he had chosen the information science branch in the top college in the city and was choosy about the college and wanted to settle down for the info science branch and not go to a not-so-good college for the computer science branch. In my opinion this was a well thought through decision. by this time my mom was there with the tea and the boy had emptied the chips on the plate.
The aunty sipped the tea and waited for my advice to come through. My mom was also anxiously looking as this was the question of her dignity too as she never trusted what I might say! I carefully chose my words and explained to the lady that her son was right and getting into the best college was important. The info science and the computer science had only one subject difference and finally it dint really matter. She quickly gobbled up her tea and said” this is what is the problem with you kids these days. You also went for this E&C instead of CS branch and see what happened. If you had taken up a seat in a different college with campus interviews and taken up CS you could have also got a good job. I thought you could share your experience of not getting through with him so that he will understand that and pick up a better seat.” She gave my mom a sympathetic look and left with her son.
I was looking at her with no words to say. I had chosen a college where I would get into the merit seat and dint have to pay any extra amount as fees. This my principle my criteria for choosing a not -so-known college. I had taken up the telecommunication stream. After my first year I had scored good marks and hence the college offered me a transfer to E&C (which my choice) and then I topped my college consecutively for 2 semesters the 7 and 8. I gave my first interview off campus and was immediately offered the job of a java developer when I had no programming background. I thought this ought to prove my caliber. But no… my society had different views.
This was only the beginning. There was one boy who lived on the street behind my house and his mom wanted me to give him some advice too. The chips were unfortunately over at home and so this time only the tea was brewing in the kitchen. This time I was even more careful and wanted to offer a very generic advice. But I was not sure what I was supposed to advice about. Then the lady explained to me that I should explain to him how he needs to apply for a job and get one right after his studies. In my opinion it was too farfetched for a guy who had not yet even gotten and seat in engineering and also, I was not experienced with 100 interviews to be advising people. So, I racked my brain for all the vocabulary and gave a few words of encouragement that anyone could get a job and people just needed to study well. I was very sure that this could no way turn against me. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
I still blame my mom’s tea as every time someone sipped it, they had something to say to me. The lady gave a few neutral words that she had expected deeper analysis of job finding and interview processes that I would explain and probably was not happy with the generic advice offered. I never did such a research for myself and was not sure how someone expected to get the same
Then there were an aunty and an uncle this time with their daughter coming all the way from across the road. They had walked almost 1 Km to come for “my advice”
This time the scenario was different. The lady was almost in tears and the man was putting up a long face. I asked my mom to stop brewing tea and only put out some biscuits. The issue was the they were worried that their daughter would not study well and was not serious about her career and she needed to do much better and wanted someone older than her to give her an advice as she was not listening to them. I was not very sure how I could help here, but I just asked the girl what her CET ranking was. I almost fell off my seat. She had a 3-digit ranking (to be very specific, the 3 digits were very close to the lower range of numbers) and I had myself scored a huge 4 digit ranking and was still living a perfectly good life! I could not get the context in which her parents seemed so worried about their daughter. I realized later that this was just anticipatory anxiety that was discussed, and they wanted to preventively take measures for their daughter to go through her engineering successfully. I was furious at the waste of my precious time and vowed to never meet such people in the future.
But my helpful nature could not curtail itself from being philanthropic and engaging in active advice when someone asked for it. This was an evening where we were to leave to Chennai and were packing. One of my Aunts and uncle drove down all the way from JP Nagar to BTM. They wanted me to advice the best subject and college for their daughter. As this was not some random friend, I sat them down and told them my analysis of good and average rated colleges. I told them the advantages and disadvantages of collages, locations of collages, various branches, job opportunities, subjects etc. even though I was extremely delayed for packing and getting ready for my Chennai trip. At the end of the conversation everyone including me was satisfied with the fruitful discussion and we bid good bye to my aunt and uncle and rushed off to Chennai. I went with a great feeling of satisfaction only to return by the end of the week to know that my cousin was never interested in engineering and took up bio technology instead!!!
Originally published at http://mywisdombits.blogspot.com on September 28, 2018.
