Disclaimer: 3rd Fingers do not take a
liberal or conservative, right or left or right-center or left-center or
center-center, pro-abortion or anti-abortion, pro-Illu or anti-Illu stand on
any issue. It may be debated if 3rd Fingers even take a stand at
all. Perhaps, Sometimes… 3rd Fingers takes a stand-up and it’s a
tragi-comic kind of stand. Comic for you and tragic for the characters.
In some parts of the world, facebook.com is the hottest website people
know. For me, it is the Training and Placement notice board. Being a
state-of-the-art modern engineering institution, we did not really have a
notice board. We had a website and like other things in this college, the
website was also green. It was nothing but a green background with white notice
heading constantly updated on it. Nonetheless, this featureless and photoless
webpage was important enough to make our in-campus geeks write innumerable
codes and programs about it to make it easier to access for the less adroit
people like me who found it hard to click on the name of a website on the
nation’s fastest internet connection. As per routine, I was scrolling through
the tons (read tens) of notices put up on it in the last 12 hours. Usually the
website was very depressing. While numerous companies did come to our campus to
select interns, most of them came looking for proficient coders who could shit algorithms and could
write 18 different languages like Java, Python, PHP, C, C++, C#, Objective C
and sometimes even the more annoying “D”. For me, I’d learnt the alphabet only
in kindergarten and had made the mistake of trying to survive the world just on
that. I did know a bit of C but I only knew the abuses of the language. Not the
literature. That wasn’t good enough for the companies. They took the
Shakespeares of computer programming with them and promised them to pay in
silicon. I waited for someone to come who considered English as a language and
would be happy to take me. Today was one such chance. Now I am a student of the
aeronautical department but in a country where the airplane industry is as
canned as its owners, I did not see much hope. So all such ambitions fell upon
the broad and suited shoulders of the latest attraction in engineering colleges
– Banks! There were many multinational banks that were banking upon the idea of
taking in engineering students in their army of overpaid clerks. They said that
engineering colleges provide the best brains which can be easily trained to manage
financial assets. After all, these are the same students who scored excellent
marks in their schools 6 years ago. So what if they have gone through a period
of thrashing, getting stoned, electrified, and in some cases even devoid of
their dignity and virginity during their initial orientation days in college.
They could still create magic in passbooks and could be the CEOs of
multinationals tomorrow. I agreed. You always agree with the person who is
willing to pay double your worth. After all, Banks, literally mean money don’t
they? Now what could be more welcoming than banks? Oil. At my campus, black
money (I mean oil companies and nothing else) literally poured in to the campus
hunting for people who could abandon home and work tirelessly inspired by the
prospect of screwing up the planet (quite literally) and making a lot of money.
Why were they paying so much money? 3 reasons:
- As Al Gore has spent his entire youth explaining to us, the oil reserves are depleting and the planet is going to die. You need a strong motivation to kill your own planet. And what better motivation is there to kill a green planet than green paper?
- The work which seemed as simple as putting a spoon into the heart of the planet and skimming the lubricant out actually required you to stay away from home for 4 months and work 24*7 (and I mean 24*7). Then you’d get a break of 4 months and whatever would be left of you would be paid for lying at home or in the hospital bed.
- Oil in our world is found on some of the most revolting places which America likes to bomb often. These are not the places Indian mothers prefer their children to go.
People generally lasted in
such jobs for 2 years. After that they usually left with a bag of gold, no hair
and nicotine addiction. Oil companies usually preferred hard workers with low
grades, such as college sportsmen, athletes and even junior secretaries because
God knows they do a lot of running around. Sadly, I qualified in none of these
categories. I wondered if any company would take me at all or would I be sent
to the silicon valley of India again in some obscure Aeronautical laboratory
which would at first involve a long bureaucratic procedure just to prove my
existence as a responsible citizen of the nation; and if I survived that then
I’d be asked to make excel sheets on the data their engineers had ridiculously
collected and not categorized over the years. I had already spent one summer
wasting my time on such a project. I did not want to do this again. Last summer
I had learnt what I did not want to be in life. That is a big achievement for a
20 year old in an engineering college. But here I was face-to-face with Mr.
Reality again and I still did not know what I really wanted to do with my life.
I’d thought cracking the most difficult exam in the nation would’ve been good
enough to secure a good life for the future. Somehow, there was more to my life
than one eight-hour long exam.
