The first day I walked into my new office, I was excited and rather proud of introducing myself to the strangers all over from India and became friends ( I call them strange as I had no idea what a fashion engineering graduate and psychology student was doing there). I felt an emotion of patriotism coloring my eyes when I saw that an Information Technology company has recruited graduates across states and across multiple disciplines; truly symbolizes how India is written about in history books- the cauldron of iversity, apparently am not a desh-bakt and will be sooner called an anti-Indian on my twitter time line by Ramu, followed by our Supreme leader. These generous wise minds and thinkers of my new company are so attached towards India’s culture that a single training is given to all recruits irrespective of their prior knowledge. Being a Mechanical Engineering graduate, I felt proud to attend Java classes with an Information Technology Graduate and he was thrilled that his four years of coding knowledge is equal to my knowledge of spare parts( I always considered an expert in it as I regarded myself as a spared part). We all were grateful to our corporate bosses, they are the modern freedom fighters we thought. They have fought and liberated us from our four years of learning and made our engineering degree just a paper. What a noble gesture!
I revelled in the training as they always wanted someone to sing songs, dance, mimic and do standup comedies. It allowed me to boast my diverse skills and even pull off some Bollywood romantic stunts; thanks again to my corporate gurus, the classes were diverse too and so my stunts had a wide reach. In fact at a stage after a series of training classes I had a trouble in selecting the right choice; not my software stream about which no one bothered but I faced difficulty in nationalism, Assamese or Gujarati woman! Since I was having my Acche Din, I preferred Assamese as Gujarat brought me nightmares of even better Acche Din. Then later I realized why to resort to one, it would be doing injustice to my company which is striving for equality. My corporate bosses are so engrossed with Indian Constitution and providing equality that they have rightfully reserved 33% of employment for the male employees. Truly benevolent! Hence to stand up to my companies dedication towards nationalism I vowed to accept my sole job in the company of being a part and fulfilling the astute duties in the 1:3 ratio.
Days went by, training went by and everything changed about me except my constant desire to achieve the ratio with utmost efficiency. Exams came, I failed once, failed twice and then forgot to remember the last time I failed to fail. But proudly I was promoted by my corporate company for my repeated endurance and sustenance. I am a software engineer now, I felt like am the ‘ONE’ in the matrix movie, developing codes and smashing the world at my finger point. But the last time I desperately wanted to become a developer in school my pretty computer teacher got married and failed me, this time my corporate gurus have fulfilled my wish. Blame my bad luck or the good luck of my newlywed teacher’s husband’s, I never got to attend tutorial classes again with my computer miss and never again developed an interest in being a developer, even now.
As years went by, I figured how Bill Gates became the Richest Man on Earth, being a developer and being a software engineer is all easy. You just have to attend calls promptly and immediately mute them, enter data in excel-sheets and most importantly eavesdrop on your team-members and bootlick your manager. My poor IT graduate friend whom I befriended on the first day relied too much on coding and was fired due to bad performance; he should have learnt the art of screwing peer-workers, greasing seniors and filling the air for boss’s car. I guess he would have had his job intact and even a couple of my trophies and higher rankings had he followed this ease of doing business. Days flew, my ratio still unchanged and rather sometimes increasing, as my position changed; I am a Manager now. I still lick senior’s boots but that I enjoy even my boot being licked now. Sometimes during busy hours, I hallucinate, I could have been a good Mechanic, but thank God Corporate made me an indeed fabulous software engineer. I feel corporate stands and symbolizes for ‘Unity In Diversity’if not, being a foreign built, the IT industry should have dumped me like Taj Mahal but I was treated as the noblest of noble Kar Sevak.