LIVE FROM LIFE - SAVE THE ENGINEER

SAVE THE ENGINEER

Well readers, the time has come, the time for which I have been waiting for from aeons (that would be 2004). The time to stop being an undergraduate and to become a graduate. Hell, that tells that you have arrived. You turn adult legally on your 18th birthday, but for those studying in educational ( and social ) backwaters like the place where I am, you are not treated like one till you call yourself a student of the campus. So finally I am about to taste real freedom, and I feel like the immigrants approaching New York who have just spotted the Statue of Liberty. So what’s that tinge of sadness. Am I feeling pulled apart from my alma-mater. Hell, no! If I had it in my powers I would make it so that no one remembers where I graduated from – they would say – he did his schooling at Oak Grove, Mussoorie, and did his Post graduation from so and so place, but we know nothing about his graduation college! Like some sort of Lord Voldemort, I would remove all traces of my origin, my middle years. Sadly, I am no Dark Lord, and I guess this would remain just wishful thinking. I am not sad, but a bit apprehensive. Apprehensive of the great unknown called ‘responsible life’. I have got my job, and to tell you, that’s almost as good a job as you could expect around here. Moderate salary and good perks. For those who are born motorheads, this would be a job to kill for – you are making more than thousand cars a day ( about 2000, in fact), at the heart of the car making behemoth of the country – good learning on the job, and a chance for advanced learning in exotic lands. Well, what’s the problem dude? Why am I not really pulled towards it ? Reasons could be many – I am not an automaniac, and I have stated it before also. So this job is not that special to me. I have a classmate who is dumping a government job, that would involve just 8 hours a day, and is going to pay at least 25 % more (and further more, subject to the Sixth Pay Commission), in face of vociferous opposition from folks, for the same job. That’s because he is what we call a motorhead – he eats drinks and breathes petrol, he is a moving talking Automobile-101. I wish I could feel the same way about it, but I just can’t. Earlier, I had not thought much about tit, as we still had a very grueling medical test to go through, where many big ones had fallen – where no GPA or automania could sail you through, but now since even that is over, I have to set my priorities very clear. Let’s see the options I have. Soon I would be a graduate, but even before I heave a deep sigh of relief and good riddance, I could become a Graduate Engineer Trainee. Or I could go on to become a post graduate (PG) – that really sounds too academic – and in that I would have two choices – a post graduation in engineering, or a post graduation in business administration, or management, to the layperson. How to weigh the options – that’s easy, man. Just check out what my job holds for me – some four hundred and thirty grands a year, minus taxes. Or it could be some seven hundred and fifty, if I am chosen eligible for the exotic training. It could also give me a chance to live in what goes by the moniker of the ‘Millennium City’, and is the backyard of a bigger city, a city which I love to hate. Is it worth signing up for four years of it? Mind you, it’s nearabout the highest my sort of engineers are expected to get. If that is what a grad makes, what about a post-grad. I had the call for interview from the best post grad institute in the country, which ranks something on the world level too. Post graduation in engineering, I meant. It meant going south to the ‘Garden City’, more south than I have ever traveled, clocking more continuous train hours than I have ever clocked, in such crowded circumstances that I had to get tickets for the highest class one could ever travel, to get a seat. It meant leaving a week of classes unattended, leaving myself at the mercy of Professors, a fickle species. Lots of investments, plus the risk of flunking for the first time in my whole 19 year long educational life. (I really suck at Mathematics, and I know I can’t be getting lucky forever.) So I decided to check out how my life will change with this PG – I traced on Orkut communities, and contacted those in know how, got a number and called. That was ‘the call that changed my destiny’. ( I love Backstreet Boyz – not in that way – I am straight) It was all fine for the time we were discussing the interview and stuff, but when I discussed ‘package’, I discovered it wasn’t a ‘big package’. Seeing how the place is a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ ( I love Churchill, too), I won’t reveal the figure here, but that is in no way compensating anyone to rack his head over more sines, cosines, exponents, differentials and integrals for two more years! I love science and technology, and the place I am talking about is to an engineer what Mecca is to devout Muslims, what the Holy Grail was to those Knights, what the Champions’ League is to Manchester United fans and what the Deathly Hallows were to Albus Dumbledore. Sadly, dreams are just dreams, and life does not feed on ideals, it feeds on currency – crisp banknotes, and sadly, not much here. That leaves me with the third option. Become a management PG. It’s called MBA, and it’s more of a pandemic than influenza could ever be. What is management – getting things done by the others. That’s not a smart alec definition – I swear by God and my GPA, that is the textbook definition! How blunt! Why would one do that – getting things done by the others? To take credit for it. After all, the great Taj Mahal was not built by teams of labourers in teams of 20,000 over a decade and a half, nor was some poor chap called Essa involved. To us, the Taj was built by Shah Jahan, the Great Moghul. How to do it – politely, its called directing – but I call it bullshitting. Doling out crap to workers and engineers so that they think you are the Boss, and without you the enterprise would simply collapse, and blinding them to the fact that it’s their skill and expertise that is actually making things happen, doling out crap to media to show how buoyant it has been under your charge, doling out crap to all and sundry. If you do not believe me, look at how they select B-School grads – first they have a test, where you must do questions in half the time required. Oh, you must be smart to get to a B-School, real smart – you have to think clever ways to see that your dolings of shit are not mistaken for shit – understood ? Once through, you go through GD-PI. That’s group discussion and personal interview. I have nothing more futile and more hilarious (even if I am down and out) than GD – ten-fifteen guys packed in a room and given 10 minutes to ‘discuss’ a topic, which, in a normal canteen discussion, would leave all silent, with no thought to speak out. But since this is a selection procedure, thoughts do come out, thoughts unencumbered by a rational mind, thoughts presented half baked, half mixed. It is said that when opinions collide, freedom rings (that’s from Adlai Stevenson). But in a GD, opinions do not collide – they run parallel, and take opposing curves, go on tangents, swerve, bounce off the walls, levitate and fall, and then annihilate together like electrons and positrons. You know what rings out – not freedom, but stupidity. Stupidity enrobed in sagacious phrases is passed off as sagacity, just as caramel enrobed in chocolate is being passed off as chocolate. Anyway, it’s not the thoughts that matter, but the words – those who have difficulty with words ( did I hear you cough - **engineers**) take it for granted that those with the words are meant to rule over them. Anyway, engineers come way above ‘workers’. Even engineers read a course or two on management – by God, the way ‘workers’ are written about, one might think we are talking about dogs or something – doesn’t a discussion on ‘how to reward worker so that the production does not go down’ sound frighteningly similar to ‘how much salt you can feed your dog so that his hair does not fall off’? Or those Hawthorne experiments, on how workers react to changing light level in their rooms – aren’t they similar to works of Pavlov with the dog? Don’t I hate this profession – they are worse than lawyers, and better at it – have you ever heard of manager jokes? I have an offer from a B-School, not the exact top dog, but still a significant one. It is in the city I hate with all my heart. So why is this option even in the picture? Just because if a put myself through this cesspool and wade out to the other end, I might be making 1.2 million or more, at the average going rates! Are you kidding me – did I hear – an exotic land trained auto engineer gets nearly half, and these crap cannons get 1.2 millions? Exactly, and that is an irony. What am I going to do. Earlier, I was all for my job, or a technical PG and an honest day’s job, but in all that B-School fever, I took a few steps closer to the other side, and now I am steadily being pulled by the gravitational pull of all that money. But what about my dreams, and my revulsion for this ‘side’? It is said that there is a bit of the whore in all of us, so let’s just quote our price. (that’s from Kerry Packer, I think) So simply think it that way, if despite all my efforts, an engineer dies, and a new manager is born – all suited up.