Well, another good company for placements came in today, but then again like many others before it, quite irrelevant to my grand plan for world domination. By that I mean, another IT company. While I have the utmost respect for IT and all that it stands good for…the sodexo vouchers, excessive coffee, team bonding = excessive drinking, mindless hours spent billing customers for work done on beating the top score at solitaire, or even the hours spent chatting up the new receptionist, all that and more…. I really want to get down to the basics of selling soap and shampoo. It’s at these levels apparently all the marketing is learnt. Well, that's the game plan....for now! But then, the only offers coming in are from the ivory towers of IT. Anyway, the company comes….puts up profiles, I quite drearily browse through and my eyes fall upon one profile….business delivery manager (or something like that) for the music industry.
Now my face glows with a certain joy that could only best be described as when Smeagol lays his eyes upon the ‘precious’ ring…which eventually turns him into Gollum. Hey! Wait, isn’t IT kinda like that? Fit young able minded MBA chaps go in, attracted by on-site opportunities and fat pay check, and ultimately turn into pot bellied unfit managers with carpel tunnel syndrome and can think of only one thing? OMG… Tolkien saw it even before it happened! A little voice in my head goes" IT…Nooooooooo! "
And then it happened…. I caved! For that brief moment in time, I felt weak….and I did the one thing that I would never have forgiven myself for….I applied. And all it took was the carrot called ‘music’ dangled in front of the donkey called ‘Nikhilesh’. I had more or less put up my soul for auction on e-bay. My soul looked upon me in the same disappointed manner that Elrond looked upon Isildur when he decided not to destroy the ring at Mount Doom. (What's with the LOTR analogy today?)
The next 2 hours were spent with me holding back my tears, for this was perhaps the most shameless thing I had done…which was to give in to temptation. In that one fleeting moment, I had let myself down in every possible way. Even as I put on the suit (customary battle armour) I was unable to look me in the eye. The image in the mirror was clapping sarcastically yelling “Bravo you Dodo…so is this how much you sold your soul for? So easily…so cheaply…we are very proud of you now”. You see, I had not even joined IT and I was already developing a dual personality. While I sat in the common room holding back tears , I felt so ashamed. A feeling that I described to a friend as probably how a sex-worker feels the first time they ….you know. Young, money starved and this is what I do. And my face bore the look of acute disappointment and disgust. Tweets go out requesting my angels who were watching over me to weep.
How could I ? tsk tsk….Was not the mistake of Engineering bad enough to scar me once? have I learnt nothing about listening to the inner voice?
I sit there in disgust, loathing the very thought of my existence on Earth….and then God intervened. He saved me. I was not shortlisted. People…you won’t believe how happy I was. I came out of this unscathed. Normally, when I do something stupid, I have scars to remind me forever. And stupid things normally happen uninhibited to me. This time, I got lucky. It was like a mere flying kiss with the devil herself (yes...the devil is a woman....like Elizabeth Hurley). Phew! Saved….imagine, that one moment of weakness could have been the complete undoing of me. Well, today would have been the day Nikhilesh Murthy died. I rushed back to the room and played Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive’ at full blast. Normalcy restored. Back to the job hunt.
Comments
PS: We know about the billing bit!