It was exactly one year ago, I was sitting on an old metal chair in the middle of a classroom... my plastic smile betraying the sense of discomfort I felt as three strangers stared at me with their piercing eyes. The two angry men in dark suits had the exact same look on their faces... a look that seemed to scream out – “how dare you have sex with our daughter?”... and the pretty young thing... well, judging by the way she was being mollycoddled, one would think she definitely was the daughter in question! Shit. My mind was beginning to warp. I knew right then I shouldn’t have stayed awake all of last night watching back-to-back episodes of Modern Family. I tried to focus on the present. The three people on the other side of the table had come from the global consulting firm X&Y, and this was my final placements interview. It was the kind of situation b-school fantasies are made of... and all I could think was – “I wonder what she’s doing now.”
Placement season is the craziest time in a management institute. As a fitting end to the two years of dealing with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome that fucks up your body and mind, here’s an intense three day window of emotional turmoil that sucks out your very soul. Three days. A hundred odd companies, all looking to hire the best brains of India, descend upon the hapless students much like the Biblical swarm of locusts. As a run up to the actual event, an air of gloom seems to envelope the entire campus. Suddenly, the same people who acted like you didn’t exist, want to know what you’ve written in your resume... you become the competition. More often than not, the burden of living up to those expectations gets too heavy for our frail twenty-something shoulders. I’ve seen my classmates burst out in tears, indulge in substance abuse, and even contemplate suicide. The Lord gave David a choice of three punishments, and David chose three days of plague.
Let’s face it. We all had our own reasons to want to improve our lives... and the dark suits were our Messiahs. There’s no point complaining about the way placements are conducted in our top b-schools. Maybe there is something inherently wrong about our education system; maybe our entire social structure is fucked up. But we can leave the "trickle of positive change" (sic) to Chetan Bhagat for now. The way I see it – if an organization is hiring someone on a million rupee salary, they have every right to put us through hell. Not that we minded the torture too much, the lure of big bucks kept us all going strong. Scratch a little beneath the surface, and you would find that it wasn’t just the money. We all had that one thing for which we were ready to compromise on the salary. While most of my friends desperately wanted a change in their job profiles, others fantasized about working for a particular dream company. For me, I had my heart set on shifting base to Delhi – the city where she lived.
It has been exactly one year since I didn’t get the job at X&Y Consulting. But I did get another one. In Delhi. I no longer have to wonder what she’s doing now.
