What time is it? …. 7 o’clock Sir
What time are you supposed to come? …. 6 Sir
This has become a routine for you, go back home … bla bla bla. This is how most of my mornings started for most part of my childhood.
Sleeping is an integral part of life, right? It relaxes your body, mind and soul. So what’s wrong in sleeping a bit more? Don’t know why most of the parents are so fond of the “Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” policy. Well I did try for 7 years of my school life, but only succeeded a handful of times. Mostly when there is plan with my friends to watch sunrise by the beach or when a latest mobiles’ flash sale is about to happen. Like the recent ‘Freedom 251’ sale. I do things only that I like and not if they are right.
I was always interested in technology. My father has this small service center for electronic items. Those days he used to assemble desktops for his customers. We were kind of like a team, he used to set up the hardware and I looked after the software part, like installation of the OS and other applications. He thinks that I am smart kid as I was able to do it without much help. Little did they know that it just requires knowledge of English language. I thank my parents for proving me the best education they could.
While working on computers I developed interest towards digital art and animation. I used try out various Photoshop tutorials from the Internet. I expressed this interest of mine to my parents, that I want to pursue education in this area. But neither my parents nor I had much idea about this field. And being the middle class Indian family they were worried about my career. I do not blame them. I myself didn’t do my homework properly, about the field and the opportunities in it to convince them satisfactorily.
Around the same time there was this crazy race for getting admission into IIT’s, in Andhra Pradesh. Someone, more specifically some Idiot got it into the heads of all parents that Engineering is the only viable career option for your child. So parents used to enroll their kids in coaching institutes after 10th standard. Right now the situation is worse. Even schools have included this exam syllabus in their curriculum, right from 6th standard. I feel lucky to be born a bit early. Anyway I too proceeded along with the tide and chose Engineering. Little did I know what I was getting into.
Basically I’m one of those guys from a proper telugu Brahmin family who is not at all religious. My parents tried a lot to induce some faith in me but all their tries went in vain. Little did I know at the time that god was watching me and waiting for the right moment to play his magic.
As the search for right coaching institutes began, two fine young men knocked on our door one Sunday morning. They said they are a group of graduates from IIT Delhi, running a coaching institute to prepare students for ITT-JEE, along with stress on personality development classes. Only when we attended the orientation we came know that by personality development they meant character development and by character development they meant Krishna consciousness. My parents were very happy and enrolled me right away. I could see the smug look on their faces which says that “tikka kudirindi vedhavaki”.
Well it was not that bad. It was altogether a different experience. Listening to Bhagavad-Gita and learning from teachers who are completely motivated to give proper education to their students. Only thing that was lacking was co-education. Was stuck in a room with 60 guys for two years. All said and done I couldn’t imbibe any religious practices though. Ironically it felt like may be god did kind of bless me finally, because though I was pretty average performer during the two years I have secured a seat in a good college.
People seem to have a lot to speak about when asked the question what did you do in college. If someone asks me the same I literally have nothing to say, absolutely nothing. As far as I know ours is the only engineering college in India which has no attendance at all. You can give the final semester exams even without attending a single class. Being the smart ass I am I have fully made use of this opportunity to bunk classes and do nothing. Don’t know how I have passed four years like that. Credits wise I did maintain a lot of consistency scoring C grade in 90% of the courses and ended up as a 6 pointer.
Finally It has arrived though. The most feared part in the life of every college student, Placements. Mathematics is one of the important subjects in engineering and I have been sucking at it since school time. And it turns out aptitude tests are the first round of any placement process. I have given aptitude tests of 11 or 12 companies before getting a placement call. May be that too finally happened because by that time half the people already got placed. Once again god kind of blessed me I guess. Got placed in a good company, Bank of America.
It been two years almost since then and my story still continues…
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the story of MY life 