Dear Pintu

“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain” is what Morpheus tells Neo in the movie.

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

Similarly, Descartes talks about the “demon” in The First Meditation. The evil demon presents a complete illusion of an external world, including other people, to Descartes' senses, where in fact there is no such external world in existence. The evil genius also presents to Descartes' senses a complete illusion of his own body, including all bodily sensations, where in fact Descartes has no body.

The Geeta in Hinduism talks of a similar concept in term of Maya (illusion). When Krishna was questioned by Arjuna about the creation, only answer Krishna gave is “Through my Maya, I create this creation in the beginning of time and at the end of time, this creation merges with in me.”

Are perceptions, the fundamental basis of learning, unstable and unreal?

Parent Trap: A doctor’s son should be a doctor, a businessman’s son should manage the family business and the rickshawpuller’s son should grow up to be a wife-beater like his father. If you go by the sheer number of star babas and babys in Bollywood you would think that dancing around trees and fighting bad guy dressed in designer jeans has some specific gene that will henceforth be passed on only to the chosen few. The lure of following in your parents footsteps is strong, and it is not genetic in nature. It about the professional network that your father/ mother has built up over a career spanning 25 years that can give you that cushy start. If you are thinking of going against conventional wisdom and breaking the cradle so to speak, networking will hold the key to ensure that you don’t necessarily have to fall into the “Parent trap”.

Peer Baba: Raju said “I wanna be an engineer when I grow up”. And just because your best friend Raju said it, the 10 year old you had also echoed his words. Some 8 years later, while studying day and night for IITJEE, you wondered where that worm of becoming an engineer actually entered your mind. Whenever making a career choice, it would be prudent for all of to see whether we are following our own dream or that of our friends, brothers, sisters, parents. All of us have our hopes and aspirations and dreams we want to chase dearly. But at times we are too lazy to lay down that blueprint for ourselves and introspect enough to come up with what we really want. Borrowed dreams don’t make for happy realities.

Driftwood: “Nothing is good enough for me. I need to find a career that suits me to the T and this is just not it.” And thus spake the lady who drifted from wannabe fashion designer to journalist to call centre executive. She’s changed 4 careers in 3 years, sometimes unhappy with the money, the hours, the firm. She doesn’t see herself grow in certain careers and others just don’t offer her creative satisfaction. For driftwoods, its never the job that doesn’t suit them. They just fail to realize that sometimes its not about what you do but who you are. Its not always the job that makes the Man but the Man makes his own job too. The initial years in any line are tough and filled with mistakes and learning. To do a good job you are careful to never risk anything, to never make mistakes. But to do an awesome job, you would need to make the worst mistakes in your career and learn from them. Sometimes its not about making the right choices in selecting your career. It is about making the right choice in sticking through the rough and turbulent initial years to finally find your calling.

I got fired!: Let’s face it, in these days of cutbacks and recession, pink is no longer a soothing colour. You can’t help the fact that your entire product team got laid off, with you in tow. Does this mean that you were bad at your job? What we often don’t realize is that competence plays a small role in layoffs as compared to circumstances. So you were not at the right level, not in the right team and perhaps didn’t not get the Boss the biggest bouquet on his birthday. Don’t let that pink slip undermine your confidence and become a force in shaping your career. No one else can tell you what you should for a living or how competent you are.

So I made CAT my game instead, and in a perverse way I found solving all that Math awesome fun for once. My mother-hen Megh would join me once in a while and we’d do little competitions against each other. I didn’t always win, but I rarely lost badly. It was awesome.

Then of course there were Mock CATs. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mock CATs are something that every wannabe IIM dude takes religiously, 20 times a year to “sharpen his confidence for D-Day”. I took just about 7 of them. I did miserably in 3 of them, did okay in the rest with a highest percentile of 98.5%. No big deal. I even skipped the last “crucial” Mock test. I basically made a mockery of mocks.

But I kept religiously playing my own timed games. A week before what many like to call “D-Day”, I went off to burst bombs and on Diwali and watch Farah Khan farcical magnum opus “Om Shanti Om.”

Then off I went to Kolkata to appear for the elongated version of my timed games. I didn’t treat it as life or death. I was, in a word, very calm. My test centre was at St. Xavier’s college, in a typical musty classroom on the 2^nd floor. I spent around 4 “precious” minutes of my “crucial” exam adjusting the drapes so that the sun wouldn’t stream down into my paper. Then I got to work. A couple hours went by and the paper was over. I went back to hostel that evening. I never checked my answers.

A week later, I mucked up my semester exams badly. All my “gaming” had to take its toll somewhere. As Mithun da would tell the villain who raped his sister “Kutte, har cheez ki koi keemat hoti hai. Ab teri jaan se keemat chuka!”

Now came the bad part. The wait was nerve-wracking. I was fine till I had given the test but slowly I was going back to my old habits of expectations and reputations. Come January and the results were out. The server on which results are stored, like every year, was down for a day. I got through at around 11 in the night after results were supposedly declared at 3pm. Yeah I had interview calls from all 6 IIMs with 99.70%tile. I was very happy.

After running around my floor in the hostel like a headless chicken, with a Shoaib Aktar-dive thrown in for good measure, for around 15 minutes, I finally understood that “Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost” Get your head back you oaf, who’s going to appear for those interviews now?

So along came Microsoft on Campus. Early August it was and summer was just giving way to rains in Durgapur. I had spent the summer in IIT Guwahati working on some weird kind of Geometric Algorithms and at the end of 6 weeks I thought myself some kinda Code-guru, which I definitely wasn’t. And thus I sat for the written test (which was the first round) for Microsoft, with my heart set on getting through, and full of also the fear of failure. (Oh God everyone thinks I am such a genius, what will happen to my reputation if I fail!) I needn’t tell you that I didn’t get through.

Interestingly enough, since I was such a confused kid, during the summer I had carried home with me a pile of preparation material for CAT. It used to be pretty fashionable in NIT D to enrol in this course for CAT preparation that a coaching centre called TIME ran on weekends. When someone asked inane questions like “What’s up these days man?” you could always reply “I’m preparing for CAT” in the same tone as saying “I’m running a home for War widows or destitute.” Preparing for CAT was akin to a great social service undertaken by the dedicated ones.

And thus in wanting to give fashionable replies to inane questions, me, Chandrima Das, the one and only, had also enrolled for the very same course. I made it a point to collect each and every piece of paper they ever handed out and also to not attend any class they ever held.

During the summer, I had opened a few of the books I had taken home and I did a few sets from the Data Interpretation section for fun. I would time myself and see how fast I could do sets of 7-8 questions. Then there is this nice CAT prep website called totalgadha.com where I would again do the same "how fast can I solve this" game, this time with Reading & Comprehension passages. It was exactly like a game for me and I even kept track of my “highest scores” just like any gaming junkie does. And this was my preparation pre-August 2007 for CAT’07 which was in November. Awesome.

So after my whole Microsoft debacle I decided to gird up my loins and throw into the trash-bin all my notions of “If I don’t get it, who will.” Luckily for me, there was this “best friend ever!” that I had, a random guy called Megh, who had not been as stupid as me and had gotten that plum job that I had so coveted. I took his achievement as my consolation prize from the whole deal. This random guy now decided to play Mother-hen to me, the kind who brings you the glass of Bournvita when you’re up studying. I guess he just had nothing better to do with his time after getting that job.

Now since I am the resilient kind (okay fine, the obdurate kind!), I was still hell-bent on getting a job where I could code around all day and get good money for it. So up next was a very fundoo Firm, let’s call it Disco Networks. This time I had no illusions of grandeur, no notions of vanity. Sadly for me, not everyone in NIT D is exactly err... ethical. Yeah, that’s why I called it Disco to prevent getting sued off my ass! Certain gentlemen decided that such a nice job with such a nice pay rightfully belongs to them and leaked the written paper. SMSes containing all the answers were dutifully passed around the Hall and wonder of wonders, dumbasses like me who never even thought of such innovations didn’t get through (sadly along with most of the brighter ones in class).

And now I was pretty much stranded. There weren’t too many “hot” firms left now. I decided “enough of NIT Durgapur and its awesome placement system, if I can’t work with this system I will work with another”. And I never applied to another firm again.

Now let me take the opportunity here to project myself in Mithun-esque mould, as the crusader against wrong-doing, as the Heroine who overcame all odds to emerge bloodied yet victorious at the end of the day, brandishing her blood-stained sword. Sadly, none of that happened. Realization dawned. I decided to study further, and work within systems which were more likely to favour my methods.

I decided that I wasn’t going to write love letters in code. I sat down and wondered what I was good at. I could talk, a lot and at times gibberish. I could write “Crazy yet readable stuff”, as described by a friend. I was awesome at organizing events, fests and stuff and getting non-academic work done because I found it way more interesting to work with people that with keyboards. I decided that I was going to be my mother. No, not join the IAS or something! I was going to be the world’s greatest super-hero Manager. I would do an MBA. And to be honest, it is introspection which is the first step of preparation if you want to go ahead with that career you will pursue for the rest of your life. Don’t drift, take a call. I did.

It was August 17^th 2007, my day of major introspection. 3 months left for CAT 2007. [continued...]