Engineering: A Case of Herd Mentality

A Beautiful Memory: Learning, Belonging and Other Musings

High School Reminiscences, part 4 of 16

Correct me if I am wrong, ever since we humans printed something on a piece of paper and started calling it money, the craze to make ‘careers’ has turned out to be something of a means to an end – as in getting to a goal, often foully like a thief or holily like a bishop! Let me explain…

I don’t profess to know the right answer but everybody understands the fact that to earn this piece of human ‘invention’ we get serious, sometimes too serious about our careers and work like Machines, forgetting that we are Humans.

Life is what you make it

Who decides what you should pursue in life. What if I say Life is not all about a career to be made? I don’t know about you but I would beg you to please believe this: It's all about life and we have only one to live in; one life to love. Love will find a way. Life will find a way. Do what you want to do: make a career or unmake a career, but make it really worth it and justified while you are here. You never know what might happen the next moment, so just live today and die tomorrow or whenever the Call from Above comes. Sure career is important but not to the cost of your happiness, or even friendship. That’s some Bathroom Philosophy if you like.

True that often Destiny, Parents and Society’s endorsement to what you will ultimately end up doing in life matters, at any rate in our country it does. Yet getting into something without duly acknowledging, in reverence, the above-mentioned all-knowing all-controlling troika can turn out to be an act of blunder rather than a boon. But of course, if you fancy living by your idiomatic edict: My Way or the Highway and don’t give two hoots and a holler about the triumvirate then the ball is truly and firmly in your court, meaning your life is in your hands you may treat it the way you like.

Think about this: A generation or two previously (in the late 1980s), career aspiration was nothing short of a deeply emotional affair for most school-goers like us. Contemplating it day and night was our favourite pastime, but not at the cost of losing some wonderful friendships which can happen only once in a lifetime. So what happened at school? I think it was mainly because there were not enough colleges then where we could get admission easily and not to mention the paucity of other opportunities also which was another dogged reality of life contributing to our general angst-ridden student life. However, with today’s generation – Millennials as they are stereotypically called – it might seem to be less so. With opportunities abound they can’t complain, can they? Indeed, they can’t. But as it happens, in this day and age, when opportune circumstances for making a lucrative career prevail, friendship is frequently the first casualty. Neither feelings pull at your heartstrings, nor eyes well up with tears. Two years of companionship, laughter, and jokes, gone.

Friendship takes a backseat, and even quickly dispensed with, as the Millennials just don’t mind moving on to new vistas to make all their dreams come true at the cost of their friendship. Though our generation had an upper hand at making friends as there were hardly any distractions like Smartphones, Social Media, or Internet then, we too were equally guilty on that score. Many from my class of the late 1980s couldn’t care less or could even be bothered to develop a deeper friendship. Why? Well, I don’t think I have a valid answer to that loaded question. Hawkish Sribathtub, Baljee Risla, and Hangorag Tarik come to mind. Sadly, once when the context of school was removed and whatever little formal acquaintanceship we had as classmates, it was all over. I wonder, how they have fared in their own life, without any old friendship helping them on their way to becoming grown-ups, adults. God only knows.

This much I have understood: without friends, life cannot be as meaningful, exciting, and fulfilling. Thank God, my friendship with P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Ramraj was the sole and miraculous saviour in the face of the whole sordid affair of all-round friendlessness in the class; though I can’t possibly stop thinking about some of the most exciting classmates I’ve had the pleasure to associate with: Rushma, Mitu, Thomas (Doubting Thomas?) and the fellow school bus traveller ‘smiley pastor, foxy trickster’ Topal Chapathi from Class Eleven, every one of them was endowed with a lovely bent of mind, great smiles, attentive, and highly pleasing and enjoyable company. One would run out of adjectives and still be unable to chronicle the feeling of appreciation one had for them. Suffice to say that they were such lovely people!

Typical Indian mentality!

For instance, take into account the all-encompassing words: ‘career aspiration’ which, since Time began, ranks as a career no. 1 in our country: Engineering-B.Tech./B.E. (and of course, Medicine-MBBS). Now, I hate to exaggerate or generalise things unnecessarily but that is what seems to be the reality, let’s admit, we knew all long.

With scores of poorly ranked private degree colleges/institutions dotting various locales of our city and the outskirts, one can hardly crib or complain about the easy availability of educational avenues that are on offer these days. People simply choose engineering as their profession as if there’s nothing else to do in life. The problem is we are abusing an otherwise excellent field of study. In earlier times, people used to do engineering because they loved machines and computers or want to create something new but now all that noble thought has started to degrade into a status symbol or in some cases ‘time pass’ or to quickly get a ‘job’ somewhere and get it done with. But hehe there’s a catch. It isn’t as easy as it seems, dude.

With scores of engineering colleges (read factories!) available, anybody can become an engineer these days. Most do it because it’s there and it is far easier to get a seat in one of many such ‘factories’ than being expected to do anything else, or maybe someone told them to do it so they went ahead and did it, or they do it because of the so-called “IT boom”. As an adverse consequence of that thing happening year after year, most of the students are ending up being unemployed engineers! Hordes of such ill-advised people, who, label themselves as “Dudes” (pathetic!), enter engineering colleges seem less interested in doing engineering but more interested in eyeing a ‘job placement’. Needless to say, the present scenario is scary as the current generation of “Dudes”, who are incapable of learning Literature or natural sciences or any other course, find a way to go through a four-year engineering course!

I wonder if they think that they made engineering the biggest mistake of their life since 80% of these graduates are starkly unemployable as they lack new-age technological application skills needed to work not just in software-related IT jobs but across industries. Enjoy!

In the present day, there are hundreds of Engineering (Engg. in short) colleges mushroomed in and around the state. If anyone even just as simple as expressing a desire to get an admission in one of them, one can get it quite easily with not an iota of trouble experienced whatsoever – making a joke of an otherwise good field of study. Easy admission; if you have the money and ‘quota’. Ever heard of herd mentality? Engineering has its fan following (read herd mentality). Hordes of people make a run for it every year. The fact is that most of these hordes go seek admission to an Engineering college with a single-minded determination to get a ‘job placement’, and truly meaningful learning is relegated to the back seat. Therefore, as is the case now, if you have only a “job” high up on your agenda how can proper learning ever come about in the psyche of the engg. students? No wonder most of these candidates are found to be appallingly unemployable as a result of that reality.

Non-descript private engineering colleges that have proliferated everywhere are partly to be blamed for offering ‘easy money, easy admission’ to all and sundry. Candidates who are not at all competent enough to think properly about what they wish to do in life are offered admissions. Following the herd going in the general direction of an engineering college located somewhere is the norm of the day. The herd thinks that doing an engineering course from just about anywhere will guarantee the “jobs” they expect during campus job placement. Little do they know that things are not all that hunky-dory when they come out of college and look for jobs. Most don’t get placed while some do. Jobs are never guaranteed even if you have become some kind of ‘engineer’ from among the floundering lot of so-called engineers. God help these candidates if HR managers refused to take them. How will HR consider them for employment if “they don’t even know anything”?

The problem is that for youngsters like them getting an engineering seat is far too easy and convenient a deal for getting a job placement than anything else in their life which doesn’t guarantee one: All you’ve to do is just show some ‘rank’ you got from writing a mass entrance exam, pay the fee at the queue-less counter and exit with an admission receipt in your pocket! Look Maa so easy! These people are sure to pass out and get to be an ‘engineer’! As simple as it gets.

Here I go once more! Getting an engineering seat is a cakewalk, there are hundreds available for the taking. In sharp contrast, medical colleges are understandably a countable few, and getting an admission in any of them is hard work and has to be very well-deserved by the aspirant, and obviously, nearly all of these medical colleges are bound to be good institutions of par excellence, unlike their engineering counterparts who have shot themselves in the foot. So only the ablest get their Medical seats. But – and that’s an important ‘but’ – when it comes to getting an engineering admission the struggle for it is often negligible compared to what goes into earning a medical seat.

That’s how fast and easy things have become in the new millennium that no one needs to fret about getting an admission in an Engineering college – in sharp contrast to our long-gone apologetic generation who had to endure a Donkey’s load of suffering to secure a place in the Indian sun. Little wonder why most engineering graduates these days are found to be unemployable!

Not for nothing we say, Old is Always Gold. So there you have it. Case closed.

By Arindam Moulick

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Hitting the Ball Out of the Park

A Beautiful Memory: Learning, Belonging and Other Musings

High School Reminiscences, part 3 of 16

Coming back to the moot point I was making in my last blog about my class fellows: I still believe that the ‘Arrogant Lot’ (my senior high classmates) were visibly affronted when they realized that the so-called ‘Humble Lot’ has gone on to become Engineers themselves, in spite of the questionable ‘difficulty’ of getting an admission in a far-flung engineering college of some repute.

Amazingly, when most of the Arrogant Lot individuals had to sit on their restless bums to compete in numerous entrance exams all in the fond hope of getting a touch-me-not pedestal of success and showy prominence for themselves that they know their societies they move in would never stop gushing about, the Humble Lot have also shone like bright stars of the same firmament, doing good for themselves. In this way, the misconception that the Arrogant Lot is always good in studies and the Humble lot is slightly less so, was finally cut a swathe through, decimated. I hope it changed their mind for good.

Isn’t it a wonder that it’ll be so much worth becoming a talking point, an interesting subject for the society to ooh-aah about our feats achieved ‘at home’ and not ‘far away from home’? I say it is.

While being still on the subject, a peculiar aspect of the Arrogant Lot people, I think, was to study well to be able to blow their own trumpet not only to their immediate peers but also to their friends, foes, relatives, and the nosy neighbourhood at large. To be in their own societies’ good books was compelling, spurring, and propelling them all the time to do what they wanted to do in faraway lands, and while they worked towards that goal they thought they could afford themselves a good standing in the same society where they lived in. This is good as it were, but, at the end of the day, the entire exercise of having to achieve your career goals not for yourself but for what my friend keeps reiterating: “show-put-up for the society” to take note of seems to me is an exercise in futility. Most people start off their career to ‘show-put-up’ or show-off to the society; when encouraged they eventually find a way to survive in the world while others with no ‘show- off career’ worth talking about becoming better philosophers in the same society, but yes, they too somehow find a footing in the world that is increasingly going to the dogs.

Though doing something good for yourself is nothing less than your birthright but, for them, the Arrogant Lot, their foolish exhibitionism, their constant crowing about wanting to become Engineers was anything but great discretion – that they can “get anything” was the centre point of their jingoistic mentality in the class was a daily skin-crawling feature one couldn’t get used to. It was also extremely off-putting, to tell you the truth. What if someone cannot get admission in an engineering college? How are they going to deal with that? So much bragging and brouhaha will only stack up unrealistic expectations for themselves, which can never be good especially when you are just a teenager and don’t give two hoots about engineering.

While I hope that they can make it ultimately, they should bear it in mind that the murmurs of ‘failures’ despite their high bragging and boasting can add up as a nice fodder to the society-waale’s desperate tongues to lick up the juicy titbits for their monotonous gossip mills to churn into sensationally exciting jamborees! I wish they realized the hypocritical aspect of life. Not that I knew this ‘truth’ beforehand when I too was an unsuspecting teenager among them in the classroom but at least I did know, for sure, how to stay calm, persevere, and play it safe when others could only think of jingoism as their most favourite pursuit.

Whatever their career choice might be, Engineering or anything, they liked to storm ahead with so much thoughtlessness and gumption that they think they cannot afford to weigh themselves down by caring about the ‘slackers’ faltering to achieve the kind of “success” they recognize or give importance to or shower their praises on. So, just beat it Arrogant Lot. Get the drift. We Humble Lot too knew how to hit the ball out of the park.

Pen-portraits of my classmates

At school – at any school for that matter – sometimes things don’t get to be entirely neat and tidy and up to the mark. Be it tutoring, sports, extra-curricular activities (SUPW), teachers, or even students themselves, everything cannot be flawlessly OK and remain beyond scrutiny. Moreover, matters like these can turn out to be slightly difficult to resolve in spite of the best efforts on the part of the school management to correct them.

While we understand that everything cannot be perfect in any setup, it is the necessary zeal to achieve the best possible perfection in everything that matters is the way forward. We students seemed to have taken them in the right earnest, and honestly, we didn’t have the foggiest idea whether there was anything amiss at all. In reality, we enjoyed our studentship in that wonderful school enormously.

So apart from positive things, I thought, there were inevitably (no not ‘negative’) but unconstructive things too. Well, I have a pennyworth of things to say so take all of the following caricatures with generous pinches of salt! This is about a small number of my class fellows with whom I have once come in friendly association with during the two years of my schooling at one of the most beautiful schools nestled in the deep countryside surrounded by mother nature and Air Force Base (IAF) towards the north of my Trishul Park residence.

While this blog is not a ‘getting back at someone’ exercise, I thought taking small liberties at caricaturing a few of my classmates with whom I had spent two golden years of my school life a little candidly might offer a chance to put a few things in a new light, a new perspective. As I’ve said previously, you may take the following narrative with generous pinches of salt. I feel satirizing makes it worth writing, sugar-coating it makes it unsatisfactorily boring. So satire it is, and I am in the mood to be its sleuthing exponent. Let’s see what happens.

• I remember one of the fellows from the junior class, going by the lisping name of a toddler Topal Chapathi used to take the school bus to go to school. Every morning at the alighting point where we used to get picked up from for school, a half-cunning aspect of his mouth with a half-endearing grin, which was not upbeat but not also downbeat in its occurrence, is sure to throw you into a tizzy unless of course, you make an effort to grin back at him and get into pointless chitchat until our common mode of transportation showed up. He looked like a smiley pastor without the standard robe of course but had too much appetite for discussing non-existent scoops of your innocent, school-going teenager’s life.

In effect, this little peculiarity of his was enough to make you look the other way or look heavenwards to pray and try and steer clear of his line of vision while you waited for your school bus to arrive – Oh God, let his vision settle elsewhere… on somebody else, not me… and miss me completely because it would be foolhardy to share all of yesterday’s happenings with this ever grinning school pipsqueak. Just joking.

• And of course, there was this monumental, buck-toothed Neanderthal, a human Kutub Minar, passing by the name of Hawkish Sribathtub – Unarguably, he is one of the tallest and blisteringly rude fellows, a total killjoy that has ever walked on earth; fond of saying: "Abey zhandu balm!". Being his buffoonish best was his innate forte. To any teenager’s mind, he would come across as a bigmouth who spoke not words but blows with clenched fists, a most offense-taking character. The word friendship doesn’t mean anything in his dictionary.
• Hangorag Tarik – A dumpy green-with-begrudge chap best known for keeping secret jealousies (among his numerous other phases of negativities) that often had no logical basis. For instance, to covet attention in everything he felt able to do apart from one other badness he had is that he openly envied schoolmates who were slightly too ‘close’ to girls. He misunderstood these things and we never reasoned with him about it; he was on his own. Little wonder that he desired to be a wannabe lover boy but never quite managing to figure out how to be one. Lest his ‘good image’ affronts our teachers and give him fewer marks, he lets things be. Poor dude flopped time and again in the sensitive bureau of chatting up the young maidens at school if that is what he wanted to pull off after all. Pity that this eager beaver was just not up to the mark.
• Then there was Baljee Risla from Masalabazar – A Hawa-Hawai chappal-wearing dandy who always enjoyed being difficult to get on with and was purposefully egoistic to the core. Hopeless to befriend.
• Then comes an ever so courteous, tall, and respectful of everybody P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Ramraj and his ever so touchy, somewhat fretful, of quick-tempered nature and equally towering sibling going by the name P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Luxmanraj.

Their legendary long initials were well-known around the campus. Whenever you pronounced them (if you can manage to do that), it will reverberate throughout the ramparts of our school and beyond. Or your intonation of that awesome stack of initials (Dasavatara plus two) with all kinds of dots, periods, full stops, decimal points between them would make a full hover of the Earth and return to the point where you started from. No prize for guessing that they would need quite an elongated nameplate to fit them all in.

Furthermore, using just their formidable pile of initials, which stood like a line of alert uptight sentries (like the famous standing figures of Kondapalli Toys!) in front of their last names, you could use them to come out with new ventures/plots/ layouts/ housing colonies or erect extraordinary compound walls for security aspect to never slacken! Echoes of their sonorous initials were sometimes heard at the drinking water tank, once in a while in the playgrounds, in the baseball field, and sometimes resonating continually in our classroom like a stern bulletin or a disciplinary announcement enough to make you attentive in class. Those long initials were the stuff of legend few could match. P.S.V.V.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. Ramraj with whom I’ve had a meaningful friendship for a long time afterwards had been a shining beacon of light until we outgrew our friendship.

• And of course who can disremember the pair of diminutive, pocket-sized twins collectively known as “biddis” (not beedis, as in cigarettes, but short ones, giddoos, meaning undersized). Tragically, their heights never matched their painfully overburdened historical time-consuming tedious names: Maha Ranaa Prataap (Piddi) and Maha Rajaa Prataap (Biddi). That’s their fate perhaps, they couldn’t help it. Such long names for two little fellas are a little too much to live with. No choice, they have to. And they did.

So what’s more progressively significant, career or friendship?

You let me know. I know my answer crystal clear. But first, what conceivable answer would you be able to think of to the following inquiries?

• Was this catch-all-spare-none effrontery of my class fellows a good thing or a bad thing?
• Was it “smart thinking” on their part to show dissent to others and act selectively unfriendly all the time?
• Or dispensing with one’s conscience to bludgeon one’s way through in the crass pursuit of career fulfillment has become the latest trend?

I was clueless as to how to get these things figured out. Some of those fellas were far too aggressive for my taste. But believe me, I was not alone clutching at this line of this somewhat escapist thinking; there were others too who, I am sure, thought just as the same as I did about this riddling mystery and barely could we concoct a worthy answer that could clarify such an inexplicable thing to everyone’s satisfaction including the few of us who thankfully have escaped from such, I concede, self-moralizing pastime and lived a life they were seeking, after leaving school. As usual, proper answers to such questions were hard to come by, particularly during those two years at that school nothing was as perfectly clear as it is presently. However, in the years after senior secondary school, these questions no longer were important to find appropriate responses as they one by one had, not surprisingly, ceased to be relevant anymore.

Still, success isn’t tied in with winning Dollar, Rupee, or Rouble, nor is it about cut-throat financial gains or having to own lavish mansions in some ritzy Bel-Air neighbourhood. Success is all about the journey, not the destination; it's about sacrifice and undiluted happiness along the way. Include money if you have to but only if it is earned conservatively not excessively. Now that sounds like an overly capitalistic, ‘wall street’ or 'Dalal street' mentality, isn’t it? Must be. Everything sellable is put on the global market for a price that contributes to humankind’s economic development but also warms up the world’s climate violently. Market economics anyone?

For me, however, the mantra of success boils down to: “successful health,” “mental peace”, “happiness” and just being myself in the company of sometimes loving, sometimes sparring family members, fantastic relatives, irate neighbours, and langotiya yaars or friends in absentia – plain jane needs nobody bothers about. Money, the great economic craving, is important but only to a certain extent, past that it is just… mud. Sounds preachy? Poetic? Unnecessarily intellectual? It’s supposed to.

"Taka mati, mati taka." That was what the God-avatar Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa used to say about money. He said, “Money is mud, mud is money.” Case closed. So why hanker after it?

Friends No More

It seems to me (and I am quite distressed by it) that the more money you want to earn, the more you destroy the Earth, which is the only home we know. The catchphrase of human life should be this – Ask not what Mother Earth can do for you, ask what you can do for our Mother Earth.

But funnily, the adolescent dreamers, I mean the Arrogant Lot, were sort of falling over backwards to chase a dream or two in an alien land far away from home, while I was being hell-bent on chasing a proudly bourgeois, poor Indian one.

My college friends too – (with whom I’ve played gully cricket, had endless uproarious adda sessions, spent a great many evenings munching on poor man’s almonds moomphalli (sautéed groundnuts), enjoying pure ghee halwa, sometimes gorging on homemade chips & sandwiches chasing it down with hot tea or Nescafé on the terrace of my house or at times theirs) – took off to distant lands across the seven seas, one after the other.

When they returned home, they changed completely: their mannerisms, their sense of humour, the ease with which we used to interact with each other transformed beyond recognition. Overseas careers, good earnings, ‘quality of life’, peculiar accents, and promising future-prospects have turned them into strange, inaccessible personalities difficult to relate to. No longer were they their old selves: charming, fun-loving bindaas young boys they used to be once. A friend’s heart would desperately long for the old times to come back, but alas, he didn’t know they never were coming. All those extraordinary old times were lost forever… consigned to the Past, to an Era which has disappeared a long time ago, recessing into our hearts as treasured memories and reminiscences.

Not surprisingly, I quickly realized that my so-called friends and former colleagues will never be permanently at home; they like being untouchably abroad all the time, working their hearts out to earn laurels for themselves and their loved ones back home. They do miss Home passionately, but it seems to me that they can’t make up their minds if they want to be transformed individuals or just be their familiar old selves, which are stuck deep in work and the promise of ‘new life’. For most of them, coming back home was not an option. That’s a globalization cake they wish to relish some more while they still could. For them, I suspect, Home is no longer home, it is just a geographical address somewhere on the other side of the planet to be worried about later. They love being Away in the unyielding embrace of the big bad world out there, across the seven seas.

Our friends want to be the next Jobs, Gates, Buffets, and Zuckerbergs of the globalized world, whereas I continued following the pious edicts of the spiritual masters like Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, and Sarada, albeit with a little bit of ‘mud’ (aka mati, money, taka) in my pocket… just to be able to get by in life; sufficient bit on which I could respectfully survive. That is all there is to it. Plain and simple.

So were we friends? I still have my doubts

I have my doubts about the whole ‘fraternity bonding’ thing and the passing away of the days, months and years have had me becoming a tad opinionated about whatever precious little ‘friendship’ we may have had at that time at school are gone now. That sweet old rhythm is lost for all time; no one stayed behind, except Yours Truly (that is me).

No wonder, our lives couldn’t endure the severe beating in the unkind hands of rapidly changing times and sadly turning of eras into unfamiliar living hells. As it were, the so-called ‘globalization’ did us in; it killed many friendships and relationships and has flung me into a kind of self-sustained victimhood that stayed with me to this day. Undoubtedly, the New Millennium has taken us far away apart from our homelands and our old way of life in exchange for fulfilling dreams and career aspirations of a new kind. All hail globalization! Just do!

One feels with a heavy heart that when it comes to the Present-day, people who simply love living in the Past shouldn’t dare try to bring together the trope of “friendship” with some stale “nostalgic feelings” one might have had once upon a time from school days: because the idea of reminiscing or romanticizing the Past have little or no value in the minds of most people. Such things don’t feel true to them; they sound hollow, pointless, futile, and even downright meaningless as they think that it is in their destiny to look to the Future, and consequently, can’t relate to the heart-tugs of the Past times that made us what we are today. It simply is not in their genes.

Maybe, once upon a time, we may have studied together in that idyllic love ballad of a school, sitting on a bench side by side, sharing notes, books, and such, playing impromptu football match-ups using a miserable lost-and-found PT shoe, having great fun cracking jokes, pulling legs of each other during free periods, yet tragically, all of that beautiful aspect of our high school days didn’t add up to anything of importance for us to experience great friendship after passing out from school. It’s a miserable story, but true.

One by one we all disappeared, vanished without a trace. No one cared to know what the other was doing in life. Tell me, couldn’t all those beautiful things we experienced and the lessons we learned together at the K.V. make us long for each other and form an everlasting bond of friendship? Lamentably, not. In the blind rush of heading out into the snobbish world of umpteen career goals, plans, and further studies, we left the ‘excess baggage’ such as ‘friendship’ behind in the deep backwoods of a long-gone history that will neither be accessible to anyone nor be ever remembered. I feel sorry for the fact that we simply didn’t know how to become friends - culminating in the death of many friendships.

Now, that, my dear permanently absent friends, is coming straight from the heart.

By Arindam Moulick

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.