Placement Saga

The broadband connection in the house was screwed, as usual. Like most things from Reliance, it was available at a ridiculously low fixed rate per month. Also like most things from Reliance, it probably cost you more in blood pressure, hypertension and heart disease treatment in the medium to long term.

Anyway, after yelling out the usual few rounds of "Fuck Reliance! Fuck all your mass market products! Fuck!...", to no one in particular, I picked up the router and threw it around in disgust. Then, also as usual, I spent the next thirty minutes trying to figure out if the connection was cold because the Ambanis were swindling me or because I'd wrecked the router. Soon though, I realised that this time around I actually needed the internet for more than just checking my Facebook account. I needed it to apply to jobs as and when they opened up on the IIT Bombay placement website. To make matters worse, the placement cell had some sort of strange blitzkrieg policy going where they would open up an application for maybe five, six hours and then close it again. Nuts, if you ask me, but that's how it was. To put it simply, if you didn't, by some chance, log on to the placement website within that five six hour window, then your chances with a particular company could be lost completely. Once again, nuts right?

So I had to make sure I was updated at least every couple of hours. I couldn't count on friends either, no one could count on friends during placements. The competition was intense, cut throat and dirty (ok maybe that's completely untrue, but then most of friends already had jobs by this time and were so busy getting sloshed that they genuinely couldn't be counted on). Instead I decided I'd give my password to my Dad and he could check it regularly from the office or on his phone or through his secretary. Needless to say, my Dad (along with all of family, right up to my cousins thrice removed) was incredibly anxious that their boy (me), who'd been valiantly interviewing for jobs since day one of the placement season, get one at the earliest. My grandparents couldn't sleep, my Mom walked around the house looking visibly worried and my Dad kept saying "Arey theek hai yaar (Chill, it's no biggie)", for no apparent reason. As you can imagine, all this put great pressure on me to feel worried or at the very least, to act worried. So I tried my best to seem like part of the mourning. I relegated myself to the confines of my room where I was supposedly scouring the internet for opportunities and networking with contacts. Truth is, I did send out a few (unanswered) emails here and there, but for the most part I respectfully closed Facebook whenever my Mom popped in to make sure I was well fed and cheerful. In the evenings, I would step out to "discuss strategies with Sud". Somehow most of these discussions tended to meander from the course we had charted out in our parents' minds. In addition to (or instead of) talking 'strategy', we may have spent entire evenings laughing about how Sud had blown his chances even with Esha. This may even have happened with Sud getting progressively drunker and drunker till the point where even he thought this was hilarious and started pulling jokes on himself. But nothing was better than the fact that Esha would usually be around laughing along with everyone about how he blew it even with her.

Alright, getting back to that password I gave my Dad. I was asleep when he called me. Yes, asleep in the middle of the day – a privilege of the unemployed. I picked up the call in something of a daze.

"A new offer has opened up, BPCL", he said.

"BPCL? Isn't that a PSU?"

"Arey what's wrong with the public sector. Besides it's not the average sarkaari place, I know some guys there. You remember Hemant Sahi, your friend from Noida? His Dad worked there for many years before Reliance, remember? It's a great position too, management trainee, then regional manager in a couple of years..."

(Gentle snoring)

"Hello? Hello, are you there?"

"Yeah.....yeah yeah I'm awake, I'm completely awake, I was just thinking about what you said... yeah...."

"Ok, I was saying it's a great position, you'll be have six hundred guys working under you in a year's time. They're even paying 8.5"

(Gentle snoring)

"Hello? Hello?"

"......Yeah yeah, just thinking, just doing some thinking....."

"Yeah they're paying 8.5, I'll sign you up then..."

(More gentle snoring)

"Ok cool I'm signing you up"

.....

I forgot all about this conversation till a few days later when someone called me saying I'd been shortlisted for BPCL.

BPCL?

What?

No there must be some mistake, I never applied, never signed. I didn’t even see the…….Oh….

NO! No no, no no, there’s no way I could work there, no way. I’ll become a Babu if I work there, nope no chance. I can’t, just can’t. My career will be ruined, I have big plans, what the…!

One might ask how it really mattered if I was shortlisted. I could always choose not to show up for the interviews, right? Or I could show up and make a complete ass of myself and get rejected, right? Or even if I did land a job I could still apply elsewhere right?

Not really, no. The institute had all kinds of rules against that kind of thing, all of which were premised on two somewhat fair ideas. Firstly, ‘if you didn’t want to join then you shouldn’t have applied’ and secondly, ‘once you have a job, you can no longer apply for more jobs’.

So if I didn’t show up after being shortlisted, there was a chance I would get reported to the placement cell. If I turned up and made an obvious ass of myself, I could get reported to the placement cell. If I showed up and told them that there was no way I would join them, I could still get reported. So what if I got reported? Well, being IIT Bombay, they had some devised some particularly harsh penalties for the reported and I was sure they would take great pride in executing them too. Things like not being allowed for the next few companies in line, or being thrown out of the placement system for a month, or you know, something of the sort.

Yeah, I didn’t want to get reported.

So I had to do what anyone in my position would have had to: convince the company that they didn’t want me. Given the significantly large number of companies that had already rejected me, I figured this would be a fairly simple task, certainly a lot simpler than getting them to accept me.

And so I went to the interview only slightly worried, thinking I had my bases covered and that within a small period of time, I would return successful with a simple “We’ll keep your resume on record if we’re hiring again in the future”. I had prepared well to not get this job. I’d made sure I didn’t put on a suit, not even a tie. Presentability was usually a plus, we couldn’t have that. I made sure my black leather shoes weren’t really black, but a dusty shade of grey. My trousers a little ill-fitting, my shirt not very new and to add that final touch, I carried my resume in a sickly little file, as opposed to a nice folder.

Like I said before, subtlety was everything. It was prudent to come off as a doof, but dangerous to seem like a prick. The trouble with pricks is, they piss people off enough for those people to look deeper. And when they look deeper, of course, there’s always the risk that they’ll discover that the prickiness was just an act. Doofs on the other hand, have that remarkable property of boring the hell out of everyone. There comes a time in any interview with a doof when the interviewer does some serious thinking about what in the world he’s doing there. At this point, nine times out of ten, the interviewer will end the interview and his own suffering quickly and the doof will be out of contention. One the rare occasion, one time out of ten, the interviewer will end the suffering and just give the doof the job. I was playing on that, on the higher odds – nine times out of ten. Which is why no suit was good but no clothes was risky. Dusty grey shoes was a good idea but bright green slippers wasn’t.

Or so I thought.

Things changed quickly when I reached the venue. I looked around me when I got there, curious to see who the aspirants were and if there were any others who were faced with the same strange situation that I was. At first, it was difficult finding anyone I knew. I mean I recognized the faces around me, but couldn’t put names on too many of them. Faces I’d noticed in the peripheries of classrooms and the shadowy corners of laboratories in the previous four years. People who despite being in the same batch, same courses, same hostel even, were completely unknown to me. People who, in short, I’d never bothered to mingle with.

Anyway, after a little while I began to notice the same vein in many of the conversations around me and it began to give me my first shivers. All the guys there, or at least all those I could hear, didn’t want this job! They were all people who had applied blindly to whatever applications were opening up and by the time they realized what they’d gotten into, it was too late to back out (Once that five, six hour window was past, one couldn’t withdraw one’s application to a company either. For the third time, nuts right?).

Like I said, things changed quickly when I got there. I entered thinking I simply had to let any of the far more worthy candidates waltz through and take the job. Within ten minutes, however, I realized I was trying to lose to people who I had a definite edge over for a job that even they didn’t want. The tables had turned quite completely. In the dark corridors of the metallurgy department, I suddenly seemed like the most able, most qualified, most presentable candidate. For all my subtlety, I realized no one was wearing a suit or a tie. Most shirts too, looked older and dirtier than mine. Compared to the others’, even my shoes were examples of diligent polishing. I actually even spotted a couple of guys in green slippers. Hell, even my tardy CPI of 7.2 was among the highest of the lot.

I was doomed.

I knew right then that it would take something spectacular to get out of this one. It was one thing to fudge the group discussion or the interview but when most of the competition also intended to be mute, my guess was the resumes would become a strong deciding factor.

Hence I was doomed.

Drenched in cold sweat, heart pounding, I was a wreck. In the middle of all this, I wish I hadn’t heard this conversation happening a few feet away:

“You know what happened with Lovely Professional University last time right?”

“What?”

“They screwed my wing senior pretty bad.”

“Yeah? How?”

“Well he didn’t really want to join them, so when the Lovely Professional guys asked him at the end of his interview if he’d actually join…..”

“What’d he say?”

“Well he said “no”, of course, quite honestly.”

“Ok, and then…”

“Well they selected him anyway. Just to fuck with him, the spiteful bastards…he wouldn’t join them, so they killed his chances elsewhere as well….”

“Holy….”

“Yeah, screwed him over properly, they did. He lives in Bhatinda now, teaching numbskulls like us, only younger”

“Shit….Bhatinda….”

After hearing this “lovely” story, I quite gave up and resigned myself to the future. Visions of fat, bald, paunchy men who commanded six hundred others like themselves swam through my mind as I waited for the process to begin. Soon we all started moving towards a room where the BPCL people apparently were, about thirty of us in all. Without meaning to be, I was at the head of this group. We got there to find someone, a lady, standing with her back towards us. She was dressed differently from what I would have imagined. Open short grey hair, denim jeans, shorn at the ankles, a sweatshirt and waist pouch, the behind of which was visible; she looked nothing like an interviewer. She turned around when she sensed there were people behind her. She had big glass rimmed spectacles and through the lenses one could see that her eyes were completely out of focus. She stared around for a bit, seemingly unable to fix her eyes on anything. Then with one sweep, she yanked her head into a position pointing straight at me. Her eyes too, suddenly found focus and were now fixated directly at my forehead. She looked distinctly deranged, and dangerous in a way that only a deranged person can be.

Before we could react, she shrieked out in a high pitched yell, “You can’t come here like this, you can’t come here. You can’t come here……..if you come here, then you can’t go.”

Already on edge with the prospect of working for BPCL, her words rang out in that dark corridor like a deep evil portent. It was just that tiny catalyst that was needed to push all of us over the edge.

I’ve seen many scrambles and scuffles in my time but none like this one. Not a moment had passed since she’d uttered her ominous words than we were all already running. Running as fast as we could in that mass of thirty. One on top of the other, scrambling to get away, scuffling to get ahead, pushing, shoving but all the while moving away from her.

We ran for a long while, till we realized we’d probably been spooked by some crazy old lady who’d wandered into the metallurgy department. Or at least that’s what the others felt. To me, the appearance of a crazy old witchlike lady was a sign, a clear sign of the calamity to follow. Not just a sign, an omen. I walked back stoically to the metallurgy building, knowing fully what awaited me and that I could do nothing about it.

Soon the actual BPCL people showed up. They were only about three hours late, which was quite early by PSU standards, I’m sure. The lady who was giving the briefing droned on for almost an hour. I saw the stack of resumes she was carrying, and noticed mine right on top. Of course, sorted according to who they wanted most. But never mind, I’d already come to terms with. It probably made sense just to bow down gracefully.

After telling us about the five hundred different allowances that made up our Rs. 8.5 lakh annual compensation, she started talking about the various safety norms in the oil industry. At some point she told us about a guy who’d met his end at an oil field near Mumbai. Apparently, a great deal of oil managed to spill itself on top of this fellow and then caught fire. In his panic he jumped off the rig and into the water, hoping the water would douse the flames. But of course the oil continued to burn irrespective. Later the coroner reported that the cause of death was drowning and not burning.

For some reason the other candidates in the room thought this was hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing. The BPCL lady looked around a little stunned but continued as best she could. She went on to tell us about how all candidates should meet various fitness criteria etc etc.

“We only hire people above 5’5”, with no history of chronic ailments and if you wear glasses then your power should be 3 at max”

Hold on a second, what was that? Glasses with a power of no more than 3?

I paused for a bit, allowing her to move on to other mundane safety issues. Then I paused some more and wept a little. Then I remembered that this was a moment of glory and that it was my duty to make such moments momentous. I got up, gathered my things, and walked to the front of the room. I interrupted her between sentences and began to make it momentous.

“Err…excuse me…,” I cut in.

“Yes?”

“What did you say about the glasses again?”

“Umm, you shouldn’t be using anything higher than power 3 lenses”

“But I use a 3.25 ….and your form said nothing of the sort and..,” I protested.

“Yeah I know, we’re sorry. Actually the guy who…”

“No but you guys should have mentioned this earlier, I got my hopes up unnecessarily”, I said.

“I’m sorry, the oil industry’s safety norms are something we’re helpless against.”

“So there’s no chance then?” I asked with a completely straight face.

“Afraid not”, she said. She seemed genuinely sorry.

I considered rubbing it in a little further with a “Not even a desk job somewhere, something that doesn’t involve oil safety?” but then decided against it. Asking her that would mean being a prick. And like I said before, being a prick was dangerous, because then she may go to her superiors and ask them if I could, in fact, apply to a desk job somewhere. So I let it pass and walked out a man again.

At some point later, Sud called me to ask what had happened.

“You got out of that BPCL thing right?”

“Yeah man, no biggie.”

“Cool, how’d you land into that kind of trouble in the first place?”

“How else dude, fuckin Reliance…….just fuckin Reliance…”

Looking back, what’s funniest is that for a guy who had no job (and didn’t get one for another sixty days of placements), I was pretty desperate to not get this one. That winter I often imagined coming back to as a recruiter some day. Last Sunday I got that opportunity, just a year after my own placement season. I even interviewed some of the applicants and saw them go through the same trauma that I and so many others have been subject to over the years. Apply today, interview tomorrow. If you make it – drink like a fish, if not – apply again.