Landing in the Soup

I have been musing on it quite a bit nowadays. I mean to say, was it all destiny, or was it sheer perseverance or was it desperation? Whatever it was, the sheer nature of various events that took shape in my time in TCS, which has eventually landed me in B-School, is indeed quite intriguing and worth a tale.

I vividly remember with certitude the exact nature of events that transpired on Dec 9^th, 2010, a beautiful cloudy day in Chennai. Little did I imagine that the happenings of those day would lead me to write this piece from the hallowed portals of IIFT. Wait hold on! I am going off the railings. Before I get my nonplussed public to start hurling stones, let me marshall the story quite a bit to give you the idea.

It was just a few days prior to the start of ‘Margazhi’ which is considered to be the most pleasant month in Chennai which is otherwise scorched by the sun for atleast 10 months of the calendar year. Temperatures had to dipped to as low as ‘17’ degree Celsius the previous night, more or less considered akin to freezing point in this part of the country. I woke up shivering around 6:30 AM (an almost laughable thing after having been closeted to almost subzero temperatures during my time in Delhi), brushed up, bathed, and had a spot of breakfast. After muttering a silent prayer, and touching the feet of my grandmother and parents, got into my car, bracing up myself for the big day. The drive to my college was exactly 24 Kms by the odometer and in my excitement I stepped on the gas a bit too much, in the course nearly running over a hen or two. It was the day of my TCS Campus placement interview, in Velammal Engineering College, my alma mater.

The formula to crack the campus recruitment process of TCS is pretty much straightforward. You subscribe to an aptitude Test conducted by one of those recruitment agencies (which I respectfully choose not to defame here), study a few numerical problems handed down over years, without any change even in the values and numbers, write the test (during the course of which I lost my complete faith in the sanctity of the process) and qualify for the interview. The above proceedings having completed successfully the previous day, I got ready for the battle, the real mettle had to be proved to a techie/HR who would sit across the table to evaluate whether we had the requisite skills to reel out code like the dickens and appease clients. After revising the usual 3 standard definitions of Polymorphism, Encapsulation and Inheritance for perhaps the 746^th time, I entered the interview room around 11:30 in the morning.

There were 2 people seated across the table. One was a typical rotund HR chap who I figured out in an instant by merely looking at the way he said "Please take your seat" in an accent that smelled of artificiality from the word ‘go’. I took my seat rather sheepishly as the HR requested for sometime to canvass my resume. The more I heard the HR speak a pathetic blend of American and British English the more it was clear that the man was suffering from a serious problem of affectation. Trying to put on an accent especially an American one is like walking on a double edged sword. Either years of practice helps you pull it off seamlessly or else you make a complete fool of yourself. The HR chap having firmly established himself to be as a member of the latter species of fake accented chaps, finished frisking my resume and proceeded to place the customary ‘So tell me about yourself’ gag. Cliched though it may seem, the advantage of such questions is that you come armed to the teeth with equally cliched answers or to be more precise were we to use B-School jargons it would be GAS or GLOBE. The HR was kind enough to offer me a couple of biscuits. Interview etiquette had taught me that whenever a biscuit or toffee was offered, the hesitant acceptance somewhere in the middle way between a grab and an outright refusal always does the trick. A couple more of rhetorical questions followed and I seemed to be making decent progress.

However, despite the smooth sailing, well into 5 minutes of my tete-a-tete with the HR, there was undoubtedly a growing tetchiness and an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was as if the sword of Damocles was hanging over my head. This, I attribute to the fact that, all along the eyes of the second specimen of the panel were rivetted on me and it was drinking in all that I was saying. I presumed that it was desperately trying to establish communication.

I gave a cursory look at the specimen. It was a bespectacled female bird, aged about 35 and one look at her told me that if ever there was a human definition of a 'techie', this techie was that techie. She looked one of those geeky birds who had done nothing in the last 15 years other than incessantly type out code and talk about servers, delivery and clients. My attention having been diverted successfully, the HR paused, and at this time, the techie found the perfect opportunity to gate crash into the interview. She evidently had enough of generic talk and decided to get down to brass tacks.

The first arrow came sizzling by – "So can you tell me the difference between C & C++ ? " I mustered all my knowledge on programming and gave out a feeble reply. The techie wasn’t entirely impressed but I was certainly righter than wronger. She then gave a paper and asked me to write a piece of code containing a nested If Else loop. Despite knowing I was in the soup, I put on a brave front and tried my best to come out with a brilliant piece of programming. The techie looked at the paper and gave a look lacklustre to the drop. It seemed almost blasphemous that a guy aspiring to work for TCS could not write something as simple and plain as a Nested If else loop. Having tied the game 1-1, the techie dished out an intimidating glare. I was beginning to resign to my fate. I knew one more question anything outside the 3 definitions mentioned somewhere above I had prepared for, I was doomed.

This is when my guardian angel woke from its slumber. The techie barked "What is Inheritance"? A sudden light shone through the room as these words trickled like music into my ears. A strange calm descended over me. I finished the biscuit, cleared my throat triumphantly and the rest is history.

To be continued…

Cracking the Curious Case of the Bharadwajs

The smile broadens, the eyebrow twitches, the pink lips unfurl themselves to reveal the sparkling teeth which heaps lustre in plentiful measures on an already fair complexioned face which glistens in the sunshine. An approving nod further complements her overall demeanour and the camaraderie between her and her fellow conversant, a young gentleman clean shaven and equally fair complexioned, is at its best. However the latter senses that an uneasy calm is about to descend in the air. His face slowly turns a shade pale and his heart rate is accelerating suddenly like the tampered meter of an old fashioned Indian Taxi. His overall disposition is that of a man who is tied to a ticking time bomb. He had been expecting this all along, since the moment he had introduced himself to this beautiful girl. The dreaded question which inexplicably never fails to throw up in many a similar tete-a-tete has arrived. And Voila it pops up! “So where are you from?” and according to the young man, the bonhomie is suddenly jeopardized and this young lady has once more set hell’s foundations quivering.

To such a question, experience has taught me to answer in different ways. Had the question been asked by an old septuagenarian gentleman with 3 broad parallel stripes of white ash pasted over his forehead, seated over a cup of Mylapore Filter Coffee, I would have without hesitation answered with flowing pride that “I am from Chennai” and had I been in a mood to chew the fat, probably would have gone the extra mile to clarify that though my parents hail from Tirunelveli and Thanjavur in South Tamilnadu respectively, my birth and entire upbringing has happened in the city of Chennai or Madras lying in the deep south of South India’s Coromandel Coastline. But unfortunately as fate would have it, for perhaps the 139^th time in the past 1 year this question had been directed to me by a member of the Aryan race - a North Indian! Now when I say North Indian generally he/she could be a professor/classmate/batchmate/colleague/project mentor in the company where I did my summer internship bang in the middle of my MBA.  The flowchart in my mind with respect to the immediate course of action to be followed would now work in the form of an If/else Loop in a Java Program, the knowledge of which had perhaps been the only meaningful contribution my former employer (or rather was it?), one of the top software outsourcing firms in India, had imparted to me in my 3 year stint prior to MBA and it goes like this.

Disclaimer: All techies and computer geeks if offended please refrain from hurling stones and pardon me for any syntactical errors in the following piece of code. Despite 3 years of working on it I have miserably failed to perfect the art of coding but frankly I am quite unashamed to admit that I am abysmally pathetic at it. That’s possibly the primary perhaps the only reason why I am doing an MBA!

var x = questionaskedfrom?

if((x==batchmate IN MBA || x==classmate in MBA|| x==acquaintance from MBA || x==Professor) && (x==North Indian))

{

Answer the bloody question truthfully. No other go and deal with your fate L

}

else if (x==project mentor || x==summer intern from another college || x==someone who does not know you are doing MBA from IIFT Delhi)

{

Try answering the question skillfully as “I am from IIFT Delhi” and hope no further questions are asked

}

else

{

Answer with true Tamilian pride that you are from Chennai

}

Now the catch lies in the fact that had the question fallen in the ‘Else if’ block, the next question proceeding from my compatriot’s lips would invariably be corrected and duly presented in its new form as “I mean BASICALLY where are you from?” and now it goes back to the first ‘If’ Block and I have no option but to deal with it. On such occasions I am almost tempted to lie that I hail from some part of the vast Hindi Heartland or to be on the safer side that I originate from the hustle and bustle of the Mumbai metropolitan lest my Hindi speaking skills be put to test almost immediately, and thus put all doubts to rest once and for all, more from an accent perspective rather than a grammatical one. But my better self pokes me and so rightly to say “Nikhil you gotta be more strong! Take pride in your roots and answer the question truthfully.” I hesitantly answer that I hail from Chennai totally aware that I am yet again going to open up a Pandora’s Box with questions shooting out from it on all sides! And cutting a long story short this precisely is my response to the girl’s query.

The reception of the news that her conversant is a ‘Madrasi’ is one of complete astonishment, but this again is completely as expected by the blueprint, for it has been the same reaction on atleast 90% of the previous 138 times. She stands bewildered and after regaining composure from her initial shock lets loose the first bullet from Pandora’s gun as I shall now slightly modify the ancient phrase gifted by Greek Mythology.

“But your name is Nikhil Bharadwaj right??? “

“Yes” I answer keeping it as crisp as humanly possible all along increasingly aware that my blood pressure has now shot upto a level that might arouse the professional interests of any qualified medical practitioner. I am in a position to squeeze every penny’s worth out of a working sphygmomanometer.

The answer further compounds her shock, but she fires the next round of ammunition.

“But Bharadwaj is a North Indian name. How come you hail from Chennai?” she quips with a puzzled look. It looks as if, atleast to me that, she is plainly stunned that anybody hailing from anywhere South of the Vindhyas could possibly be blessed with Bharadwaj as a surname.

Before I can retaliate she suddenly brightens up and says “Ah Maybe you are a North Indian and your forefathers settled in Chennai several decades back”. She does not exactly shriek ‘Eureka!’ but the look on her dial is not unlike the look Archimedes might have sported as he jubilantly sprang from the bathtub on the day he discovered the Principle of Fluid Buoyancy.

I, quite to her disappointment have to intervene and give her the bad news again.

“Bharadwaj is the name of a Gotra. People all over the country have many common surnames and Bharadwaj is one of them. ”

‘‘So you speak Tamil at home?’’

I reluctantly but forcibly hammer the final nail in her coffin of queries and reply that yes indeed Tamil is my mother tongue and not Hindi, I emphasize. Before she can utter again, I now being the subject matter expert, further endeavour to throw more light on the topic and say “For example Sharma is also a common surname. In fact Rohit Sharma the Indian cricketer is a Telugu”.

The answer seems to dispel most of her doubts and she begins to wonder if this is a plausible explanation to all her questions.

Pondering over it, finally she concedes defeat and says "You know you look very much like a North Indian. I had a feeling that you possibly come from Delhi or Chandigarh."

Till today whenever someone says something on those lines, I have not been able to venture any reply let alone a witty one, but instead manage only a feeble smile.

And then we either move onto the process of exploring other pleasantries to be exchanged or if there is a lack of time, we simply smile at each other and end it up with a "Chalo. See you then."

I walk away wondering how I can handle meeting number 140 in a better way.

But having been quite blown away by her breathtaking beauty, a part of me wants to meet her soon again and start chatting away in Hindi, partly because I hope to befriend her but more importantly to show her that there is something more North Indian about me.