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 9th, 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 746th 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…
