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…