The Harvard Resume

It’s been long accepted that it’s a fierce race out there, and the smart thing to do is prepare oneself to brace it well. Preparation can, of course, begin only once the destination has been decided. And it’s never too early to decide.

There are kids today, who have decided they want to take the JEE right in class eight, and what follows this clarity in vision is five years of dedicated single minded working towards the set goal. And then the kid fulfils his goal and finally enters the hallowed gates of these prestigious institutions, left quite without a goal for some time, having achieved the single objective he had. However, you must always have a goal as only then can you prepare and you must always prepare. So it isn’t long before our kid has found yet another goal. The clarity in thought is almost enviable. He knows what he wants, he is in a place where there’s no dearth of success stories to look to to and emulate  and he will soon have figured the best way to get there, and then it’s just a matter of doing exactly the right things at exactly the right times for the next four years. The path is set. A tad too set I think.

I have always been envious of this kind of clarity in thought and aim, and maybe this is just a case of sour grapes, but I have begun to sincerely believe that our generation has gotten trapped in a CV making rat race. For everything you want to be there’s a Harvard Resume, the perfect profile. And there’s a race out there to get as close to this Harvard Resume as one can. So, eventually one’s objective, the destination one is working so hard towards is but a Master Resume.

And there’ll be plenty who may see no reason to change this, but I think it’s rather ironical that resumes which are supposed to reflect upon an individual’s personality have now begun to dictate it. 

The August post

Honestly, I’ve started this post (as the title suggests) just because I’ve had a post every month for the last three and I’d like that to continue for whatever it’s worth and because I’ve spent the last hour trying to figure where to study from, for the six subjects I have, for the impending mid sems and I think I deserve a break.

If I had to describe the time since the last post, it’s been busy. I’ve completed my internship, come back to R, gone back home for a week and back to R again. There’s so much happening, but if you ask me pin point exactly what, I don’t think I’d know. Yet as I try to write this post, thoughts seem to be flowing freely.

Everyone around is busy doing what they can to ensure they can do what they wish to do once they pass out of here in a year’s time. I still have a year to go for all that, but I can’t help wonder what is it that I want to be preparing for. I am rather disappointed that even after three years of college education I am almost as confused about what I want to do for a career as I had been when I first came to R. What I regret is not that I don’t like what I came here to do – Chemical engineering, but that I haven’t yet figured what I do. No doubt I can see more avenues now, and understand better what they mean but the lack of clarity is somewhat disturbing.

But a line of thought I am growing to believe is that there is not necessarily something like figuring what you want to do forever, that’s going to keep changing. You just got to do what you like at present and move on to something else when you feel the need to. 

Sometimes

Sometimes I really wonder from where I acquired notions that I’ve held on to for long. They’ve just been there for all time, and then one day it seems ridiculous you ever believed such a thing. Oh well. 

The Intern - 1

I know, the assumption that there will follow more posts about the internship, inherent in the title, is somewhat premature and also optimistic given my previous record but then what’s life without hope eh?

Knowing that my summer would be spent interning at ITC almost 8 months in advance, I had had my share of opinions and advices on what to expect and what not. It was going to 2 months of working your ass off, strict deadlines and tough deliverables. And all this in some random small town called Guntur in the middle of an alien state speaking an alien language. I was scared.  

A month into the internship I can safely say, most of what I’d heard was true. The working hours are long, deliverables are clear and deadlines are meant to be kept. And Guntur is a small town. (Bigger than Roorkee though, if that counts. It has a theatre that is much better than Neelam talkies in all fairness! ) And a lot of people around me speak nothing but Telegu.

What’s surprising though is that I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would. In fact I like it here. The work is fun, and people are helpful. I am doing a project, about which I didn’t have the remotest idea when I received my project brief two months back, but I am finding it pretty much very interesting now. And it’s been a roller coaster ride getting wherever I have.

And while at it, I’ve made some progress with the language, learning crucial statements like ‘I want coffee/tea/food’, gotten used to being served 1 weeks rice in 1 serving, travelled to quite a few places, started hating the transitions from one place to another less, brushed up my skills in making Powerpoint presentations, and realized what an idiot I was to have eaten Biryani without Raita for the last 21 years! 

The summer of 2012

The summer of 2012 is anything but over, in fact it has just about started, I know. But I’ve seen enough of it to know it’s going to be an experience I am not going to forget.

I think I am going to try and be regular here, at least for the next one and a half months. Not for anything else but so I have more than just a fleeting memory of what I did in these two months.

What remains to be seen though is whether I’d want to remember it or not.

But talking about things that have happened so far this summer, I’ve fallen in love with Instagram at first sight, finally learnt to appreciate the benefits of owning a smart phone, have a new found respect for Google maps, found myself in the middle of nowhere, figuratively and literally, and learnt bits of an alien language. 

I had to have a Women's day post

I really don’t know how or why Women’s day began to be celebrated. Today it’s mostly a day to talk either about how women today have come of age or about how they haven’t yet, and needless to say both sides find enough illustrations to prove their point effortlessly. Personally, I think that’s a rather pointless debate. We are talking about roughly one half of the entire world population. It’s ridiculous to put it all under one blanket. Each has her own definition of progress and happiness and shouldn’t be measured against a set standard.

To me Women’s day is about celebrating the amazing women we know and for me, that most amazing woman is my mom. How she manages to do everything she does and as effortlessly and beautifully is something I can never fathom.

It's a privilege being your duaghter, Aai. Love you! 

That thing called Media

Call me paranoid, but I really don’t know how much of what I read to trust these days.

For one, there was this game ‘Chinese whispers’ that I played as a kid. You whisper a sentence into the next person’s ears and see what becomes of it when it reaches the last person. No doubt, a very amusing way to pass time when I was a kid, but I often wonder if the same thing happens with news.

But anyway, if we assume that these guys have gotten their facts right, the media, something that was supposed to be just a tool for communication, has become way too powerful for that. It has the power to decide what we know and what we don’t. It has the power to decide how we feel about a particular issue. And it also often has the power to decide whether we feel anything at all about that issue or not.

This just makes me wonder whether the media has indeed become a powerful manipulator and I am but a stupid idiot (I know one of the words is redundant, but that’s how stupid I feel) who is walking into a carefully set trap.