Tuesday, November 18, 2008
The Otherside
Some mornings are bound to be gloomy..
You get up, browse through the newspaper and the first thing you notice is that a major finance company just laid off 50 k employees! You are all wtf’s, as it suddenly strikes you “Wasn't this company coming for recruitment??"
Moving on with the morning, I went to the bog, while brushing, remembered the conversation I had with a senior the other day (on how a top financial firm goes about laying off its employees, in Bangalore):
Senior: It's not good dude!
Me: How?
Senior: Well, the manager comes to your desk, and asks you for a coffee. You surely go along with the manager. You come back realize that your system has been locked, and its password has been reset. Then, to explain things, your manager takes you out for a drive, which ends up exactly at your residence, with you being told “Get down and move on dear, best of luck!"
Me: Shit!
Though it’s not always that such thoughts come to my mind, but with a little less than two weeks before the placement session begins, it seems natural.
As if the fate had it this morning, I went down to the mess hall, only to find a branch councilor, disclosing that another recruiter has bumped placements this year. And he wisely advises "Listen machcha, it is worrosssttt max this time. Put fight for whatever companies that are coming. By the way, how did you write CAT?"
"CAT?" sounded like a perfect nail to the coffin-box, because I didn't write CAT on account of my application getting rejected. Inevitably, my appetite for the breakfast broke loose then and there itself, and I tried to cheer up myself and figure out other options.
Returning back to my room, feeling like not doing anything, I again picked up the newspaper.
As anticipated, it was flooded with articles on financial meltdown, layoffs, and market recessions. To add to the fury, even talks in the wing and peer groups eventually converge to the same theme.
Its obvious that the placements this time don’t guarantee to be a spectacle , but its just a matter of days and I'll be through with it, again on the other side . Till then, its business as usual. The only positives I can sense from here are that I'll still be from the golden jubilee batch of IITM, after all ours was the last batch to enter IIT's clearing screening and mains both, and the only passing out batch ever to face such a recession.