Oasis to Mirage - Ideas loaned from my wife!!

I would like to express my transition from real freedom to assumed freedom. I am here talking about my transition from my college to the booming IT industry. I would like to pour my experience of the so called glamorous and fun filled IT industry.

We used to wander those spacious heat filled open grounds and closed class rooms with just 50 rupees in pocket and plan the whole week’s budget with that. But now we wander along the well cleaned, fully air-conditioned corridors with about five to six credit cards in our pocket thinking where to swipe the cards with credit cards eagerly waiting to eat next month’s salary. I can’t believe that it was just few years before that the 50 rupees seemed to be thousands, but now, thousand seems to be nothing.

College canteen, Tea shops were the favorite hot spots where we spent hours together, having a hearty chat with our buddies forgetting the whole world. But now Cafe coffee Day, Quickies, Baristas have taken those places. The money of approx 3 rupess we had spent for coffee has now gone up to 50 rupees.

Those precious days where we used to laugh for nothing, while chatting or while playing or even when you fail in your paper because you have got 30 marks for an empty paper, rarely comes into picture in our so called serious corporate world

Hatred and Ego were the words you haven’t heard in those days. You smash or hit your friend for some reason and the next moment you walk along him with hands on his shoulders. But now you don’t like the guy sitting beside you because he’s getting a salary 10k greater that you or he’s always being appreciated by your PM. True friends are hardly found here!!

Those days, should somebody speak badly about your college, you can find your blood boiling inside even though you don’t like your principal. But here loyalty is the lost word; whenever someone is talking badly about your company you join them to criticize your own company. You join the company with the resignation day in the mind because you’re looking much more for you than you deserve , Don’t mind – Along with us, Tom, Dick & Harry are also planning for the same!!

You have seen the late nights only on the eve of the exam, where you rely on your friend to wake him/ her at night 1 or 2. And how can we forget those last minute tensions in exam, you remember that only just before entering the exam you find that you have forgotten to revise an important question that your friend suggested that it will surely appear on this exam. You rush back and flip those pages with tension.

But today you work at least 2 days a week till 1 or 2 in the night to deliver something to your unknown client who is at US or UK. You are aimlessly typing at the useless word document that your supervisor asked you to finish with his tailor made smile. Loads of tension with calls from home, with your eye lids eager to kiss each other and you promise them to allow it a little later, cursing Bill Gates for inventing MSWord.

We are all in the same desert where I have realized that we are moving from the warmth ness of the Oasis to chase a mirage. A mirage that promises a lot of thing, but still it’s just a mirage. When I turn back I can find thousands chasing that mirage with a ID card around their neck. I wish all the best for them.