I Am Calling You

I just asked my brother to close the drawing room’s door and keep quiet. I showed him some pictures of Infosys’s Mysore’s campus and he started asking me several things relating to how my job there would be. He then asked me if I was not going to do MBA and how I could do it if I were joining Infosys the same time of the year next year. I said I am going to write CAT. He asked me or rather said that I was not studying. I asked him if he was studying for EAMCET. He reminded that CAT was in November and EAMCET the next year. And I asked him to close his mouth. He was playing on his cell phone while talking to me.

Yesterday two of my college friends came to my house after 11 pm. I had my glasses resting on the table when I heard the bell ring. My father was out and others were already getting ready to sleep so I went downstairs to check the door. The two guys had moved back to the gate waiting for me to come. I saw them from a distance. As I had no glasses I stared wondering who could come at such a time even while I knew most of my friends do this. I asked them to come up.

Around 2:45 am I realized the time. They both stayed till 5 am and left as we could hear the Fajar Azaan at the nearby mosque. We had serious talks, naughty times and moments of uncontrolled laughter. But it all had only two premises – Infosys and I cannot directly mention the other thing here. The time went racing as we didn’t care of what was going around. Everybody home was asleep after my father came home at 11:30 pm from a marriage function he had been too. Nobody else went to that function for we had a get together at home – home made chicken and mutton biryani from outside.

The day I got selected in Infosys I hardly had any form of jubilant feeling which I could see in many people there. All I could think was my mother’s happiness and how proud she could feel telling her colleagues about her son’s selection into Infosys. Soon after informing I started getting calls from other people to congratulate me. I kept them telling that I am for doing an MBA and Infosys can’t give me what I want from my life.

The next day at my cousin’s reception party I met more people than I had ever met in my life before. They were greeting me. They were telling me how happy they were for me. They also explained me that this is for the first time somebody could get a job this way in the whole family especially when most of the money here has been pumped using foreign currency. I was happy hearing all that but it was not really what I wanted. One of the two things I wanted was just a few meters away from me yet in reality a million miles far, and the other thing, an MBA degree from a premier business school which had just started giving me sleepless nights, started looking blurred. Possibly, that day things began to change for me. They really changed; with the other thing too.

Getting into and working at Infosys seems too easy now and working for CAT seems the hardest thing. The last mock I wrote went so well that I scored 86 percentile and cleared one cut off out of the three. I say that it went well because there was zero preparation behind it and the section in which I cleared the cut off with three extra marks had always worried me. I am cent percent confident that if I study now, I can crack even the toughest paper presented to me. Who will provide me with the motivation I need now? The other thing has got me dejected.

Yesterday I asked one of my friends to remember something very important whether in doing business or in doing a job – if you are not growing, you are bound to fall. There is no such thing as security. Success never stands on a plateau. If the downfall doesn’t come immediately, it’s just a matter of time before we are struck by it. The only way to fight is the keep growing. That’s the only way.

There was something else too which we spoke. It has been running in my mind for long. I have a cousin sister of mine who lives in Austin, Texas. I had spent many of my childhood days with her and she has been like a teacher to me. I remember her once telling me that she wanted to do Phd. and she likes having that “Dr.” thing attached with her name. She got married when I was in my ninth standard and on the 1^st of this month she started teaching in a school there in Austin. Until now she was a housewife. I am glad I have such a good person in my life and if someday I sit down to write the list of people who have influenced me, I would be including her name in the top few. But I feed sad that she has not done her Phd. till now.

This happens with many girls. At their kindergarten age, like every other person, girls do dream of something big – being very rich or achieving so and so things. They grow with the dream in their heart and seldom do they realize that the destiny they are heading to won’t let them materialize it. They get married in their early twenties and the dream is lost. They have no pain of seeing the dream dying – at least as far as I could understand. This is usually what happens in the society I come from.

I know it’s bad. It’s as bad as stepping on ones ideas. It hurts me – it hurts not because the dream doesn’t come true, it hurts because the will to fulfill it dies. I always see a person by the size of the dream he or she keeps and the commitment being put behind it. It’s a different thing if the dream goes unfulfilled. The making of a dream into a goal is important.

I Don’t have sisters. At least my mother has done what she wanted – she is independent and earns to meet everything she wants and more. Alhamdulillah. And I am also glad that she supports and encourages every person who dreams; just that she laughed when I told her that I wanted to buy an island! Though in general, in my whole family, girls have always been taken equal to boys and have been given equally good education no matter how much money the situation had asked for. My two maternal cousin sisters are going some steps beyond this.

If I had a sister I would have supported every dream she could have ever dreamt. It can be a bigger satisfaction to help others achieve their dreams. I wish I could do more with this idea of letting girls keep their dreams alive even after they get married. I can just write it here. It won’t make much difference. I can discuss it with some people I know and those all who will give their ear to me. But still it won’t make much difference. The tragedy will continue. I still wish I could change that idea. I still wish the other thing I mentioned above wasn’t that million miles away from me. I could have kept the dreams alive even after three years from now.

If I join Infosys I will work with them for at least two years. I would be looking forward to leaving this country at the earliest. I was glad when they asked me to keep my passport ready when I join them next year. But my aim is to do an MBA from a very good institute. I would try to pursue something through the company itself. I have always kept myself at an inclination toward management and that’s where I want myself to be destined to go. I like programming, I like being a technical person skilled in computer languages or working with computers for the computers. But that’s not how I want to see myself. I don’t like being called as a software engineer. I never wanted to work for any IT company. I hardly knew of Infosys until I saw their website on the 17^th of July, the day on which I had my interview. I may work with them, but they can’t take me to my goals. I have fixed check-points to be crossed – they come at 5 years and 10 years from now respectively.

But I am sad that things are not going the way I wanted them to happen. I thank Allah for the support I am getting from my parents and other relatives but still I am not getting what I wanted. When I asked everybody to open my heart and see, they cut through my ribs, took a razor-sharp blade and slashed the hard muscle of my heart, and complained about what they saw. They said there was only blood, and some chambers they couldn’t figure out. So sad they couldn’t understand what ran in that blood. They didn’t see what gave motion to it and what resided in the chambers. I wish they could understand that the other thing resided in my blood stream and it can never be removed from it. Colorless blood has never been found in humans.

Lately I have understood that even if I have a backing of a hundred people, one single person can prevent happiness from reaching me. I wanted to show faith, that I can be the one who can make happiness, but there was nobody to listen. I can’t even go and beg for I have to keep the pride and honor of the family. My aunt told me that I am being played with my emotions. I still don’t know what lies on the other side. The person won’t speak up.

I have always used my blogs liberally to convey messages and I thank all those who read it. I found a new reader too who mentioned about me in her blog a few days back. It feels nice to be talked nice about. None of my friends blog; so I can never read what the people who are known to me can write. Two of my cousins write but they are not personal. I am reading the two blogs of my new reader daily and I could relate myself to what she writes. She was right when she wrote a comment on my blog – even on the other side of our planet, there are people we can relate ourselves to.

I am not aware of the presence of any form of human authority above me. I always like people who can think for themselves and take their own decisions. My parents have always encouraged me and my brother to take decisions for ourselves. We have never been stopped or forced, just guided. We both have always spoken our minds without the fear of being scolded or reduced. We have also been given the right to veto if something was not in favor in our house. I strongly believe that that is how a house can be made into a home. The way my parents can question me, I can ask them anything. They have always made me feel their equal even while respecting the age differences and that rights and duties we are bound to live. We have learnt to enjoy the freedom in discipline. Alhamdulillah.