Trials and Tribulations

This is a story that I really don’t know how to begin. Not because I don’t know how to tell it, but because I don’t know what would be a good place to bring you into it. It is the story of the past one year of my life. A story that completely justifies the title above.

The very day I set off from India for studying in the USA, I had made one decision - that I will come back. I have lived here now for 4 years and never once till now have I felt my resolve shake. Not because I found this country bad, but because I had found my own country to be very good. And this year, I had decided to go back. What spurred this decision? I’d say it was a combination of factors, but more than anything else, I realized that I simply had to draw the line somewhere. There was never going to be an auspicious time for it unless I decided to just do it.

I needed security in my career before moving to India, and I needed that in the form of a solid job or fulfill my ambition of admission into a leading business school in India. And thus began my lone and exhausting journey.

Around mid-July I took a date for my GMAT. With just one month to prepare, I knew I was pushing it, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to apply to Indian School of Business (ISB) and their deadline was in August. Once again, I was back to studying. After an 8 am to 4 pm office work, I rushed back home every day to study for the GMAT. It needed a lot of patience and a different kind of understanding. Having done a very technological study and work for 7 years, the study for GMAT took some time before I gathered some traction. My verbal skills were falling short. Critical Reasoning and Sentence Correction were totally not up to the mark. And I knew that I could not afford to take second chances. Through some conscious out-of-the-box thinking and many 4 hour long practice tests, I improved, until my final GMAT where I scored 760 on 800.

The first step was a solid and good one.

Then began two phases simultaneously. My application to ISB had a deadline of mid-August. But also, I had to be mature enough to understand that I must do everything I can to apply for jobs in India too, just in case….

The one good thing about ISB’s application was that it was completely online. But this application was similar to those for the best business schools in the world. Along with the usual academic and professional record information, this application contained three essays and two recommendations from my managers in my office. I sincerely thank my manager that he understood me and agreed to write me a recommendation. But the most arduous part of the application was the three essays.

Because there were fewer essays, and my work experience was only just two years, I knew that these essays were the only remaining points of distinction between me and other applicants. And the most crucial essay was: “Million dollars or the knighthood: what will you choose and why?” This essay topic was so extra-ordinary and so multi-dimensional that I knew right away that this was the fulcrum of my application.

I’ve lost count of how many iterations I made of these essays. My friends Samir and Upen and my jiju Nilesh were the only ones who helped me in this most crucial juncture. As I worked on that essay I described above, I realized just how deep the meaning of the topic ran. Each word in that title had been very carefully chosen. And my answer too was going to be scrutinized and weighed equally carefully. Each day I changed my answer a little and polished it a little till my answers satisfied my eye. I felt so distant from those people around me who used their weekends for fun and joy while I worked on my application.

But this was not the whole picture. I was using every evening I had on every weekday to apply to jobs in India. I realized with some amount of rude shock that despite my Master’s education and a good two year work experience, the openings I had in India were both slim and low paying. I was fully prepared for a drastically low salary as compared to my present one in the US, but what I did not know was that I would get paid exactly what a person with a Bachelor’s degree and one year work experience gets paid in a software company in India. I applied and I applied… painstakingly, on website after website… through friends, contacts, relatives, job agents and acquaintances. But although everyone told me that I would get an interview call, not one materialized. I do not wish at all to say that these people weren’t helpful. They all agreeing to help me in itself was a very great thing for me. But for three whole months of August, September and October, I kept applying to these jobs relentlessly. Touching base with contacts, emailing the job agents, calling career agencies, searching for open positions – I tried all paths. But as each day went by, my hope dwindled down.

I don’t know if any of you have truly felt helpless in life. But as November approached, my confidence was really shaken and desperation mingled with gloom settled into my mind. I had nobody around me here whom I felt comfortable confiding this in. But I knew that I could not return back home jobless and with a full question mark about my career prospects. When at such times one’s hope and optimism begins to fail, one looks to have someone who can talk to you and really and truly understand and feel you.

Then came the hope I was searching for. ISB got back to me that they wished to interview me. I had a month to prepare myself. Once again, it was a struggle I fought alone. Through endless searches and many documents, I created a long list of probable interview questions. Online discussion forums, talks with my jiju about interview questions, sitting hours at end every single day and every weekend till my head began aching with thoughts and staring at the computer screen – this was one tiring month for me. Simultaneously, I was finally interviewing with one company in India for a job and the preparation for that was totally different because it was all case-study oriented. I was working four days a week on my job interviews and the other three days preparing for my ISB interview.

Post-interview, it was a long and seemingly never ending wait. How the interview went is yet another tale, but it had not given me any clear signs. For 24 days I waited. Each day I woke up with a queasy feeling. My job interview hadn’t gone well in the third round. It was all down to the ISB result.

The wait really did seem eternal. As the days went by, I lost interest in most things. The pressure was getting to me. I remember walking out of my company holiday party because I couldn’t feel happy. I remember waking up abruptly at 3 in the morning night after night with a bad dream. I remember those nights when I lay in my bed awake yet not feeling anything. Oh I remember…

I so wanted to talk to someone. Speak my heart, tell my fears and hear words that would bring me courage. But there I lay. Pushing myself every day to live my life and do my job. 24 days and 24 nights I waited thus – alone and apprehensive.

And then I got the news that I had passed and had been offered admission into ISB. There are very few moments in a person’s life that are truly “make or break”, and this was mine. For the first time, I realized the meaning of the expression “tears of joy”. The pride and satisfaction I felt telling the result to my ma and baba is indescribable.

I was going to go back…….Go back home. :)

Shadowfax

I read it once somewhere in some forwarded email:

“To know the meaning of miracle, ask someone who’s been saved by a hair’s breadth”

Having never had the chance to measure a hair’s breadth in that sense, I only could understand that sentence at a theoretical level. A Monday in November this year changed all that.

I drive a Toyota Camry all white model which I completely love. It’s the first car I ever owned myself and I call it my “Shadowfax”(a reference from the book Lord of the Rings where the king of horses is named Shadowfax). J I know it sounds crazy, but I really do believe that “it’s the car that chooses the driver”, and I’ve shared an amazing chemistry with mine. It’s like since the time I’ve owned it, I’ve gradually developed a bond with it so that it now responds to my slightest touch and I know its sounds and senses. So when I moved some 10 miles away from my office, I picked out a small, narrow inner country road that takes me from my house in Reston to my office in McLean, Virginia in exactly 25 minutes regardless of the hour of the day. Shadowfax took to this road like a fish to water. I’m sure that I would not be able to drive on that road as comfortably on anybody else’s car.

The reason I say this is because this road is easily one of the challenging ones I’ve driven on in my life. I decided to take this road only because the main highway is blocked badly in the morning rush hour. It’s a road that passes through forests so dense that the cell phone network goes away although it is just a few miles from the nearest town. It has a couple of streams along the way where deer, ducks and swans can be seen everyday. Tracts of farm land touch this road where a couple of houses breed horses. And all throughout, the road has so many sharp twists, turns and steep slopes that if I go at 10 miles over the speed limit, it makes u feel like you are sitting in a rollercoaster at a theme park. This road is in short everything that a “morning commute” is not. And I was very happy to have found a road that leaves me feeling fresh and alert as I reach the office rather than sitting in bumper to bumper crawling traffic snake-lines inhaling emission fumes.

And I can tell you that Shadowfax was extremely adept at navigating those sharp turns and slopes. Even with the speed limit being 25 miles an hour, I’ve driven on those slopes and turns at around 45 mph and times even at 50 miles an hour. And never once did I feel the car showing a lack of confidence in itself.

That Monday morning too, I was driving down that same road. I was quite late for my office and was trying to make up by driving a few miles above speed limit. I was listening to my favorite CD and wasn’t going too fast at all. When something totally unexpected happens, in retrospect, sometimes people do feel that they had some kind of an extrasensory perception or a premonition before the event which they ignored at that time. I admit now, that I did have something of that sort, but I attributed it to my being late for work or something.

At one spot on this drive, the road turns very sharply (about 90 degrees) to the left and also slopes downward with about a 45 degree gradient at the same time. The road was wet that morning with last night’s rain and the morning’s heavy dew. As I completed half the turn, I felt Shadowfax shaking. The next moment, he slipped – all four tires losing traction. The steering wheel twisted out of control and I saw myself being dragged into oncoming traffic head-on. There was no lane divider in the way and the car was careening out of control to the left.

Let me tell you that at such times, there are two things that happen. First, oddly enough, your mind goes blank – not blank as in thoughtless, but blank as in there’s no sense of any tension, no chain of thought or any of it. It comes down to its very primary and core level – the survival instinct. Secondly, something queer goes on between your mind and body and you get an odd sense that things are going at a slow pace. It’s like you are watching things happen in a slow motion film replay to see what went wrong! May be it’s the excess adrenaline in our system at such times that makes our brain extra fast, but I remember now that I could see things and process them as they happened.

The car was being drawn to the left – I could see some sort of a space to my right – the car turned left down that slope with amazing speed – I rammed the wheel to the right without any particular plan but just to get the car in that space I could see – that space turned out to be the driveway of a house – the driveway was made with gravel – the car further lost traction in that – something in the gravel burst my left front tire – the car further lost balance as the wheel hit the ground– it hit a upward slope in mud – it crashed through the fence and I saw a tree in the front – the car hit the tree full head-on and the tree cracked and fell – I put my left hand against my face as the windshield cracked and a loud THUMP! And crunch of metal against wood as the hood caved in and the juggernaut of my car stopped abruptly…

I remember shaking – shaking a lot – as I got out of the car. The door seemed broken by impact and I had to shove it really hard to open it. As I got out, I could hear a hissing noise and looked back to see my rear left tire fast loosing air. The front had fully caved in and the metal was sticking out at a weird angle. I held on to the car for a couple of minutes to stop myself shaking.

And then just as suddenly as the mind had gone blank, surrounding sounds and thoughts rushed in as if someone had opened a plug somewhere. I saw the owners of that house – an old man and his wife rushing out to see what had happened. I realized I was safe and unhurt. I also realized that I had just either lost Shadowfax or incurred a huge expense. I remembered I had a meeting at work which I was not going to be able to make it to. I had to call 911 to get the police here. Will the insurance cover this, how will I reach work, will the owners make a police case, I take out the phone in my pocket and dial 911, just then the old man asking me –

“Are you hurt?”

“No I don’t think I am, just shaking… but I think my car’s a goner…”

“Don’t worry son, as long as you are safe…”

“911 emergency response… can you tell me your name and emergency Sir?”

“Yes, I just had an accident in my car – I hit a tree…”

“Are you alright Sir? Is anybody hurt?”

“No nobody’s hurt.”

“The police are a few minutes away Sir, please wait there.”

And then suddenly things were sort of happening in fast forward. Before even my shaking had subsided, I heard police sirens and Fire and Rescue truck horns in the distance. Two police cars stopped along with the ambulance and fire and rescue truck. The officer walked up to me and again asked if I was hurt or needed medical attention, the fire and rescue was inspecting the vehicle and had declared that it was not fit to be driven to the garage. One police was taking down my details and license while the other was calling the tow truck company. Before long, the fire truck departed and the policemen left too. The tow truck had come and was hauling the car on to it.

The whole incident from the moment my car skid to the moment I saw its battered form hauled away had taken probably not more than an hour and the actual accident not more than 20 seconds. But it was one of those events that you remember not for their length but for their depth. It was my closest brush with something that had all the markings of going horribly wrong. What was remarkable was that of all the things that could have gone wrong, none actually did. On coming cars, people on the street, garden walls, other cars in front and back… even the slightest change in any of those parameters could have scripted a totally different story. It was certainly an event that makes you wonder the intercession of a divine force on your behalf.

As I stood there in the cold watching my car being hauled away and waiting for my office colleague to pick me up, I chatted with the old man about the accident and I told him how close a call I had today. One thing he said to me then with an ancient smile on his face has stayed with me still. He said “Don’t worry son, when you live long enough, you see these things happen.”

Was this a miracle? Well, “C’est la vie”.