My first job came pretty easily to me. Managed not to break an egg while dropping it from the first floor. Said that Jenson Button was my next favorite driver after Michael Schumacher and drew a few relative permeability curves. Two days later I had a job. I still had one whole semester to go before I graduated.
As the Chinese say:
‘You’re lucky that the Yin has come to pass
Coz now the Yang will come and kick your ass’.
They don’t really say that but then again if they did I wouldn’t understand it.
But it did. And it all started when that senator from Illinois walked into the White house. In all fairness, it started a while back when I signed the admission acceptance from UT and quit my job. But all this detail is chicken and egg. Everything gets scrambled eventually. So this person became the 44th president of USA and started twisting the arm of the companies. The basic premise was – ‘ If I see you hiring non-Americans, I’ll take away your tax break so fast that you’ll think that time-space has been warped’.
And so no organization was foolish enough not to heed to this and started checking your passport before hiring. At this point even developing an accent didn’t help either. I don’t blame the companies. Tax break is such a lucrative thing that it can make Aston Martin develop a hybrid that looks like a Pokémon. And we are talking about millions here so with passing time the resumes started getting rejected just coz I hadn’t seen McDonalds until I was 15 years old.
So I was about to graduate out of grad-school in about a month time and the metaphorical tunnel was pretty dark. Internship result hit a brick wall. Applications kept getting rejected to the point that I thought that I could write ‘To be able to find the end of a rainbow’ as the objective in my resume, as I believed that one read it anyways. A month went by and on the fateful day of my graduation, God brought the dangling carrot a bit too close and I took a bite. I got a job offer. Now that was a double whammy! I walk tonight wearing the black and burnt orange robe and now I have a bearing on my future. What could be a better timing! 3 hours later I was walking out of the Frank Erwin Center with the tassel on the right side. I had gotten in and out of UT, Austin successfully.
Incidentally at this very moment my kryptonite was taking shape. In 1757 the British had fucked the Indians. This time they did it to a single person. BP drilled a well that popped like a champagne bottle and the contents spewed all over the Gulf of Mexico. The worst oil spill in the US history was just starting. And the POTUS threw the spanner into the gears again. Ban oil drilling for 6 months. Remember how there were no flights in the air for half a year after 9/11. No? Exactly. Because it never happened. By gross extrapolation the muck-up of one company was used to cripple the entire oil and gas sector. Honestly I didn’t care that the pristine white sand beaches of Alabama and Florida were affected. I lost the job offer that I had. With no drilling happening, the industry was like a neo-natal ward in an impotent world. Nothing to do.
So I was back to looking up websites and applying. I began to like living in this state of suspense, where I wake up every morning to check my email and see if I have any more rejections. No news was good news at this point. I was living with a couple of my friends now and the constant company helped dilute the despair a bit. The high point in my day was biking along the 10-mile Lake Austin trail. The water, wind, gravel and the spandex-girls helped me put my mind at ease. Sitting beside the water, listening to Keane, I spend hours reading. Should I be liking this lifestyle? It was a conundrum. Here I was living in Austin, one of the most beautiful cities of US, not having to worry about a thing in the world. No coursework, no logs to pore over, no excel spreadsheets to look at, no meeting to report to and still I was wishing to move to Houston, the city which can only be described as the land of four seasons- almost summer, summer, still summer and Christmas. But I don’t really care about all that right now. All I want is to get a job, put my masters degree to good use and start saving up for a M3.
The best laid plans of mice and men often do go astray but all I’ am asking for is that Mr Obama stop being such a hard nosed democrat who thinks that all of his actions will be immortalized in the history books. When gas hits 10$/gal even your presidential entourage will have to stop for a refuel. And if you ever read New York times, listen to Thomas Friedman for once. An advanced degree should come with a green-card coz all I want is to make a life for myself, and a good one at that and it does not help when a recruiter tells you marry an American.
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