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The Butterfly Diaries 08 - The Migration Mistake

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The series of events that had started at a 5-star hotel was coming to an end at a railway station. Six of us stood in front of the train. It had a bit of déjà vu for me and my Malayali friend – once again a bachelor home being split right across the middle. Ready to board the train with me was our fourth roommate. Unlike me, he was excited about the move. Meanwhile another scene was being enacted right next to us. A girl from our batch had come to send off Mr. Zest. She had successfully warded off the attempt to separate her from him during the Pune transfers. But not this time. Her eyes brimming with tears, she flung her arms around him as he got ready to board the train. The three of us stood in a silent huddle. The sixth person on the platform stood apart and watched. I wondered how it would have been to have received such a farewell from that ‘ her ’. My Malayali friend seemed to have read what was going on in my head. “ Dude! ” he said. The other’s eyes sparkled mischievously. It ...
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The Butterfly Diaries 07 - The Ersatz Elevator

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There were elevators and then there were ersatz elevators. One never knew which was which till the door opened. So it was with our attempts to get into projects. One might think I wasted the entire time since the completion of my training in the grip of the vices of the vile village. But in between these bouts of hedonism, I did make earnest attempts to find that elusive elevator to take me on the ride of corporate success. Every third day, I would be at the desk of our business unit human resources lead and every tenth day at the door of the business unit head’s cabin. So much so they fled at the very sight of me. My schoolmate was the first one in our home to get into a project. It was a mainframe one, like that of most of our other Open Systems colleagues in the America business units. It looked as if the training stream mattered little more than one’s initial or birth month in staffing. So much for me being sad about missing the Internet stream. As it happened, the first project op...
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The Butterfly Diaries 06 - The Vile Village

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They say it takes a village to raise a child. And if the village happens to be a vile one, what would be the fate of such children? Or of us – the naïve children entering the corporate world. But first things first: if we did not clear the training, such questions would be immaterial. And if the project failed, I would not be the only one facing the consequences. My schoolmate who had stood by me through it all, the Saint I looked up to, the nice Miss Graceful, a couple of other innocent bystanders and last but not least ‘ she ’ herself – they all would fall with me. No! I couldn’t let that happen. That thought served as a combo dose of Wikoryl and steroids. For the last three days of the project, I worked like I was possessed, not caring for food or sleep, stitching together the modules into a working application. The others toiled valiantly too. Yet we could not finish on time. We finished a day late with a few bugs still unresolved. But we had met the minimum standards required to ...
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The Butterfly Diaries 05 - The Austere Academy

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As we headed towards the training completion, it started feeling like we were at an academy going through a rigorous educational program. Classes, attendance, exams, projects – we had it all. I hoped this was more a transition and real work was going to be nothing of this sort. All my efforts to rally support turned out to be unnecessary when it became clear this lady had no intention whatsoever of exacting revenge upon me. I was so relieved that I did not even care about her contribution on the next one. And we managed to pip the other team at the post yet again. Next came the final course – Visual Basic. And with it a new kind of trouble. Again, the project team was shuffled and this time we lost that petite girl who had been with us through the two earlier courses. She had been quietly competent and a total team player. Her presence had been so gentle and calming that I had not noticed it until it was gone. And man! It hit me hard. Especially when I saw her hanging around with her ...
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The Butterfly Diaries 04 - The Miserable Mill

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I have read about how factories in Europe were the miserable mills that powered the industrial revolution. I often wonder if tech parks in India were their equivalent, powering the digital revolution. Of course, watching someone sitting in front of a computer altering thousands of images to fit different browsers does not evoke the same sympathy as watching someone standing in front of an assembly line and attaching thousands of parts. The stream-specific courses came with group projects, our first taste of the mill. As if to ensure that we did not escape the misery, they allotted only one computer for every two persons. This halved each group’s speed while subjecting everyone to the joy of watching someone else blunder their way through the module assigned to them. My Malayali friend and I circumvented the situation by unofficially signing up for the night shift that came with the additional perk of a free dinner. The first course was Unix. For the project, I was paired with a guy fr...
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The Butterfly Diaries 03- The Wide Window

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I have always lived in environments where windows were kept wide open for most of the time to let fresh air in. This was my first experience of being cooped up in an environment with no windows. Of course there was the air conditioning. But that is no replacement for natural air, is it? We had to spend long hours in these buildings, for the training was quite rigorous. How else can young kids from diverse backgrounds be shaped into a pool of professionals with a similar set of skills? The diversity I guess was not a feature but an acceptable bug when one tried to skim the cream off the student bases from various fields. While Hogwarts had just one sorting hat, we had two. One to put us into a technology stream and the other to put us into a business unit. And no one knew how they worked. “ It is all based on your interview performance, ” said some. “ It is based on the college you are from, your grades and the engineering branch, ” said others. “ No. None of these matters. It is all a...
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The Butterfly Diaries 02- The Reptile House

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While initially the software development blocks with glass on the outside were looking cool, as time went by my mind started summoning images of the reptile houses I had seen at the Guindy snake park. The only difference was that in a reptile house, the outside walls are opaque, and the individual enclosures are transparent. In a software block, on the other hand, the outside walls are made of glass and the partitions between software engineer cubicles are opaque. Meanwhile the assignment for our first weekend was to find houses of a different kind – human ones - for us to stay in. For, like Cinderella’s ball, our 5-star dream stay would end exactly at the stroke of midday on Sunday. And by then if we didn’t have our own place to stay, we would be on the streets. With the ubiquitous stray dogs, who, unlike humans and reptiles, had no houses. Waiting for us after breakfast on Saturday morning was the brokers’ van instead of the company bus. To take us around the city looking for houses....
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