IIT + IIM = ?

At the age of 18, when I was going to begin my journey at IIT, I felt young and successful. I felt that the world was at my feet. More importantly, I felt assured and confident of my future. Today, five years hence, having successfully completed IIT with a decent grade, having got into an IIM, having got a pre placement offer from a company of great repute worldwide, I feel confused as to what I want to do with my life.

Ya... I do have a job but then, GE is not going to offer me finance so there’s this big question whether I should accept it or not? I’ll write more about this in a later blog. The more pertinent issue is that I have no idea where my life is heading. I’ve no control over what kind of a job I’m going to get. In February, I’ll sit for placements and within 3 days, my fate will be sealed. For all you know, I might end up with some IT company in slot III, where I don’t wanna go – especially after rejecting a PPO from GE.

And it’s not just about the first job; it’s about the holistic picture getting blurred with every passing day. I talk to Diwaker on chat and he seems so sure that one day he’ll come back to India and start up something of his own, that someday he’ll make his own small contribution to the world around him. He simply seems to have all the answers – no confusion whatsoever.

I do think that I’ll have a decent career if I continue to go along the path I’m presently on. However, the catch is, I also do think that I would have wasted my potential, like so many others do, by not following my gut feeling as to what I really wanna do in life. Today, I look around me and find that I have such a tremendous amount of respect for the kind of work Tarun Tejpal did with ‘Tehelka’, or the kind of work Barkha Dutt does. I’ve always respected the profession of journalism more than anything else. Perhaps, I should have gone for something like that. Why didn’t I go for it? Because I was too busy and obsessed with charting out a career path that would be termed “successful” by the people around me. But then, at that time, I was a kid with boyish dreams of making it big in the corporate world someday – so IIT + IIM seemed to be a natural choice. Today, a little mature but nevertheless boyish, I’ve got these ideals of true happiness, job satisfaction, social contribution etc. And it makes me wonder whether IIT + IIM were the right choice after all.