The Frayed Ends of Sanity

The best things in life come to you not necessarily because you were the most brilliant, but because you happened to be at the right place at the right time. And at the end of the day, it is just a grander version of Russian roulette. It isn’t fair, and it can be bloody cruel. I exited, thankfully, before the cruel part began to show forth in its full glory.

Probably nothing fits this description more than the hugely hyped ‘Day Z’ aka ‘Slot 0’ of summer placements. Not everyone would agree with it more fiercely than me. Whatever I had thought about myself, whatever I had thought as a natural fit for me, took an about turn within hours. Going into day Z, just before my first interview, for a month worth of preparation of cases, and for most of my professional life before that, I always thought I was meant to be a consultant. In a matter of 5 hours, I had signed up for an internship at a top rated bank. An hour later, I had to downplay my mathematical ability to thwart another bank, almost equally highly rated one. And this is one that I would have willingly given my right hand to work for. Such is life, and such is day Z. It can hardly be more ironic. For some of the lucky ones, the day ends in euphoria, for some others, a justification of a month (or more) worth of effort, and for some more, with philosophies – of where you wanted to go and where you ended up at. Makes you want to relook those assumptions that made you want to go to consulting in the first place.

The world as we know it has shrunk to the size of the MDC complex, with everything happening within it. Everything happening outside, irrespective of the magnitude of the event, becomes insignificant.

Craze, hype, desperation. From the best of them, for the best of them. The assumption of rationality of human beings (and hence of their institutions) took a back seat as pockets of news filtered in about a great escape, or a great catch, depending on the originator and the actor of the story. Some of the stuff would become a part of the folklore that would be dished out to the next generation of students to come. Some of them (I hope) would be examples of what not to do on a day Z.

Once the craze and daze have subsided, what is left is disappointment. And then the pain starts. With time, it builds up, and grows. Grows strong enough to make you doubt your own fundamental abilities. I don’t know how and wherefrom do you derive strengths to counter that. Sniffs, puffed eyes and tired faces are no longer one-off sightings. You wish the process would get over, as this whole playact of being carted around from one interview to another, being expected to smile cheerfully everywhere – is nothing short of suffering. The sight of good people searching for the increasingly-becoming-elusive re-affirmation hurts. I won’t claim to know even a pinch of what it feels, because that would be so unfair to those who do.

You wish you could help, but your education hasn’t taught you how to. You wish you could say something, anything, that could soothe, and you find that of the gazillions of books that you read, none of them had that perfect panaceal line. You simply cannot think of a sentence that would objectively not make him/her think, ‘He can say that now! He already got placed on day Z!’ You see people lending a shoulder or two, but somehow you can’t bring yourself to, even if you want to. All you end up doing is spending almost all your waking time generally loitering in that area, surviving on chocolate, bakery products and carbonated drinks, not knowing what to say to whom, except dumbly standing around, kind of hoping that even that would help, even if just a little bit, and that the nightmare would soon be over.

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An excerpt from the mail sent by the placement chairperson a few days before the start of the week:

Placing 250 students in 60 companies within a week is a complex process, especially since demand and supply preferences are varied and dynamic. The students’ Placement Committee along with the volunteers will go through one of the toughest management exercises in their lives during this period. There would be competition, euphoria, frustrations, innuendos and in the end (hopefully) philosophies….

While I did not laugh at it outright, I was intrigued by the description. Four days into the process, and I find it true to every word, even the philosophies.