the e^xponential stress

This is in continuation of part one - How I Messed Up My First Interviews: Chapter I It was December 1st, the 'Day 1' of the 2015 placements, and Honda R&D happened to be the second company to have come after Microsoft. We were 4 students from the batch who opted for the Honda interviews. After a hiatus from my previous interview experience during engineering, I thought that this time I was prepared and would have learned something. I was excited for the interview although not much excited because I wasn't into two-wheelers as much as I was into cars. In a batch of 20 M.Des students at IIT Delhi, I too was amongst the 5 people who wanted to become an automobile designer. In our multi-disciplinary course, we studied product design for both tangible products as well as for digital products. We worked closely with Maruti Suzuki India R&D for more than 6 months and learned the entire process of car design right from research to clay modelling, but despite our efforts an...

This year, I completed my second-longest stint with a deactivated Facebook account, a complete 3.5 years while I write this post in July 2020.  I have had my Facebook account since December 2009 which apparently was created by my college friend Alok who couldn't see me as the only person without a Facebook account in a batch of 60 engineers :D. One day while we were sitting in the computer lab, Alok scraped my education details from LinkedIn and created a Facebook account with my name, and started adding my school mates too. For a complete month of December, Alok acted as Chetan on Facebook until I accepted to take over the account and maintain it. I had to give in before he did anything more in the name of Chetan :D though Alok was my best buddy so he wouldn't have done something funny with my account yet to be square, I took over the account. He had kept a geeky password 'Efficiency' to start with. From January to February 2010, I added all my mechanical engineering...

This story is in continuation of  Stranger Friends . If you haven't read that, I would recommend reading that first before reading this second part. Bangalore wasn't new anymore. I had obvious friends in the office as well as in Uniworld, my guesthouse. But, there was one unique friend, a stranger friend in Uniworld, the housekeeper! I had been talking to him about random things around me in the city, office, life, and whatnot. Strange but, true; I would talk to him generally during weekend mornings. After completing my stint of four months in Infosys' Bangalore Campus, I had taken a transfer to their Jaipur DC. My transfer is another interesting story highlighting the politics in the corporate world of Infosys; will write an article separately on that. On my last day in Bangalore, I had my bags packed and kept them on the floor near the room's door. The housekeeper did all the cleaning chores and while he was leaving the room, I looked at him. "Sir, ja rahe h...

Ever wondered what a friend really means? I have always had a few people whom I have called friends, maybe 4 or 5 friends in a total of two and a half decades! But as I grew up, the definition of friends evolved. The 4-5 people in my life whom I called friends qualified to be called as best friends which gave room for a few more people to be called as friends :) So, this gave me a diplomatic excuse for not calling everyone a friend. Every classmate then became a friend while a few important personalities in my life enjoyed the privilege to be on my best friends list. No one cared by the way...Lol! But, yes, I have always had a small circle. Remember, I mentioned introversion in my previous post? Friends from personal life and friends on virtual Facebook life were the same or less. But, somehow, IIT and the time changed me. My circle of friends became bigger while the circle of best friends accommodated a few (2-3) more friends. It's the game of hierarchy actually, Stranger > A...

This post has been pending for years now. Ever since I finished post-graduation, I have got little more time for myself, time to read books again and enjoy the solitude. This article is going to cover my experiences with GDs (Group Discussions) and how I dealt with them. Not sure if this can qualify to be a tutorial post of "How to nail GDs?" or "How introverts can speak in GDs?" I'm a person who doesn't speak much, and when there's a group chat, I don't like to talk at all! I like to be in solitude. In short, I'm an introvert. Therefore, Group Discussion is a parameter that can't filter out persons like me for a job during the placement/selection process. Whether Group Discussion is a correct parameter to select candidates or not is a different topic and I won't talk about it. During my engineering, I sat for almost ten GDs (all were not for placements-some were practice GDs while some were with friends) and the funny part is tha...

This is an update to the previous post:  Purpose Of Life I really don't understand the concept of people celebrating their own birthdays though I've got really no problem with that and why would I have a problem either? I have not done anything remarkable after being born. Anyway, I believe, birthdays are always special for the parents and the people around who love the person who was born on the day. Birthdays mark the day of a child entering in the parents' world. It's the day for them to cherish, it marks the anniversary of their love for each other and the offspring which brought the contentment in their lives. So, I feel extremely odd when people around me ask for my birth-date so they could wish me on the day; I don't know how to react when people wish me with 'happy birthday' except for saying 'thank you.' I've got few relatives, few former colleagues of my mom, a few neighbours (old and new) and as I mentioned earlier: 3-4 frien...