If not M.Tech then what ??

          Who knows? Life has an ever-changing path with scads of options open at every possible instant. One needs to have a lot of courage and confidence to leave one and follow the other. “Every path is paved with gold” is the marketing mantra and you just need to find the essence of the holiness in the path you choose to kiss the summit in this highly competitive world. Keeping aside reaching the summit, finding the essence is in itself a mammoth task to achieve.

Though I was lucky enough (that’s what I think) to get into the MTech program, I did have a lot of choices to make other than Mtech. To be a doctor was my first dream and I tried a bit to achieve it.  But the huge syllabus in my intermediate deprived me to attain such a lovely goal and I had to detour this path with no other option other than the very common BTech.

“BTech used to be a very prestigious degree in our times”, is what my father kept on saying all the time. I felt as if I am committing a crime by opting for this used to be a prestigious course. It really gave an impression that students who don’t get to get into anything finally settle for engineering and it was really annoying. Still curious to know how, but I did manage to get a degree after four years which stated “BTech in Electronics and Telecommunication”.

But the twist came then and I was uncertain about my future. I didn’t know what to do or rather what I want to do. I somehow managed to get out of college and then there I was, standing with a dark road or perhaps roads in front of me. With no clear thoughts and a common engineer’s job in an IT company paying the meagre salary possible, I decided to try every possible way. I had the intention to get absorbed into any field which readily accepts a novice like me.

The first path was to prepare for Common Aptitude Test (CAT), every engineer’s dream. Almost half of my batch mates were along with me, on their way to become managers and capture the multinationals under their arms. I was really worried as to how do I compete with so many people who always surpassed me in every aspects of graduation. But I did not lose hope and kept on preparing. After a lot of preparation, I appeared for CAT and cleared it with good percentile. It was just good and not sufficient to get me going. I got some real good offers from so called good colleges for MBA.

The second path was to prepare for Masters in science (MS). Suddenly I got focussed and interested to go to a foreign university to complete my masters. A foreign degree really looks good in your profile. I got this impression when I saw three foreign degrees in our H.O.D‘s nameplate outside her cabin. I started having dreams which had the impression to be real. So I prepared for GRE and appeared for it. This time as well I had a good result but again not that good.

These two results really disheartened me. I was getting opportunities from good college but was unable to convert them into reality. I again came back to the situation, puzzled about my own interest in life. I was so fickle minded that I could not even decide what to do next. I was in real dilemma as I had three options, viz, MS, MBA and job. This enigmatic situation had the courage to introduce me to the fourth option MTech. With no intention in life to opt for a masters in Technology, I had to appear the tests for it.

To the utter disappointment of my life, this was the only path I got through without any inkling of hassle. Had I not passed this barrier so easily, I may have been studying accounting and finance in some BSchool in India or doing research in some trendy topic in the USA or sitting in the bench of an IT major drawing and spending money without even doing a bit of work. Life would have been different and it’s really hard to say in which way. For a good for nothing lad like me, having so many options to choose from is simply an illustration of the idiom “Bolt from the Blue”.

To be very precise, if not MTech then I would have been a future Manager of a multinational trying to utilize every bit of its resources to make up for its losses. If not so, then may be a future scientist, chided and castigated for trying to disprove the Newton’s Laws or else a corner cubicle guy in an IT major with no intention of getting disturbed. Life did give me a chance and I grabbed it at the right moment to enjoy every flesh out of it.