The bits and bytes of being an IT engineer in India...

Yeah, I am an engineer...more so an IT engineer. One of those million faces in the bandwagon that started rolling somewhere in the early 90's and has now become a major face of |India's economic growth. There is no denying the fact that the Indian IT industry is a major contributor to the country's GDP as well as its reputation for skilled workforce in the international arena.

But once we go down deeper, brushing aside the statistics and numbers, there we find a much humble, if not sorry, picture of an individual spending his entire youth , writing away lines and lines of code and then re-writing most of it  . Yes, the IT engineer himself. He is no superhero but someone super-humanly over-working and multi-tasking (read : slogging for hours , juggling between code, spread-sheets, tools and of course yes, Google, to meet the deadly deadlines). Yet unlike the doctors or even his engineering brethren from other fields like civil or mechanical, the society does not have the slightest clue of what he actually does, leave alone having any regards for his efforts. Even his family members spend pensive hours at night wondering what sort of lawful work extend to such unearthly hours when most of their neighbors are either sleeping or weeping over the latest episode of the popular TV soap  !!

But this guy was once a dreamer.  Armed with a geeky attitude towards life and the picture of a Matrix-like world, he had set out to create something brilliant that would save humanity someday. Slowly and slowly he had equipped himself with the various languages understood by the computers. Be it C, Java , Python or Oracle, there was no stopping him. He felt himself to be just a step away from becoming the next Tony Stark alias The Iron Man !!

And then something happened. Something seemingly exciting at first but supposedly sure to disappoint later happened...he got a JOB !! And overnight , the dreamer posed to change the world with he strokes of his keyboard finds himself encapsulated in the abstract world of a cubicle.  There he learns the norms and rules of this new world and by the time he comes to his own, the passionate dreamer morphs into a deadline-chasing machine. His dreams squandered and ideas under-rated, the guy gets programmed to perform the same tasks, day after day and then getting assigned some other task, perform it day after day. 

And among all these, the fear of being labelled an under-performer looms all the time. There are also frequent rumors of downsizing going around in the office canteen. So he postpones his plans for the weekend to the next weekend , only to postpone them again to the next. He loses track of  important dates like birthdays and anniverseries and gives family functions a miss. He slogs and slogs harder to get those few extra bucks to sustain a decent livelihood. After all, the society still knows he is an ENGINEER !!

Just in case...

How many times have you wondered what if you had gone up and asked somebody about what had been boggling your mind all the time ? Most of the times you have let it pass only to realise your mistake later or further wonder !!

The world we live in is moving fast . So fast that even the surest of meetings get cancelled due to a a few seconds of negligence. We have evolved to realize the saying more than anything  else that 'Change is the only constant'.  In this rampantly changing picture we try to fit ourselves in and while we ponder over the chance of having an opportunity, somebody else is already walking out with it.

Be it about asking out that attractive friend of your cousin whom you see at a party or asking your boss for an extended vacation, it's all about asking the right questions at the right time.  Even if it is the slightest of chances, may be just 1 out of 100, yet you never know. That once percent of chance might be written in your name and waiting to be just grabbed.

That innocent looking hook with a dot under it, yeah the question mark, is a more of a friend than a bothersome companion and hence definitely not someone to be ignored. So let not those question bubbles popping in your sea of thoughts die a death of hopelessness. Rather give those questions a chance, a chance to come out and serve their purpose - to check for all those what-ifs and may-bes and create opportunities if exist. So the next time let not a question die its untimely and undeserved death. Reach out...and ASK, just in case there is a chance !!