Wake Up Call: Dealing with graduation and discovering your true calling
An article written by GuideBuddy CEO Saurav Agarwal on his journey from being lost and disillusioned in college to doing a Ph.D in Aerospace Engineering and launching a tech startup
This was written sometime in September 2010 when I had just graduated from my undergrad. None of the original content has been edited to make it politically correct, so if it ends up offending someone, so be it! I think now is the right time to share it, so here goes!
For a really long time, I have felt unhappy, not because I feel something missing from my life, but rather, a deep discontent that I see in the eyes of friends and people around me. Every now and then, I have asked the question, why some people lead lives not knowing what they want out of it? Is it that their own desires are unknown to themselves, or too dangerous to be realised without making sacrifices and foregoing worldly pleasures. Maybe it is neither, people in this day and age, with the ever-increasing pace of life and the constant pressure to succeed, are forgetting to pay attention to themselves and discovering who they truly are inside. I sense a feeling of lingering discontent hiding deep beneath people’s words, masked by feeble attempts at an idyllic notion of happiness. They are walking, nay, floating about in some sort of time-space continuum where the activities and things that make them unhappy are what they are intent on repeating unto infinity.
I write this because every now and then, I wonder about that momentous question which has perplexed philosophers for time immemorial. Why am I here and what is the meaning of my existence? For a little time however, I have had the feeling that I have found an answer which and I say this at the risk of sounding pompously self-righteous. However let me clarify, before you start thinking that I have had some visit by the ‘lord’ or some sort of ‘aha’ moment wherein the stars were perfectly aligned and the heavens revealed the truth in one stupendous flash of lightening, there was no such extravagant show of magnificence by the gods (if there are any) to your disappointment.
The answer has been a work in progress and started developing in my head the day I started thinking seriously about my career. Like every other teenager, I was absolutely confused, terribly misinformed and incredulously arrogant. But as I sit today and write, I get the feeling that my arrogance paid off. Let me put it into perspective. As placements in college came closer, I saw people around me starting to run after goals set and achieved by others before them. Companies which were nearly drowned in the financial meltdown, were back again with a bang, with an ever increasing demand for educated fools. (The overvalued system of elitist education is another question I will deal with later). These companies with job profiles that were an insult to the highly trained mind of an engineer were fought over, friendships were jeopardised and political alliances were forged. Murky rumors of favoritism started spreading and no one was immune to the placement fever. I had taken a backseat in this grandiose stage, having already decided to study for a masters and nothing much beyond that had been planned. So confident, I had been of an admission despite my lack luster CPI, that I did not prepare for any job interview or did not polish any of those core skills, which are tested by those grossly overpaid HR managers from multinational corporations. These jobs, which either involved making presentations on power point, filling up excel sheets or sucking up to customers to market random products, somehow demanded leadership skills and innovation. What leadership skills does an analyst sitting in front of his desk, crunching excel sheets need? Please explain to me. Leadership was a word, attached to people of significance in an organization, who were visionaries in their own right and led the people they were in charge of to new heights and glory, others were managers doing their jobs. Maybe I get a little carried away and confuse the real world with an ideal one. But, if we are not striving to make our world ideal, what are we doing in the first place.
Anyways, as time passed on, my friends started getting placed and I started getting worried. My admission offer was not in yet, while others had already receiving them. I decided take matters into my own hands and enlisted the help of a dear friend. I was going to sit for an interview with a big ass bakery so that I could sit in an air-conditioned office and sell biscuits. I was preparing to become a glorified chai vala (Tea Seller), just in case my application for masters in aerospace engineering did not go through. So the preparations started with all the usual HR questions, future plans (which now miraculously did not involve even the slightest whiff of aerospace engineering, but rather “An MBA after 5 years and some lateral and vertical growth within the context of the opportunities provided to me within the framework of the companies departments and processes”). Look how easy it is to fake such bullshit and with the help of a friend, I was able to write a considerable amount of drivel, which was sure to impress an interviewer and get me a high paying job. The interview date came and I was shortlisted in the Group Discussion. Then came the personal interview where I was asked about my future plans and I cheekily repeated those glorious lines, so deeply drilled into my head by my friend (I refuse to mention his name). Next was a videoconference with the MD and he had a look at my resume. Somehow he felt that I was more of a technical guy from my resume (Hello! I had made it for that in the first place!). He was a bit suspicious that I was just sitting there creating an option for myself and I really dint give a damn about the job, so to test my dedication to the cause of creamy biscuits, he asked me why I was not taking up further studies. I was perplexed, the first interviewer who had seen through my pretence, who could figure out that I was really just bullshitting him! DAMN! But then I thought nah, this guys is smart but not that smart, I would rather just take my chances and lo and behold! With a few manipulations to the rehearsed lines, I was able to convince him that what I really wanted to do in life was to sell biscuits. The day after that, the confirmation came that I had been offered a job. All my friends were happy, but one person who wasn’t and thank god she wasn’t was my girlfriend. She knew that I really did not want this, but was rather just buckling under the pressure. She was afraid that I was being too short sighted and was making the absolute wrong choices, that I should be sending more masters applications rather than wasting my time on these jobs. I knew she was right, but I was too immersed in myself to pay heed to the warnings. So time passed, I got an offer from a good university for a masters. It was accepted without a second thought and then within a few months, I cleared my exams, and was on my way to Amreeca (The Indian way of saying America!), or so I thought. How was I to know, that being brown and an aerospace engineer with a project in miniature aerial vehicles was a sure shot way of firing an alarm in the visa officer’s bureaucracy ridden brain. One can only wonder how the nauseously insecure American psyche works. My visa was put on hold and I was forced to go with the only remaining options, working at that biscuit factory or sit at home and sulk, which really is not an option when you are 21. So I took up that job, thinking it was but a stop gap measure, a small technicality in my life, a little setback till the Americans would eventually get their head straight and grant me my visa and I would be off to the land of opportunity.
Well, the deadline for joining the university passed by silently, much like a lonely taxi on a rainy night and I was stuck in that job. Though I hardly worked there for a month, it was the most painful, poisonous experience in my life; I’d rather be skinned alive and roasted on a slow fire than go back to that. What that time did to me however was convince me of what I wanted to do. For the first time, things were absolutely clear in my head, I was even more resolute in my intention of my pursuing further studies and decided that just a master’s would not be enough. I had to do a Ph.D., research was what my heart wanted and that’s what I was going to do. The first decision then, that needed to be made, was to quit that obnoxiously high paying job and settle for the paltry pay of a research assistant in IIT. A few people said they were impressed by the courage that I had shown but I could not understand them. There was no courage involved; there was only what I wanted, and what I needed to do in order to achieve it. All I needed was the support and confidence of my parents and few close friends and everything else was secondary.
Since that day, I have been happy. Truly and fully satisfied, doing what I wanted to since I was a little boy. Playing with machines and making things work. I am not the most intelligent person you will meet by far and definitely not the most talented. But what I have is the undying desire to achieve what I want and a stupendously blind disregard to the possibility of failure. All it takes is a little introspection and seeing what you would really want from life. Being true to yourself is not as easy as you might think.
I saw highly intelligent and capable people reduced to mere rats, running on that proverbial wheel until the exhaustion wore them out and they couldn’t take the pressure anymore. What I saw missing, was the spark of childishness, that brilliant little light inside us all, that drove us to climb trees, knowing we would fall and hurt ourselves. It led us to learn the piano even though we ended up playing the guitar to impress chicks. It made us ask questions, unafraid of their consequences, while the grown-ups ran around with their disproportionate sense of self-importance and seriousness. I say don’t take yourself too seriously just take what you do seriously. Doing what you love takes practice, as does everything else. If you have a burning desire to do something, ignore everything else and just go do it.
There is no secret formula, no short cut. There is no meaning to existence beyond doing what you love and loving the people around you. It is all about sharing the joy and contributing in our own little ways to this world. We are not immortal souls, but only immortal memories, that may remain, in the minds of the people we loved, because it is to them that we mattered.
Today, I can happily say that I still agree with what I thought 3 years ago! I’m doing a Ph.D and running GuideBuddy, life doesn’t get any better!
CEO, GuideBuddy
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