...a new fish into the gigantic sea of opportunities and competition. One month back I graduated from an engineering college. “Happy Independence day”, greeted one of my peers. “What Independence??” I questioned back in wonderment. “Well you are no more a student now. You are free from the shackles of scary classrooms, boring lectures and enforced assignments”, reasoned my friend.
Well, my friend was right in suggesting
me to rejoice the completion of my academics but sadly I couldn’t respect her thought
since I didn’t felt any independent space around. I had a reason. I had the fear of getting suffocated in the toxic
atmosphere of unemployment which I was to breathe in next.
“Ho! Good old days, the heydays”,
I whisper to myself now, as I think of my college days. My college life was not any
hunky-dory type but quite satisfactory. I was one of the well-known faces of my
college, well-known for being a Kashmiri Muslim and somewhat for being good in academics
and other activities. Also my debating and hosting the college events had won
me a good number of admirers. I ruled the roast. Period!! What now? The game is
over. That part of me died a month ago. Now I am no more a student, not anymore.
I am no one in actual fact. My identity…as big as naught and as small as iota. Now I have a new name. They
call me a fresher, a new fish into the gigantic sea of opportunities and competition.
I have been sitting at home from the
last one month now. Though I am not a clock-watcher or a couch potato, I rarely
go outside except for an interview. I restrict my social presence to the four
walls of my room with my only two aides- headaches and depression. God bless the
freshers, I pray.
I am 23 now. I feel awkwardly bad
asking my dad for a little money to have a simple haircut, not to talk of the money
needed to fill the job registration forms or should I say to fill the banks of the
employers. I have a conscience, and a sense of responsibility. How long can I
live the life of a remittance man? Many of my schoolmates who jumped into
business have made fortunes once they left the school. And what I have earned is
barely a degree worth I don’t know what. It makes me lament the loss.
Being a fresher I am not supposed
to sit back at home in my mother’s lap. I cannot afford to corrode my aptitude
like this. I have to explore for jobs and hence I do. I desperately do. But everywhere
I go, I find the big bosses asking for an experience or an expertise, the only
thing a newbie carries not. Sometimes I wonder how the God-blessed experienced
people are born. Are they born with an experience certificate in hand? I question.
Agreed that an experienced person
is more valuable than a fresher but what if the latter proves more worthy once
trained. We need to respect the young
talent and cultivate it rather than murder it long before it blossoms. Let
there be a system to welcome both freshers and experienced at the same
platform, equally or in some other measure. Let the freshers earn some
experience by learning so as to transform their creativity into productivity. Else
in the least bit what my poor sanity wishes is to roll back to the good old
times of my father's and fore father's when there were colossal jobs waiting at
the doorstep only to choose the befitting. How cherished were those times, I
can only dream.
[P.S This post is dedicated to all the freshers. Kindly note the above opinion totally belongs to the author.]
Off the boat and a bridge too far..
Keeping eyes on the prize and the wheels come off ..
[P.S This post is dedicated to all the freshers. Kindly note the above opinion totally belongs to the author.]
