"Why did you do it?" She was shocked.
"I..... I just wanted to help......"
"No Padmanabh. By doing this you haven't helped anyone. Instead, you have done more damage to yourself."
The conference room looked nearly empty as only 30 students were present. Almost 4 months ago the place was full of engineering graduates eagerly listening about the placement session which was about to kickstart. As the companies visited campus and recruited the students, the crowd here began to get thinner and now only 30 students were left to be placed. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I was one of them.
Mr. Amit Gupta, our TPO, grabbed the microphone and with his opening words silenced the students.
"This is going to be the final placement drive for your batch. There is no other company in the pipeline now."
There was a deafening silence in the room. I think the guys were anticipating more bad news and Mr. Gupta didn't disappoint them.
"This company would recruit maximum 10 guys from this batch. So, in the end, 20 guys among you would still remain unemployed. I hope the most deserving candidates make the cut this time."
'Most deserving candidate' I smiled. I knew what Mr. Gupta's definition of most deserving student was. The list included 3 of his favorite students who had failed in each of last 13 campuses and I knew he would leave no stone unturned to make sure they get the jobs this time. But there were few others too who actually deserved the job. I turned back and looked at few anxious faces.
There was Ashish, a brillaint programmer, in the Far right corner who had flunked 5 interviews. To his left was Imran who had cleared almost half written exams but his communication skills had let him down in subsequent rounds. In the second last row Ritu was engaged in her own thoughts. She had been one of the consistent performers of the class but, due to her Hindi background, had never been able to clear english section in any written paper so far. Her boyfriend Rohit too had had a bad luck as his abysmal 12th percentage had allowed him to appear in only couple of campuses so far which he couldn't crack.
Finally I settled my eyes on the person sitting right to me. My best friend Bajrang was busy scribbling something in his notebook. I was sure he would have hardly paid any heed to what our TPO had just said. I don't want to comment about others but I was pretty sure that there were only 2 guys in that conference room who didn't deserve this job - my best friend and me. The reason behind this assertion - we both didn't want to get placed. We didn't want to do jobs actually. His father had a small factory and my father had a solid export business. Who cared for the job?
I hardly knew that destiny was brewing up something very different for me....for Bajrang... and for Sonal.
