Tag: postaday

Jobseekers

I participated in a job fair a couple of days ago, and learnt so much that I wasn’t prepared to learn. I saw how convoluted our education system is, and how twisted and desperate it’s made our graduates. Also, how difficult it is to find jobs and how the pressure transforms even the respectable into shameless persons.

Let’s take it one at a time. It was my first time attending a job fair as a recruiter, on behalf of my employer. I arrived a little late and the first thing I noticed when I walked in was our stall groaning with a mob clamouring to shove resumes at my colleague. The volume of the crowd stunned me. I had expected a maximum of two hundred people visiting our stall over the course of the day, but in reality, we had two hundred people in the booth at any time during most of the day—from 10 am to 6 pm.

Every person had the same look and the same mentality: to give out their resumes no matter what role we needed. Most of them were fresh graduates, eager (read desperate) to land a job, and it didn’t matter that we needed technical qualifications and experience they don’t possess. Some of the folks I spoke to were blatant and honest: they needed a job, any job they can get. They didn’t mind which city they’d work in, they didn’t mind which role, the compensation we’d offer, the responsibilities they’d undertake, or the amenities they’d receive. I collected over hundred resumes of such fresh graduates. And it amused me—how flexible they are, their eyes screaming a yearning to find a job regardless of all that matters.

That’s when I realised it’s the fate of most graduates in India. We’ve colleges in every other street, with almost every politician chairing a chain of educational institutions. The result is an army of graduates, few qualified but most of them mediocre, unable to find proper jobs that pay what they deserve. And so to make up for lost time and time, these graduates hunt for whatever jobs they can find. From there stems the desperation that reeks through their skins.

It’s sad.

But collecting these resumes, promising them I’d forward them to my team knowing well that I wouldn’t, I could only squirm with disgust. I know I shouldn’t blame them for almost-begging for jobs. I know they have no choice, that they have loads of loans to pay off, and parents who moan at their unworthy degree. This system’s been around far too long to change in a heartbeat. I doubt it’ll ever change. Until each of these graduates realises—before they fall into the pit—how futile it is to take up an expensive, once-prestigious, course in a country that’s made education an unaffordable bounty, and replaced quality with cheap textbooks, and campus buildings in disarray.

Creator

Wielding her weapon, Margaret felt immense power surge through her veins. Everything rested on her — she could make or break Larry. She could poke, tease, torture him even, and no one to intervene.

She could control him, discipline him, and boss him. Like a puppeteer she could play with his arms and legs, like a sore partner she could mess with his soul, like a disowning parent she could stare until he withered in shame.

She had created him, and she had every right to destroy him. After all, she wouldn’t be the first author to torment her characters.

Focussed on one, un-focussing all else

This week’s photo challenge is interesting for two reasons. One, David Watkis posted a bokeh, almost out-of-focus, photo of the New York skyline, asking for something that represents focus to us. I never keep the remains of my disastrous, no-focus photographs. And so my initial reaction was to hold my head in my hands and wonder what to do.

Later, though, I looked at my archives and I realised that I indeed have a bunch of then-embarrassing photos. That’s the second reason this challenge is interesting. When I looked at that photograph, I relived the moment: It was couple of years ago in Pondicherry, a city I’d love to  return to any weekend of the year. It’s close by and offers a lot more than affordable alcohol and glorious gelato.

It was around five o’clock in the morning when I looked through our hotel window. The street was deserted except for a few early-morning health walkers and yoga enthusiasts. I was so focussed on capturing the emptiness in the street that only later did I realise  how the objects in the photo came out un-focssed. For some weird reason I hadn’t deleted the photo, and I’m glad I didn’t.

Focus

Doing more of what you love

doing more of what you love

Photography, nowadays, is thriving as a hobby. I look around and every other Tom and Dick seems to have a DSLR, caressing it as it’s their life’s dream to caress it. Some of those wannabes, though, turn out as good photographers. In fact, they’d become so good that people start paying for them to come take pictures at their wedding. Or pre-wedding, or pre-engagement, or maybe even the pre-proposal—preposterous though it sounds.

It’s a good thing to earn by doing what you love, yuo might think. I thought so, too, until I looked into the eyes of a professional photographer at a wedding yesterday.

We weren’t the early birds, meaning the new couple and the old photographers had already gotten through at least a hundred people posing on stage with shiny white teeth, pouting lips, flashy jewellery, and studded dresses. The bride and groom though tired, received us with happy faces, but the photographer and his accompanying videographer weren’t tired—they looked bored, instead.

Drooping eyes, stifling yawns, dawdling walks, forced patience—they symbolised everything that points to someone who’s been doing what they’ve been doing for so long that it speaks to their soul no more. Then I wondered: At what point does doing what you love become such a vexing routine that you no longer love it?

Perhaps the photographer had reached it, the tipping point. Perhaps the idea of capturing blooming faces, grooming parents, ruling aunts, and unruly children didn’t thrill his heart anymore. It looked to me like he wished to be anywhere but there. And I felt sorry for him.

He would’ve had a phase in life, young and excited to achieve what he has now. He would’ve spent eager hours in the darkroom looking for something that would light up his life. He would’ve tossed and turned in bed wondering if his applications would get through, if he’d get the job as a photo journalist or even an assistant; he would’ve thought it a great opportunity to get coffee for a popular photographer, just the idea of being in close proximity with them keeping him up till the crack of dawn. He would’ve dreamt awake, slept in dreams, and waited with bated breath. He would’ve once given anything to have what he has now.

Except now, years later maybe, he has not a sliver of joy in his eyes. Perhaps he didn’t sleep the previous night, perhaps he spent it in the darkroom in his studio developing photos from the previous wedding, perhaps he was trying to figure out how to make space in his calendar for all the people booking his service. Perhaps the blooming faces and ruling aunts got on his nerves now. Just perhaps he would now give anything to give up all of it.

That’s what his eyes told me during the couple of minutes we were on stage, holding our not-so-natural smiles for the photographer to capture the moment and the videographer the moments. By the time we left the stage, the photographer turned his attention to the next group, our faces, our smiles, and our moments once a source of pride, now just a fleeting flash in his memory, from an event he cared naught for.