Current affairs

It is hard to concentrate on work when you are just dying to leave everything. It's even harder when you are outside your home country since there's no support base around you. Work has been crazy lately: attending late night phone calls, managing ~5 projects, negotiating with multiple groups for more funds, applying for educational loans (well that's personal, but work nonetheless) and so on. During recessionary times, the work tends to get crazier since people want to cling on to their existing jobs by doing their best and making themselves indispensable. The manager (whose chair is equally shaky) in turn exerts that much more pressure, explicitly or otherwise.

I bumped into a colleague (well, a client technically) yesterday. I was shocked to see that he had bloodshot eyes. On inquiring I found that he has been working day and night for 48 hours now. This is very rare in US especially in my office which values personal time like very few other companies do. Flexible Fridays, work from home, complementary day-offs, firm sponsored community work what not. But in hard times, perks go for a stroll in the park. Personally, the current scenario doesn't affect me since I'm gonna leave it all soon. But seeing the tension around does affect one's state of mind. People say that 2009 is only going to get worse. Seeing the placement figures of top universities around the world, I must admit, I have been having some teeny weeny doubts about leaving a cushy job in this market. Who knows whether I'll get a decent job after passing out? Who knows whether I'll get a job at all?

"Dude, stop it! You are making me depressed", exclaimed "A" fellow ISB R1 admit, on getting bombarded by my not-so-rosy projections. That drilled some brains into my head! Now, I'm an eternal optimist. I've learnt over the years that if you believe you can, you can.

My personal philosophy is: if it ain't broken, why not improve it. And that's the reason I'm doing an MBA. I know nothing is broken in my life, there's really no overwhelming reason to change anything. I can stay in US, earn some $s and generally continue to have a good time. But what about the career goals and why MBA question I had answered in my ISB interview? Were they just meaningless words I read from a script? My goals, my career, and the general tendency to push myself beyond my comfort zone that pulled me through the MBA app journey weren't just meaningless blabber. I believed in them. And I still do.

I realized that I can't possibly make someone depressed - something must've been broken in my thinking. To fix that, I thought some more! Finally, an incident I read about long ago and line from my favourite song came to my mind.


The incident:

Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the protagonists in the Manhattan Project, once faced a great lull in his career. Now, Feynman was an extremely popular figure and his sense of humour is legendary. However, he was rather unproductive as a physicist in the period from 1961 to 1967. Had Feynman just run out of ideas, or had something just gone wrong?

Quoting from the book:

Feynman had got to know [biologist James] Watson during the sabbatical year that Dick had spent as a 'graduate student' in biology. He had an opportunity to renew the acquaintance when he visited Chicago early in 1967, and when they met Watson gave Feynman a copy of the typescript of what was to become his famous book The Double Helix, about his discovery, together with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA. Feynman read the book straight through, the same day. He had been accompanied on that trip by David Goodstein, then a young physicist just completing his PhD at Caltech, and late that night Feynman collared Goodstein and told him that he had to read Watson's book -- immediately. Goodstein did as he was told, reading through the night while Feynman paced up and down, or sat doodling on a pad of paper. Some time towards dawn, Goodstein looked up and commented to Feynman that the surprising thing was that Watson had been involved in making such a fundamental advance in science, and yet he had been completely out of touch with what everybody else in his field was doing.

Feynman held up the pad he had been doodling on. In the middle, surrounded by all kinds of scribble, was one word, in capitals: DISREGARD. That, he told Goodstein, was the whole point. That was what he had forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress. The way for researchers like himself and Watson to make a breakthrough was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and plough their own furrow. [pp. 185-186]

I read this a long time back. But suddenly the message came back to me. DISREGARD. There's too much importance given to others and external circumstances.


The song:

Tagore, a Nobel winning (the first Asian) Bengali poet once wrote: If they answer not to thy call walk alone.

The above 2 messages definitely hold a lot of meaning when held in synthesis.
Well, definitely there's a chance I might not land a job post-MBA. But at least I have a shot at my dream job. There's no way I can make that transition in my career without an MBA. And just because some others are afraid, some others have faced problems and extraneous circumstances are bad, doesn't mean that I have to be bogged down by it all. May be I'll be in a similar problem, but I gotta have faith. And I ardently believe that we shall overcome the crisis someday soon (sooner than Feb 13, 2010). Amen.