My friend Shagun works for Alstom Power in Noida in the sales and technical tendering team. He graduated from a National Institute of Technology last year and was recruited from campus. His primary job responsibility is to co-ordinate with the sales force and the engineering department to prepare technical/commercial offers in line with business requirements. He does not mind the job even if he has to often work on up to three assignments simultaneously. (That's because there is this burly senior who, in spite of not being his line manager, piles him with tasks all the time.) And then, Shagun lives in Rohini, which means changing the metro twice and travelling for close to two hours either way.
One year into the job, Shagun is divided over whether to pursue an MBA or MS. He wants to use either option to do a PhD and ultimately get into teaching. He is gay, so that may have something to do with it. I know of three other men, besides me, who have left the engineering-MBA combine to opt for training of some sort or the other. One of them is a GRE/GMAT trainer, the other runs an English coaching class in south Mumbai with his boyfriend. The third is into aptitude development and professional counselling.
Shagun's dilemma centres on what kind of teaching career to opt for. As an electronics engineer, he could take the General Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and if that goes well, he could end up doing an MS-plus-PhD from one of the IITs, post which there would be no dearth of teaching opportunities. Alternatively, (since every self-respecting gay man has a technical-hating gene) he could do an MBA and start teaching right away. Curiously, a number of Tier-II and -III B-schools do not require faculty to be PhDs (known as a fellow programme in MBA parlance).
The other issue, of course, is the entrance procedures for PhD. GATE is a full-time beast requiring one to devote not less than a year to preparation (for comparison, look at IIT-JEE). The Common Admission Test (CAT), on the other hand, can be humbled with a three- to four-month preparation, that too over weekends alone. Given the big deal everyone makes about gaps in one's career, taking a year off to prepare for GATE is not the most exciting option for Shagun.
He has other things on his mind. He wants to learn to play a musical instrument, time for which might be squeezed out only if he is home preparing for GATE. If he were to take on CAT, on the other hand, he would likely continue with his job without a break. That looks great on his CV (Alstom adds to the allure), but is an idea Shagun is the least amenable to. "I think I should take a year off and bump my head around before arriving on things," he says.
If only. While it's not uncommon for young people in the west to take a year off post school to decide what they want to do with their lives, taking out time to discover one's true self is considered rather posh in India. Everyone expects youngsters to follow the trodden path, the slim consolation being that this well-worn path which, for an earlier generation, meant only medicine and engineering, now sports some diversity.
In my opinion, Shagun should go the MBA route, even if, as of now, he is clueless about what it entails and cannot, for the life of him, distinguish between the responsibilities of one kind of management from the other. But at least an MBA is more broad-based than an MS and will keep options open for him should he decide tomorrow to drop professorship and work the typical corporate job. MS would only mean hyperspecialisation.
In the middle of all the professional head-banging, Shagun is battling other demons. He came out to his parents recently, and has mixed feelings about their rather cool (not cold) reaction. They are merely in denial. In a country where people are thrashed and abandoned for revealing their sexual orientation, Shagun feels guilty about being greedy for a little more than his parents' non-violent, let's-not-talk-about-it approval.
Which brings me back to the teaching. Is it really a gay thing? One, of course, is the difficulty gay people face in traditional corporate structures since in India at least, there are no support groups. How does one deal with a difficult boss if one has not tapped into the drinking, back-slapping, (often) chauvinist post-office hangout culture? Sexual innuendo about and directed at women can be a powerful glue for men that, for obvious reasons, gay men cannot participate in.
There is also this. When Shagun is out with colleagues at work, most of them are making plans for their impending weddings and the inevitable slide into family life. That itself is enough to bring an adult seriousness to their hitherto impish, still-forming selves. No such luck for Shagun. As he and I, and others like us, near 30 and the body clock starts ticking, it is those that we train and nurture who provide us the best approximations to essentially heterosexual rites of passage.
The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
