A week into our internships and I have a deep urge to pour out my state of mind. But before that, what this internship is all about, needs to be told.
Like most things in IIM Calcutta, this concept of having a one month internship as a component of this 1 year Tandoor Grill Course, too was driven by a Bheezeeon (some outside Calcutta spell it incorrectly as Vision). The Bheezeeon was to make five international friends. Yes Five. Not One, Not Six but Five. So in order to implement this PentaFriend plan, a study tour was organised collaborating with international management schools whose name if searched in Google usually come in the second or third pages of the search results. Three years down the line, not many friends were made so this idea was discarded with our batch and the Bheezeeon got confined to getting an internship done from just about anywhere. Gorakhpur Brick Factory would do just as fine as Bain . That we are accepted in neither is another story all together.
So there we were , a bunch of 44 scrambling to get internship offers from whosoever had a space to offer in their office premises for a month. Hurt at the unceremonious manner in which we shelved the PentaFriend proposal the college offered no support at all in this process of securing our internships. Just FYI, an all-AC 85 room temporary structure was erected over two months to cater to the summer internship process for the PGP folks. But of course the comparison does not hold. We are PGPEX you remember, guys with an average work experience of 9+ years, people who know the nuances of the industry, appreciate the courses so much better and of course pay shit loads of money for the course. We do not need these facilities nor the support of the institutes, do we ? We are way above all these trivial things as meagre summer internship offers from UBS, Merryl Lynch, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, McKinsey, A T Kearney and the lot.
Anyway so here we are, a week into our internships, splintered across the country, working primarily on projects that require intensive researching, data analysis, corporate strategy formations, market entry decisions, new business proposals etc.
He he he ....Yeah sure !!
Four of us are in one of the top Indian IT firms within the Process Excellence division of their BPM department. Okay no giggles allowed here. Blogspot is naturally turning the word Process Excellence into bold each time I type it.)
Our office which also houses the corporate office is situated in an aptly named place called Sarjapur (HeadGoPur). We all know how Indian IT firms work best when employees keep their heads and brains back home.
Now there are certain things that you would never want to see in your life again. People swiping their ID cards while entering the office in the morning is one of them. The moment I saw droves of people queuing up to mark their attendance in the swiping machine, some very painful memories flooded me. Eight months it was since I had last seen something as painful as this. And it does not stop there. Our one-month-employer, I guess must be CMM Level 5 in Swipe Usage .
So once an employee has marked his attendance, that goes into the record books as his/her time of entering office. The next swipe which would happen when he enters his wing would also be recorded marking the time of entering his actual work place. The difference in the two swipes would thus determine the time one has spent devouring Dosas and Idlys and gossipping in the office cafeteria- an important matrix for the project manager indeed. In addition every swipe out from the wing, other than the last swipe out of the day, must be paired with a swipe in. This would check tailgating and more importantly determine the time spent outside doing non-billable activities. Another important KPI for the manager.
Thank God that we are yet to be given our cards which however comes with its own set of inconveniences. With both the washroom and the coffee vending machine being outside the wing, some natural biological requirements are held in check till someone kindly opens the door for us.
Now as regards our project , well, lets say we have had a very fruitful week and there are two people whom I would like to sincerely thank for this , Sergey M. Brin and Lawrence E. Page. These two individuals to whom the Indian IT industry owes a major share of their profits have blessed us too with their guidance. Lets avoid the details of the project, as discussing them might be in violation of my Intellectual Property Rights.
Another aspect of this one week which deserves mentions is the awesome food that we have been having. One experience surpassing the other. Basically the Bangalore cuisine is pretty simple. A red coloured paste which is of course Andhra style forms the base. Now you may involve animal pieces or poor vegetables in it and you got yourself a dish. What happens to your Gastro intestinal tract following this consumption is also best left unsaid and unheard. Lets just say that the Tissue paper industry has been doing good business in part of the country.
Such has been the week of our temporary re-entry into corporate life, a life which however much we wish to avoid awaits us in some months and to say the least , the dress rehearsal has begun on an interesting note.
Joy Baba GoogleNath !!
