Category Archives: Miscellaneous

23, and something

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Sunil Kumar Barnwal sat next to the radio with great apprehension. It was the day of the civil services results.

On the radio news in Hindi, he heard that a certain SK Barnwal had topped the civil services exam. He couldn’t believe his ears. He listened to the subsequent English news and it said the same thing. He shook his head in disbelief. “Couldn’t there be some other SK Barnwal in the country?” he thought. The next day it was his nameless roll number on a sheet of paper which confirmed that he had indeed topped the exam he had dreamt of since childhood.

Till a few days back, the topper had been leading a fairly ordinary life. In his first attempt, he had faltered at the interview stage and a few had become cynical whether or not he would make it in subsequent attempts. In the meanwhile, his peers were doing well in the private sector as well as abroad. But one day, thanks to a roll number that was his, all kinds of apprehensions disappeared. “I cried with joy,” says Barwal. I could also see the joy of my parents, friends and colleagues who had backed me up all my life.”

He remembers, “When I came to office the next day, the chairman of GAIL congratulated me and later the concerned minister presented me with a bouquet.”

The 23-year-old comes from Bhagalpur in Bihar, a state that has been traditionally performing well in the civil services. He studied in Science College Patna. After that, he studied engineering in the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. He passed out in 1993 and has been in the Gas Authority of India Ltd ever since.

Till the second standard, he hated school and that was the worry of his parents. Then, during his third class, a strict teacher in a village school started punishing him by pressing a pencil between his fingers. The fear of punishment was immense. He started taking interest in his studies. “I even started counting the numerals at a very fast pace in class.”

In fact he would finish his syllabus well before the exams. The, he started learning the syllabus of the next higher class! It was this zeal that helped him earn a double promotion from the fifth standard to the seventh. He started dreaming of being an IAS officer from the eighth standard, he fondly remembers.

It was impatience all the way after that. He would finish his syllabus well before time, redo it and start the next year’s. He had to be pushed out of home to play. “If I wasn’t here, I would definitely be in academics,” he adds.

There was slight frustration for him when he became a graduate. He was too young to give the civil services exam. It was a difficult wait. People around him were either taking the IAS exam, doing MBA or going abroad.

He succumbed the MBA thanks to peer pressure. But he left his industrial management course at Mumbai’s National Institute of Industrial Engineering to prepare for his civil services exam. Thereafter he got a job with GAIL and accepted.

But a fortnight after the results, the euphoria has died down. He realises the daunting task of coming up to expectations and feels the pressure.

A believer in destiny, he summarises, “This is not the peak of my life, but just the beginning!”

(This article appeared in the Hindustan Times newspaper)

Chits and Pieces

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It all began when he wanted to send her a message. He tore a piece of paper, wrote down the message, folded the paper and sent it to her through various hands. That was the first note. And soon a new era began.

Now before you think I am telling you another mushy love story, let me make things clear. I am talking about the latest craze that has hit our small class of post-graduate students—note-writing.

It’s a unique way of having a discussion with someone in the class without opening your mouth. You send a small chit to the person with a comment. The other person replies to you with another chit and this process goes on. Hundreds of such chits are transacted every day.

Perhaps everyone just took a fancy to it. Or perhaps everyone was exhausted with the busy schedule of back-breaking work that our faculty was piling on us and here was something to let off steam. I really don’t know and don’t care. It’s there and that’s enough.

But it really started when we had to go on a field trip to a tourist city. While everyone around us would be on holiday and casually admiring things, we journalism students would be attending lectures and viewing every tourist spot as a story for our training periodical. This concept was too much for anyone who needed a break from endless classes, assignments, subbing, reporting, page-making, project work…

We attended our first boring lecture and started looking at each other. Some bright guy took a chit and sent a message. And soon everyone started tearing pieces of paper furiously and exchanging “notes”… This went on to the next class and soon we were exchanging notes in the dining hall, in the matador and even on the road!

Now you might ask, what’s so big in a chit and why am I going gaga over it. Well, apart from being an extended discussion between two people, there are other options. I ended up asking such questions to people which I never dreamt of asking on their face. I exchanged life’s philosophy with some and got an insight into people I didn’t know well. One girl wrote to me in a chit, “I think this note-writing in some vague way brings two people closer.” I can’t help agreeing with her.

With others I exchanged nonsense. It’s also fun to pull someone’s leg through a piece of paper. A girl and I started exchanging notes in rhyme. This caught on and I was amazed at the poetic talent running in the class.

Now all this is done with such impunity that the person giving the lecture cannot fail to notice. Note-writing has reduced us to a bunch of rude inattentive scholars. Once when note-writing was in its primitive stages, a guest lecturer’s daughter sat with us. The whole atmosphere was too much for her, so she got up, fired the class for not paying attention. After that she burst into tears and went running to the faculty. Sigh! We were such a mean bunch. Another lecturer asked us if we were on some sort of “paper-chase” or something.

But now the course is coming to an end and note-writing is the thing I’m going to miss the most. “Don’t worry,” said my friend, “We’ll continue this glorious tradition to our work place.” Even if we manage to do that, I don’t think the same magic can be recreated again.

© Sunil Rajguru