Placement Hour: Time to obsess!

Remember the last time you obsessed about a dream – engineered it while asleep, lived it while awake – the last time you reached out to different Gods with one common prayer, the last time you geared up with the most single-minded focus for a day that would be as big for atleast 50 other people you have known and grown with in the last two years.

If you can’t remember any such day, brace up for your eureka moment! Your next two months will be nothing short of a sleepless sojourn. For some, the expectation of the big day will inflate their hearts with hope, for others, the same anticipation will freeze their thoughts with deep fear.

Some will be explicit, others implicit, but you will see it wherever you go. You may hear it over coffee conversations, see it in the half-filled plates on dinner tables or feel it under the breath of your best friend egging you on over a late night conversation. You may want to run away, hide from the spotlight – but make no mistake, there is no hiding this time around.

And, therefore, the sanest advice would be: Shape up and compete with dignity. It never was and will never be pleasant to be thrown into an every-man-for-himself cauldron with your best friends – those you have dined and wined with for the best part of your Bschool years.

So, read up on your laws, brush up your compensation formulae and lap up your OB concepts. And while you do this with the undistracted intent of a blinder-ridden racehorse, do not for once lose sight of your neighbor standing behind you – the goodfella who has entertained you over daaru nights and paid for your chai and tiger biscuits – the goodfella may now need your push, and a bit of pull, to make it to the finish line. Coming first is alright, but there’s more fun when you complete the race knowing that while you have pulled through to emerge victorious, you have done enough to pull others along rather than pull them down.

And, we all know that on that monumental day, a few will achieve what they set out for, a few others may fall slightly short of what they think they wanted to achieve. And disappointment will come for some who think they have fallen short, those who think they have failed. But, they will tide over it soon:  it’s a matter of time when they’ll realize that their bar of failure is far higher than the bar of success for the average 25-year-olds out there. 

So, dust up, get up, plug in that favourite song of yours that inspires you to outdo yourself, and obsess once again. I may not hazard a guess on what the end will be like, but can vouch that this journey will be surreal. And as I said last year after completing my surreal journey – the gap between achieving your dream and settling for a safe reality is a distance equal to one leap of faith. Soar on!