On April 28, I completed 23 years in sales/ marketing. After I finished my graduation I wanted to do a course in NIIT. NIIT was new then and were chasing people to enroll them in their courses. In fact information technology and computers were new in India. It was just getting out of the crib and was trying to crawl. Anyway, I couldn’t afford the Rs.2000 odd which they were charging as half yearly fee. It was a quite a lot of money those days. NIIT were behind me for a couple of weeks offering to reduce the fee, as they said that they hated to let a deserving candidate like me miss a golden opportunity. After some time they gave up. Guess they would have gone behind another deserving person.
I started working as an analytical chemist in my uncle’s factory. It was a small unit dealing with bituminous (tar) products. Bitumen is processed to make a variety of products, some of which are associated to you without your knowledge. It is used for insulating underground electrical cables, as emulsions under railway coaches to sound-proof them and also as anti corrosive paints by the Indian Railways. They are used to water-proof the top of buses. For those of you who were born with silver spoons and don't know what a train or a bus is, these products are also used as jointing compounds (as it is called) to fill the cracks and joints in runways.
So after burning my fingers literally (tar melts at temperatures upwards of 100 degrees Celsius) my uncle thought I shouldn't get stuck to tar. My brother-in-law helped in making me an entrepreneur. Along with a couple of gentlemen known to my brother-in-law we set up a plastic molding unit making containers, bottles etc. I was young and brash. The elderly gentlemen who were my partners were experienced and intelligent. Our paces did not match and I decided that I wouldn't fit the mold of a businessman.
I opted out and joined as a medical representative for a princely stipend of Rs.1000 with daily allowances thrown in. I am in my current orbit helped on by a few nudges, some pats on the back but mainly due to innumerable kicks on my butt. I deserved everyone of them, the kicks I mean.
During this period I have been fortunate to meet a lot of people who have helped me personally and professionally. I can also look back satisfactorily at the number of people whose career I have been able to course. My experience and the characters I was associated with would make for some exciting posts in future. All in all I have no regrets that I couldn't become a computer techie for I had a chance to deal with a more complex and challenging entity than a computer.... People.
I started working as an analytical chemist in my uncle’s factory. It was a small unit dealing with bituminous (tar) products. Bitumen is processed to make a variety of products, some of which are associated to you without your knowledge. It is used for insulating underground electrical cables, as emulsions under railway coaches to sound-proof them and also as anti corrosive paints by the Indian Railways. They are used to water-proof the top of buses. For those of you who were born with silver spoons and don't know what a train or a bus is, these products are also used as jointing compounds (as it is called) to fill the cracks and joints in runways.
So after burning my fingers literally (tar melts at temperatures upwards of 100 degrees Celsius) my uncle thought I shouldn't get stuck to tar. My brother-in-law helped in making me an entrepreneur. Along with a couple of gentlemen known to my brother-in-law we set up a plastic molding unit making containers, bottles etc. I was young and brash. The elderly gentlemen who were my partners were experienced and intelligent. Our paces did not match and I decided that I wouldn't fit the mold of a businessman.
I opted out and joined as a medical representative for a princely stipend of Rs.1000 with daily allowances thrown in. I am in my current orbit helped on by a few nudges, some pats on the back but mainly due to innumerable kicks on my butt. I deserved everyone of them, the kicks I mean.
During this period I have been fortunate to meet a lot of people who have helped me personally and professionally. I can also look back satisfactorily at the number of people whose career I have been able to course. My experience and the characters I was associated with would make for some exciting posts in future. All in all I have no regrets that I couldn't become a computer techie for I had a chance to deal with a more complex and challenging entity than a computer.... People.
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