Bye-bye Infy - Hello Manchester!!

Just winding up my last few days with Infosys. It has been quite an eventful 4 years.Joined on 9th June 2003 in a batch of 140 freshers in Bangalore for training. The 3 months of training was the first time in a long time (read as 4 years) that I actually took the pains to study seriously!! From the jovial, fun-loving, noisy back-bencher in college, I had changed to become a studious, serious second/third bencher. What had come over me? Why the sudden change?
It was nothing but the psyched feeling in me that I am no good at programming. In college, I had barely managed to pass my "C" programming exam - thanks largely to few of my friends who taught me few fundas and ofcourse God's grace. Post that, there was never any programming in my curriculum and I never bothered putting in efforts. I was sure of getting into a core communications technical job and determined not to sit for software engineering. But call it fate - I ended up being picked up by Infosys and the brand name kinda pulled me to it and that was it. I knew for a fact that if I remained the way I was in college, there was a possibility of me being chucked out! I decided to play the slog overs in a smart way and lo!!I had become a first-class geek. Add to that the fact that we were getting trained in COBOL/CICS gave me the undue advantage of starting fresh with all the other programming wiz's!!!
From there my stay at Infy was pretty good..Fortunately for me, there was very little coding that I had to do in my period here. Following my first project, I went to UK for production support. After that I was into the client testing team followed by the role of an Onsite co-ordinator. Next up was the technical lead role which I played out to perfection at Bangalore and then again back to UK as Onsite co-ordinator. My main activities till date @ Infy comprised of: understanding functionality, managing people - colleagues & clients, resolving functionality issues, solution designing and discussions - Therez been no (rather very less) developer coding phase in my period here and I thank God for taking me through 4 years in absolute success.
During this period I also got promoted from a software engineer to a Programmer Analyst. This didnt change any of my responsibilities much - I had mostly performed the role of an analyst rather than a developer.
Also this period saw my promotion from a bachelor to a husband - In contrast to the previous promotion, this however did change a lot of my responsibilities. I became the matured, family guy (no cross-checking allowed with wifey;))!
All said and done, my stint with Infy is coming near an end. Another 14 days and I am done. Its back to student life at Manchester Business School for an MBA, beginning in Sept.I got my student visa stamped for 2 years, blocked my tickets and now looking forward to the break before the gruelling starts!

Privileged to be a ST!!?

There was a time when there were fights to remove "Untouchables".
Gandhi fought for them - to treat them as equals, Lincoln fought for the "blacks", William Wilberforce fought to abolish "slave trade" etc. Now after so many years - all the happenings in India especially is making me think whether I would have been better off being born as an Scheduled Caste/ Tribe!!
Come to think of it - there were recently riots in Rajasthan because the Gujjar community wanted to classified as Scheduled tribes rather than as "other backward castes(OBCs)!! And why this sudden urge - coz of the reservation issue thats become very prominent in India these days. Everywhere you go, you are now penalised for being a normal person rather than a ST/SC!! In the olden days, villagers migrated to the city to raise their status in the society and to earn money. But these days - everyone still wants money but also , at the same time, wants to be classified as one of the many scheduled tribes. When the govt. of India still holds on to such traditional systems, how can we blame the ppl for not thinking otherwise! To get an admission in a good university in India there are basically 2 criterias now - either you are rank 1 or you belong to one of the many ST/SCs. Where is this world going to? We are in the age talking about nuclear technology, microchips etc. but the thinking of the common man is still traditional and backward. Coming to think of it - how many of these ppl are actually backward - not many. Many of the so called "tribal" people are actually financially very well off compared to your average middle class-citizen. But then our system is so damn porous that such things are just ignored. All that is valid at the end of the day, is whether you have some certificate which classes you as a backward - and voila!! - all the good things in India come to you!!
This country will not progress unless such things are completely abolished. Gandhi fought for the untouchables and I think someone (a new father of the nation) should now actually fight against them - to rid them of all the privileges that they get
courtesy the "tag" they carry along.
I am frusturated already with this system and I have not even been on the receiving end yet:(!!