"So we are not renting a TV?"

 "So we are not renting a TV?"

...I asked them both in disbelief.

It was March 2006 & after the experience of a lifetime at the Infosys Mysore training campus, I & the 3 others (let's call them A, B & C) from my engineering college in Mumbai, managed to get a posting at Pune after swapping locations with other trainees. As soon as we found a flat in Pune, we started buying/renting stuff. While many things got discussed, no one spoke about a TV!

"Who has time for TV? We need to prepare for CAT!" announced one of them, for the two (A & B) of them. I & the other bloke (C), who had no plans for further studies tried to protest, but in vain.

I'd see these two blokes come back daily after office & start studying. For the first month, I managed to kill time, but then after some thought I decided to take a shot at CAT too. We used to come down to Mumbai every Friday evening & back Monday morning, so I enrolled in a coaching institute to get coached over the weekends.

Both A & B had clear goals - "get thru one of the top 5 MBA institutes or not do an MBA". For me, my goal was one, to get an institute in Mumbai (due to family constraints) & two, get into a good institute (that was better than not doing an MBA at all). So all 3 of us prepared, working as software engineers by the day & MBA aspirants by the night.

Cutting short to the results, A & B scored better than me. However, the score did not augur well for their targeted institutes. Luckily for me, I was able to get through one of the respectable institutes in Mumbai. "A" decided to continue working & subsequently enrolled for an MBA from a good school abroad. After another attempt, B decided he was going to stick to plan B (MBA from the institute of his choice or no MBA). C - the jolliest of us all, never had to stress about any of this as MBA was never an aspiration for him.

As I look back about 15 years later, A, B & C have settled in the US since a decade. Are any of us more "Successful", "Happy", "Wealthy", "Famous" than the other? None of us probably knows or cares, coz these are scales set up by society to measure human emotions & mental state and while they do serve their utility to some extent, beyond a point one realizes that one only needs a very basic amount of wealth, health & mental peace to survive (or thrive) & get through the 365 rotations of the planet year after year.

One of us did an MBA from a top school, one from a school that wasn't in the top 5, one gave it a shot & refused to compromise on his plan & one still works at Infosys today. I believe each one is happy & successful if they view themselves from the other's perspective, yet in the dark moments each might be laden with self doubt about the efforts/choices they made in their journey so far.

Ironically, one of the biggest RAT races that students face early on is called a CAT and the recent talks about the results got me thinking about our CAT days.

By the way, we did rent a TV once we took our CAT.

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