My first day at Internshala
I recently graduated from NIT Jamshedpur with two job offers in hand. Job offer- this reminds me of brutal GPL sessions (come on, we all know what GPL stands for, and if you’re really naïve, I’m sorry I am not going to strip it for you). You see the most interesting part is I ditched one of the offers, and the second offer- they just showed me the mirror. God! It was really a harsh experience for me to get ditched. But what the heck, I am smart enough to get a job.
I set foot for Bangalore thinking that there would lot of opportunities in the ‘Silicon Valley of India’ for an Electronics graduated that too, from a branded college. But the grass on the other side is not always green. One morning, I stumbled on to Internshala’s advertisement on the ‘entrepreneurship internship’. I gave it a shot and the fortune favored me.
Preoccupied with plethora of thoughts- should I have gone for the job I was offered or should I have gone for the IES etc., I arrived at Internshala’s office in Gurgaon. Oh! Nobody’s here- I was a little early. The journey of the day begins, after waiting for 15 minutes at the reception, some humble guy walks in- just for the record, it wasn’t Sarvesh. I introduced myself to him, “Hey, I am Shadab and I’ll be working with Sarvesh at Internshala.” The techie (I presumed from his look) was really very welcoming. Also, he ushered me to Internshala’s office- thanks to him. Here comes Sarvesh- apologizing for being late- damn! I’ll have to look for convincing excuses lest I get late.
The environment around the office, it’s a tiny lovely business centre where four new start ups are brewing, I found it really conducive- surrounded by intellectual youngsters endeavoring to materialize their visions. I didn’t know how to react when Sarvesh told me that there were only two people working in office, I being the 2nd one. I felt both irony and amusement. I had a hunch that it would be boring, but I must confess that my intuition was very wrong. The very first thing we did was we thoroughly discussed the very eccentric idea-Internshala. As I imbibed the idea I got super excited; I realized that it has enough momentum to cause a paradigm shift in the Indian employers’ recruitment attitude.
Although I do admit that if I went for a big corporate job there would have been a fancy party at some fancy hotel, but I would not have enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed the maggy and tea at Internshala office. I sincerely hope that this experience would be like a ‘relic’ which I will relish throughout my life.
