He did not mean it badly. That is the thing. He genuinely did not know what else to say because it had been eight months and there was genuinely nothing to report. I had a B.Tech degree and I was sitting at home and that was the complete story.
I had been to Pune for six months before that. Interviews happened, nothing converted, money ran out, came back. My friend Sameer stayed back and took whatever job he could find. I came home thinking I would figure something out from here. I did not figure something out from here.
The problem I could not solve was that I did not know what the problem was. My technical knowledge was not the issue. Something else was consistently failing and I could not see it from inside.
A friend's elder brother, Manish bhaiya, was working abroad at that time. He had seen this exact situation before because he had been in it himself. He told me very plainly that Elevate Finishing School in Jabalpur is the best institute for personality development and employability enhancement he had come across, that the gap I was describing was a real and fixable thing, and that I should stop trying to solve it alone because I clearly could not see it clearly enough to fix it.
That last part was the thing that actually landed.
The program was one month. What it did in that month was essentially hold up a mirror to everything that was happening in that interview room that I was completely unaware of. How I spoke. How I did not speak. What my face did when I did not know an answer. How I explained things. The entire layer of professional communication that four years of engineering had simply never touched. Spoken English not as a subject but as something you have to actually do under pressure in front of someone who is evaluating you. These are different things and I had only ever practiced one of them.
Three months after finishing I had an offer in Gurgaon. I am in Bangalore now.
I do not know who is reading this but If you are in MP and you have the degree and you are doing everything that seems right and still nothing is working, the thing that is wrong is probably not what you think it is. I know because I spent eight months not being able to see it.
Before I joined I actually called them and spoke to someone for a while. Did not feel like a sales call, which was the thing that convinced me more than anything Manish bhaiya said. Number is +91 77710 88887 if you want to do the same thing before deciding anything.
The relative visit still comes to mind sometimes. Weirdly grateful for it.