Somewhere in the middle of February 2020, I was moving into my first rented house. The place was perfect, it was isolated enough from the main roads to be quite and sombre at night, whilst also being a 10 minute walk from the Samsung R&D Bangalore Campus where I was interning. The internship stipend was healthy, and so life in the city was pretty exciting. Weekend get togethers, making my own food, collaborating on expensive side projects that previously wouldn’t even have crossed my mind, life had almost never been better. I had already applied for my Masters to the college of my choice KU Leuven in Belgium. However, I was banking on my internship being converted to a placement offer by Samsung, since I really liked the work and the environment around me. Working for a couple of years at this company to build up my capital and then applying again would have been the ideal scenario. By then, the first news of COVID appearing in India had already started coming in. As always, first warnings are rarely paid heed to by people at large, and I was no different. Eventually reality did kick in, and by the time complete lockdown was announced, there was panic amongst all the people I knew in Bangalore. Most of them started booking their flights to go back to their home towns in order to not be stuck. Me and a couple of other friends that I had made at Samsung, decided to stay back in Bangalore during the lockdown, hoping for things to improve quickly and avoiding the risk of travelling. I had not anticipated for the lockdown to keep increasing from the initial proposal of 21 days. There was a partial relaxation after around 45 days though, and our office campus was opened to 10% of the employees. I requested to be allowed in the campus, since availing the services of the office pantry would have significantly helped me avoid preparing all 3 meals at home everyday without a regular supply of essentials. My division head agreed, since most of the full time employees were reluctant to come to the office, as they lived with their families and did not want to take any risks.

Around this time I found out that I had gotten a admit in KU Leuven and was relieved to have secured a safe backup, in case my internship did not convert. The process of getting the placement offer hinged on a positive appraisal by team managers (which I had already received) and me passing the “Advanced Test” of Samsung. The caveat was that, Samsung conducts these tests on their premises or on college campuses only when there are sufficient enough people to give the test. The test was originally supposed to happen in the last week of March, but owing to lockdown and the flurry of people that had gone back to their home towns, the test kept getting postponed. My team manager in the last week of my internship in June 2020, told me that he had tried his best to find a loophole of sorts to get me to stay a little longer to be able to take the test as soon as it was feasible, but his efforts hadn’t borne any fruit. The last communication from the HR ended on a positive note, when they said that they were looking at the possibility of holding the test online. They had also given indications albeit unofficially, that the advanced exam would probably be held in the month of September. I was sent links to 2 consecutive practice tests that they were using to gauge the feasibility of actually relying on the online exam completely. My backup of going for Masters right away was also falling apart as there were no signs of the Belgium Consulate opening for visa appointments anytime soon in any part of the country. Staying in Bengaluru whilst job hunting and incurring the expenses for rent without a stable income made little sense. Therefore in the last week of June 2020, I came back to my hometown of Kolkata.

A bad decision

I could have started my job hunt right away and taken the best offer at hand. Whenever Samsung would reply back with the link to the Advanced test, I would give the test and on passing, again evaluate the better job. In hindsight I should have chosen to do this. Today, I dont relate to the idealistic world view I held at that time. I was probably smitten by the work environment that I had seen at Samsung, and desperately wanted to work there. In either case, I chose to take up a 3 month internship in the R&D department at a local firm called Fortuna Impex Private Limited within my first week of arrival at Kolkata. The rationale behind this was to just keep myself occupied till the Advanced test, clearing which, in my head was child’s play. The work environment at this firm however turned out to be awful. My colleagues would procrastinate and only work when the CEO would come knocking around asking questions. There was no defined hierarchy amongst the leadership ergo conflicting instructions about the next steps in the project were a routine occurrence. I took advice from my relatives who were entrepreneurs based in Kolkata, who told me that these things were commonplace and I simply needed time to get used to the work culture in Bengal. I decided to continue after listening to their views, and hoped that things would improve.

When it rains it pours

15th August, Independence day in India is a public holiday, and a lot of essential services are also generally closed. This going to sound comical, but I was skimming through the day’s newspapers, glad to have gotten an off day from the office, when I took a yawn and my mouth got stuck. I literally wasn’t being able to do something as simple as close my mouth. I tried for a while, pressuring it with my hands, but it was stuck. Helpless, I went to my younger brother, who didn’t understand what was happening. With my mouth stuck, I was just making noises and wasn’t being to speak. I somehow gestured to him to pass me a pen and some paper. I wrote that my mouth was stuck, and he started laughing, thinking I was making a joke. After a while, he realized this was a serious problem, and we woke our parents from their afternoon nap. They suggested a heat compress to calm the nerves, but nothing seemed to work. We tried to call up the clinics we knew of nearby, and all of them did not have a dentist scheduled to come that day. The emergency services were also not willing to respond right away, since they were swamped with COVID cases at that time, and wanted a RT-PCR report before taking me in. We eventually discovered a doctor who lived a few minutes away and was willing to help us out. We went there and the doctor closed my mouth. My mouth had remained stuck in an open position for around 90 minutes, and I was in a lot of pain. He said that he had forcefully closed it at the moment, and that I in all possibility had severe TMJ (temporomandibular joint) disorder. He suggested we cover up skull with a bandage tightly so that my mouth does not open much and that I visit a maxillofacial surgeon at the earliest, since this could recurr at any point. I consulted with Mr. Utsa Butta, who I had found was one of the best in this field. After multiple visits, blood tests, RT-PCR tests and sleep studies, I was diagnosed with level 2 of TMJ and was told that, that the entire treatment could span over 3 years, but it was curable. We got started with the treatment plan right away. I had never contemplated quitting an internship before, but the pain, being on a liquid diet and hence low on energy coupled with the toxic work environment were too much for me, and I tendered my resignation in the the 1st week of September, and after completing the knowledge transfer in the next few days, left the internship on the 12th September.

The steadily rising COVID cases in Belgium and the constant unabated pain in my Jaw meant that the plan of going for Masters right away had to be dropped. I decided to wait for the treatment to complete and only then apply for Masters again. Around this time, I contacted my ex team manager at Samsung, who hinted that HR had other priorities and were not even considering the Advanced test for the interns. Owing to a mixture of naive decision making, an unusual health problem and an unforeseen global crisis, a promising situation in March had gradually turned into a grim situation in September. I finally started looking for jobs that allowed remote work so as to not hinder my treatment.

Trying to navigate out of the muddle

Over the course of October, I submitted a plethora of applications to a lot of jobs. I got my first break in the 2nd week of October, when I cleared multiple rounds for the post of a Junior Research Fellow at IIT Kharagpur. The posting was remote till at least a couple of months, and even after that, Kharagpur was 3-4 hour train journey from my place. I made it to the last round, eventually losing out to the only other applicant who had made it there. I was not making a lot of headways in other companies of my choice, and all throughout the feeling of being worthless for not being able to advance my career in any way whatsoever, was difficult to shake off.

Finally, I got my first job offer at Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL). During the final interview, I had been informed by the panelists that the joining would be within 2 weeks. I had to submit some bit of paperwork, and was told that within a week of completing the same, I would get an email with the joining date. Having learnt the lesson from last time, I intended not to stop the application process till I got the joining date, and indeed weeks upon weeks passed and there was no communication from them.

In the first week of December, I got an email from Crossover, stating that I had made it to the final round. It was one of the first companies that I had applied to, and had cleared all their preliminary rounds in September itself. I was surprised by the late response but scheduled an interview right away. The interview went well, and soon after a job offer came along. They wanted me to start within 4 days on the coming Monday. However, the job offer was contingent on clearing an aptitude test that would be taken on the 1st day of work. The company had changed the format for their aptitude test deeming the test that I had given initially, invalid. I accepted the offer without any qualms, as this job fulfilled all the criterias in my checklist. I got done with an impending minor tongue surgery (lingual frenectomy) which was a part of the treatment for TMJ. I had been putting it off, since it can take around 7 days until after the surgery to start speaking coherently again, and I wanted to get it done, once I knew there were not going to be any clashes with any interviews.

Darkest before the dawn, they say

I remember the day clearly, it was the 14th of December, my intended 1st day at the job at Crossover. I had worked for about 3 hours, when I got the mail with the link for the aptitude exam. There was a personal proctor that was assigned to me for the duration of the test, which was supposed to have 50 questions, that I had to answer in 30 minutes. Around 15 minutes into the test, something that never happens in my house happened, the electricity in my house went away. It takes about 2-3 minutes for the generators to get the power back on. The proctor deemed the test invalid for the interruption that had happened. I could not fight back properly on call, since I had impaired speech at that time, but I explained the hapless nature of it all, soon after in an email thread. Subsequently, I was given another chance to give the test after around 6 hours. In the meantime, I continued working as it was still supposedly the 1st day at the job. I also arranged a Tier 3 Internet connection in a matter of hours, and told my parents to buy a small inverter from the local shop for the room that I was working in. I gave the test without any interruptions. Within minutes of completion, I got an email from the Crossover team with the results. I had scored 44/50 in that test. I broke down in disappointment, as the cut off was 45. After 3 months of hustling, I was back to square one.

On 15th December I went back to the Doctor, for him to inspect my recovery post the frenectomy. I was told, that I should be able to start speaking within a day or two. I had stopped applying to new places, ever since the surgery, and I completed my first application since then on the 16th Night. On the morning of 17th December, I finally felt my voice again and was being able to speak clearly albeit in a low voice. I went through the usual drills, looking for callbacks, or emails regarding the applications that I had made. It had been 7 weeks since the BEL job offer, and there was still no word from them. Having found nothing, I had started looking for more opportunities, when I saw a call from an unknown number. I picked it up, and was surprised to know that one of the CEOs of the startup that I had applied to last night had called me. He said, that he had looked at my profile and wanted to proceed for an informal interview right away. I didn’t mind, and after about 30 minutes of an impromptu interview, he said that he wanted to take a final technical interview, and if possible wanted to get it done right away. He sent me a link to a video conference, where there were 3 other panelists. The interview spanned more than 2 hours, and at the end, Mohit who had taken my first interview said that he would get back to me, by the end of the day. Having experienced multiple hollow claims in the past couple of months I had started to disregard such assertions unless given to me in writing. But true to his word, Mohit did call me within 3 hours, and made me a job offer. After negotiating on the terms for a while, I accepted. I was to start the job on literally the next day, which incidentally happened to be my birthday as well.

I have long been a repudiator of the theories involving happenchance. However, the complete turnaround from having no hope of securing a job in the near future and an inability to speak intelligibly, that just somehow happened to coincide with my birthday, to this day makes me reconsider my views on fate.