The campus recruitment of Cognizant Technology Solutions at Jadavpur University reassured me that all talks surrounding whether the Bengali middle class youth is increasingly forgetting its 'bhadrolok' values & sentiments & turning out into 'hybrid' Bongs is grossly misplaced. We are where we've always been – firmly attached to our Bengali roots of hypocrisy!
How else do you explain students from all the departments of not only Engineering, but also Science & Arts, slogging it out for a job that has got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with whatever they have been learning in their graduation or Masters course? Even Ph.D. scholars of our department (& most definitely of other departments too), who have been researching on God-knows-what topics for God-knows-how-many years, got into their neatly ironed formals and queued up unabashedly along with us. M.Tech., MBA, MS, M.A. (the last category includes even an engineering student who had been daring enough to make such an unconventional choice, but evidently was not bold enough to stick to it) – whatever the declared future COA till date may have been, almost each & every non-placed guy turned up. Everyone was eager to land the twentyfive grand job that makes no distinction between a Jadavpur & a Dumkal, a Comp. Sc. & a Construction Engg., or even between an engineering guy & an arts/science student.
'Aal izz well' guys! We may work on projects dealing with the latest state-of-the-art technology. We may dream of being the next big scientist (technical or pure science), the next big writer, or the next Indian on the Forbes top 10. But when it comes to making that taking that ultimate decision, making that final choice, we still can't get out of the cozy comfort zone of a typical run-of-the-mill job, a typical family-life, a typical professional life, and then a typical retired life. For the educated Bengali youth, landing a 'good job' is still considered the biggest achievement possible – not only by society, but even by the youth themselves.
Of course there are other events too that signify that 'Bengaliness' is still alive & kicking. Consider this blog post itself. Everyone around me knows how determined I have been not to accept a job after graduation, even if I don't get into a good B-school this year. But after showing 'exemplary courage'(according to some people & not me) by bunking all companies after Adobe, even I couldn't resist the temptation (or fear, who knows...) and found myself mugging up Insertion sort feverishly at 9 p.m. on Wednesday. Over & above that, here I am ranting on & on against the typical Bengali 'risk-avoiding' mentality. Isn't this the perfect case of a 'gyanpapi' *, which is again a typical characteristic of the Bengali?
Translations for my non-Bengali readers [I sincerely hope that you do exist, because the cardinality of your Bengali counterparts isn't likely to be considerably higher than zero]:-
* Gyanpapi – someone who does a particular activity while simultaneously lecturing on why it is bad & should not be done
