| He
earns in dollars but spends in rupees Girish Bhagia | May
30, 2005 The most mysterious thing about education is that you never realise how it will help you. When I was in school, my friends and I would say, how will trigonometry help me in life? What difference does it make if I don't know the capital of Brazil? While it does not have a direct impact on your career if you don't know all this, the most important thing that education teaches you is how to learn. My father is a very, very intelligent man. Which had its pros and cons when I was in school. The good thing was, I got good genes. The bad thing was, my parents had very high expectations, education-wise, from me. But I hated school. Thanks to good genes, passing the examinations was easy for me. That is all I managed till Class X. At junior college, I don't know what happened. I started taking examinations seriously and worked hard. I got only 85% at my HSC exams -- good enough to get me into a descent engineering college in Pune, but far below my expectations. I was back to my old self, just wanting to pass my exams somehow.
I managed to finish my electrical engineering, thanks to ATKTs (Allowed To Keep Terms, a provision that allows a student to move on to the next year by giving him or her another opportunity to clear the exam in which he or she has failed) After my engineering, I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to work in the electrical engineering field. I did not know anything else. I sat at home doing nothing for about a year. My sister, who was in the US, asked me to apply there for further studies. I did that, along with getting into an MBA programme in Pune. I got into an M S Electrical Engineering programme at a pathetic school in a small town near Chicago. And I was off to the States. The flight to Chicago was long and boring, but it got me thinking about my future, finally! I knew what I had to do: 1. Get an assistantship. I applied for assistantship in several departments except my own as I wanted to change my major. I got it in the Physics department because of my electrical engineering background. I then changed my major and got myself enrolled at a business school with a specialisation in Information Systems. I also changed to Loyola University, Chicago, with an assistantship. One of my professors at Loyola, liked me and introduced me to a lady who owned a small software consultancy firm. Her name was Tania Neild, one of the most intelligent, smart, ambitious and hardworking women I have ever met. I found it hard to cope with school work, assistantship and a part-time web site development work. But I did realise this was a great opportunity, and I worked really hard. So, of course, when I graduated, I already had a high paying job lined up for me with a financial company where Tania had joined as CTO. I slogged there for two years. And I decided I have to look for opportunities in India. I always wanted to come back home. I convinced my boss about working from India -- it was not difficult, since she believed in working remotely. I came to India three years ago as a consultant working from home. I used my experience and contacts to slowly build a small firm called WebDev, Inc. with four employees doing software development for financial companies in the US. I making money in dollars, but spend in rupees. The grass
definitely looks much greener on my side! |
