The Shadow on the Wall by Manoj Nair
The Shadow on the Wall
Copyright 2014 Manoj Nair
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
About the Author
Chapter One
Hari adjusted his tie for the tenth time. He knew that the knot was perfect. There was no way it would not have been perfect, his father had knotted it or him. All that he had done, was loosened the knot and placed it in the suitcase while packing. Luckily, the room he was in was air-conditioned, it was the middle of March, and in hot, humid Mumbai, a tie was the last thing anyone would want to wear. He looked down at his shoes. There was a coating of dust on them. On the bus, he had not been sure as to where he was supposed to get down and had gone a kilometer up ahead. The walk back, had put the dust on the shoes. He checked to see if anyone was watching then began rubbing his shoes against the back of his trousers. The candidate sitting next to him caught this, and smiled. Out of the corner of his eye, Hari looked at the young man. His shoes were shinning, his shirt his trousers everything looked costly. He was even wearing a heavy wristwatch. He had on a strong perfume, which was giving Hari a headache..
‘ Rich kid,’ he thought and sighed.
The interview was to start at nine in the morning. He had reached half an hour before the scheduled time, but had found the hall was already packed. All those who came for the interview had a small plastic tag, which said ‘Visitor’. The instructions were that they had to attach it to the front of their shirts, and keep it-displayed prominently, while on the premises. The sofas in the reception area were already full. Those left standing got some plastic chairs.
The technical interview panel was in a cabin, next to the reception area. After the interview, those selected stayed back while the others handed over the plastic tags and left. The next round for those who had cleared the technical rounds was a meeting with the HR team. Hari had been observing all this closely. There was nothing else to do. He and the young man sitting next to him were the only candidates left in the room now.
Hari peeked through the folder, which he had on his lap. All his mark lists were there. His B.E results were arranged semester wise. The photocopies were in a separate section in the folder. He checked the copies of the passport size photographs. Yes, there were a dozens of them in a separate cover.
He looked at the clock on the wall. It showed 3.30 in the evening.
“Mr. Rajesh, you can go in now,” the receptionist said. The young man sitting next to him got up and went towards the interview room.
The receptionist looked at him, smiled, and whispered, “Best of luck”.
Hari went through his certificates one more time. It would be his turn next. He looked around and realized how huge this office was when compared to his previous employer’s one-room workplace.
‘And this is only their reception area’, he thought.
The entire office was air-conditioned and occupied two floors of a skyscraper in Andheri, one of the suburbs of Mumbai. The train journey to reach here had been the first he had made in his life, alone. This was his first job interview in a year and Hari was desperate to make a good impression.
Mentally, he began checking his strengths and weaknesses. Language would not be a problem here for as an Army man’s son, he had travelled across the country and knew Hindi quite well. English, he could manage with slight grammatical errors. He knew that in the software industry, technical skills were all that mattered. His academic records were also not that bad.
He had stood second in his district, in his board exams. His village, Devipuram, was around ten kilometers from Trivandrum, the capital of his home state of Kerala. Overnight, Hari had become a celebrity in his village. His photos appeared in all the major newspapers and he even got a five second mention on the evening TV news. The school had held a function to facilitate him. A girl from another school had topped the district. Her parents were doctors and she had tutors for each subject. What had made Hari’s story special for the media was that, he had achieved his success without any help from guides or tutors. His father would anyways have not been able to afford it.
V.N.K Pillai had retired as a Subedar, a noncommissioned officer, from the Army. The family survived on the pension V.N.K got for the years he had put in the army. Hari’s mother, Devaki was a homemaker. The family had one more member, Hari’s younger sister, Priya, who was six years younger to him.
After the spectacular success of his board exams, his grades two years later had been just average. His father had noticed it and had given him a piece of his mind. V.N.K was not one to sugar coat his words. When they flowed from his tongue, they burnt and scalded all, who were unfortunate enough to be in their path.
“Do you think money grows on trees?” he had asked Hari. “I had put thirty years of my life on the borders, living away from my family, suffering extreme cold and heat. All of that for what…this? Do you know how much you have scored? You have managed a mere sixty percent. That is just a first class. That is thirty percent lower that the ninety, you got in your board exams,” he said, shouting at the top of his voice.
Devaki could hear her husband from the kitchen. Thirty years of marriage had taught her that running to her son’s aid when V.N.K was in full flow, only aggravated him further. She knew and so did Hari that the best way to handle V.N.K was to keep quiet, avoid eye contact, and let him finish whatever he had to say. Once he had exhausted his quota of words, he would cool down equally fast.
When it came to Priya, however, V.N.K’s rules were quite different. She was her father’s pet. No matter what she did, he never scolded her. The girl took full advantage of it and unlike her brother; she was below average in her studies.
“Girls do not need to study. Once she gets married all that would be left in her life would be pregnancy, motherhood and caring for a family. Let her enjoy as long as she is in my house,” V.N.K would tell Devaki.
Hari went on to get his BE in computer science from an engineering college in Trivandrum. Unlike most of the others in his Engineering College who had come in by paying lakhs of rupees as ‘donation’ to secure the seats, Hari had got in solely on merit.
After completion of his B.E, he had joined a small firm, Om Software, in Trivandrum. He had worked there for a year on a monthly salary of two thousand rupees. There they had made him work for more than twelve hours a day. At times, they even made him do some of the office work like getting tea for the boss or carrying the shopping bags when his Boss’s wife came to the office. Hari never complained about it for he desperately needed the experience, which he knew would help him in his career.
At Om, he learnt everything about development. He knew that all programmers dreamt of joining big companies. The big firms paid well, but there the developer would end up as a member in a team of a thousand. This is where a one-room enterprise like Om stood apart. At Om, the developer was on live projects from day one. The programmer got an opportunity to learn everything from requirement gathering, analysis, system design to actual development, unit testing and deployment. Direct interaction with the client was another part of the learning experience. The application developed at an organization like Om would be nowhere near, what the software majors put out in terms of code quality or levels of testing, but for the developer the experience gained, would be complete. It covered the entire scope of the software development process. His tenure at Om had come to an abrupt end as one fine morning the owner suddenly decided to close shop. The owner had decid
Hari smiled as he remembered all this. His parents, they seemed so far away now. It was just two days back that he had caught the train from Devipuram and come to Mumbai. Indigo Software, was a multi-national software services provider with offices in all corners of the globe. This job opening was for its office in Mumbai. They required a Dotnet developer for a project, which was to start in a month’s time. They wanted a minimum of a year’s experience, and that, was exactly what Hari had.
Sitting in their Mumbai office, Hari looked around him. The hall was huge; on one side, it had a glass wall, which had the entrance door. There were plush sofas for visitors on two sides, the receptionist sat behind a desk, which covered part of one wall. Next to her desk was the entrance to the main office. Hari smiled as he remembered how small the office at OM was. The entire office could easily fit inside this reception area.
The receptionist looked up and saw Hari smiling. She thought he was smiling at her. One look at his frayed shirt collars and cheap trousers and she had sized him up. She was not looking at spending the rest of her life at the reception desk. She wanted to go ahead in life and knew that it was certainly not going to be with someone like this young man sitting in front of her, smiling from ear to ear. She looked at him and frowned.
‘Oh, she thinks I was smiling at her,’ he thought and looked away immediately.
The door of the cabin opened and the previous candidate stepped out. He went up to the receptionist, took out his plastic visitor-tag, handed it and whispered something. She smiled back at him.
The buzzer on the reception table interrupted their conversation. She looked at a piece of paper lying on her desk and called out, “Mr. Hari Kumar”, she said and returned to her conversation with the other candidate. Hari, jumped up, upsetting the folder in his lap, bent down picked it up and went towards her desk.
“ Should I go in now?” Hari asked.
“Why else would I call you?” she said, looked at the other candidate still standing at her desk and they both laughed.
“Thanks,” Hari replied. He was too tense to note the sarcasm in her tone and made his way to the cabin.
“Please may I come in Sir?” Hari asked at the door.
“ Yes, please, and please keep the door open, the smell of perfume from the previous candidate is too strong in here. I can hardly breathe,” said one of the interview panelists. The two other men on the panel laughed. They were sitting behind a desk and facing them was a single chair for the candidate.
Hari reached for the certificates in his folder as soon as he sat down.
“No.. no… we don’t need your certificates right now,” the person in the middle said. “We will first ask you a few questions, and then we will decide what to do with your certificates. Are you ready for your technical interview?”
“Yes, Sir”, Hari replied.
“Can you tell us what is the difference between public, static and void?” one of the panelist asked.
Hari smiled, the opener was easy. The questions came one after the other.
“Can multiple catch blocks be executed?”
“What is an object? “
“What are Custom Control and User Control? “
“What is the difference between value types and reference types? “
“What is an interface class?”
Half an hour later, Hari got up to leave.
“Wait outside,” the man in the middle said.
“Ok Sir,” Hari said,
“You do not need to call me Sir, my name is Gopalakrishnan. You can call me Gopi” he said and smiled at Hari.
The receptionist did not look up from her work, but held out her hand. Hari ignored her and went towards the sofas.
“You can go now,” she said.
“But I was asked to stay,” Hari said.
“Who said that?” she asked.
“Mr. Gopalakrishnan - in the cabin said that,” Hari said.
“Let me check,” she replied sounding unconvinced. She called up someone on the intercom, listened for a few seconds, and put the phone down. With an incredulous look on her face she said, “You have to wait. There will be a HR round next. If you clear that you are selected.”