Why Engineering? - Part I

After a long time I am writing something very personal. I have been asked this question a lot of times by many of my friends. Every single time I would just reply it’s a very long story and dodge. There are only a handful of my very close friends who know this flashback of mine. And here it is for all of you to read and contemplate on.

After 12 months of taking Pre-sea training at IMU, Chennai I was too reluctant to join engineering when my parents tried convincing me. I spent the next whole year at home and traveling almost the length of India trying to get myself on-board a ship so that I could spend the rest of life traveling the world. I went to Mumbai twice and literally passed the days over the whole stretch of the world’s largest city shuttling between places in the metro trains. But the whole Mumbai operation ended in vain and I couldn’t get on-board even after a lot of efforts.

While returning from Mumbai I came to know about an agent in Dehradun who then promised to get myself on-board for a kickback of 1 lakh. That seemed pretty cheap compared to the 4-5 lakhs asked for by the Mumbai agents. So I was convinced enough to take a trip to Dehradun instantly. It took me another fortnight to start the journey though.

The train journey across Indian states are the most pleasant ones a traveller can ever dream of. You get to meet a lot of people from different states. There were many funny moments that took place in the train. I’ll share them in a different post. Let’s just stick to why engineering in this one.

So flash forward the Dehradun train journey and I was on the other side of the table negotiating the ‘service charge’ of the agent. Even though the clauses very not in my favour, I agreed to the deal as I was so short sighted on my adamant interest on getting on-board a ship immediately. The deal was 1.2 lakhs (due to an alleged better merchant ship) and I would be joining within days in a ship docked at a port in Syria (And this was when Syria was in civil war). They had my passports and stuffs to get the visa ready within the next day.

The money was not paid yet. It had to be transferred from the father’s account the next day.

Before I get more into the happening, I should now give you an insight on why I chose to seal the deal even though it wasn’t fair enough.

  • Money. (Yep I badly wanted to be financially independent and the salary they promised me in the ship was good enough)
  • Travel the world

But things didn’t turn out the way I expected. I found the whole agent establishment fishy the night when I interacted with a Kashmiri guy staying with me. He said that the agent had rented that building to run his institution which only has an overall strength of 8 students. And the agent had given me three bank accounts to transfer the money to. They were all belonging to banks in various parts of India like Bhopal, Ahmedabad etc… So the whole thing made me think! And that’s when I got rid of short sight and started thinking deeply.

The next day, I just went to him and said I don’t want to continue with the deal and even before telling him I asked my dad not to do any money transfer. The agent was adamant and he asked for compensation of visa charges which I am damn sure he would have spent a penny on. All alone in a place where no one spoke my language and thousands kilometres away from home, I could not think better.

I just called my dad and he asked me to come back. I said my passports and certificates are with them. He said let them eat it if they want and just asked me to come back.

And the return journey made all the difference.

(More tomorrow)

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