Its in the air !!

Today I happened to speak to someone from good old IIT days. This guy Yash, graduated from the bachelor's course in the same year as I did from MBA. After graduation he joined ITC, while I moved on in the banking domain. In IIT, we were introduced to each other by virtue of him having been the coordinator of the English Literary society before I was. I remember having interacted with him for a lot of reasons other than the ELS. One such was the protest on George Bush's visit to India, which I was almost dragged into because my beloved Prof. Rahul Varman had taken a lead on it. Anyone on campus knew that I could be lured into anything in which Prof. Varman was party. And I have strong reasons to believe that Prof. Varman knew that himself. Anyhow...that shall be a different piece of analysis...that requires more data and hence I shall refrain from doing....
Coming back to my telephonic conversation with Yash today. So far there have been several occassions when I resurrected contacts with some old pals from campus ( considering I have a habit of losing contact easily), but never did the experience feel so unique as it felt today. The primary reason for that was the industry in which Yash works - manufacturing!!
In today's world the manufacturing industry though has not lost importance but sure has lost mention. With the services sector booming, and India haing been labeled as the next big place for churning & exploiting human capital in an intellectual arena, the mention of the manufacturing industry seems to have thinned down. Not only that, with most of our generation(those with our kind of educational background) choosing the services sector over manufacturing (i guess the choice for most of us in our generation is pretty easy & obvious,looking at the abundant availability of jobs in this sphere) availability of people who could even give a fresh perspective on what the industry looks like & where it is heading towards is not ample. Looking at the dearth of such people, my conversation with Yash was rather refreshing.
Though the kind of problems that Yash mentioned existed with his job, were pretty much similar to what any youth of the services industry would also portray but the flavor & light in which he portrayed those experiences were unprecendented to my knowledge.
He mentioned about the level of excitement in his job during the inital days, when he was being trained & the process in which he was working was being established. He mentioned having reared the process right from having to buy the machinary, getting it installed, having it run, and then graduating into the mundanity of monitoring it. I dont think these sequence of activities are any different for anyone in the services sector. I myself have been in Bank of America since the inception of my process, and have seen the same steps happening in the flavor of 'services'.
He mentioned considering the option of doing an MBA in order to break the cycle of what he is currently doing. Very similar to what any engineer who has got into the cycle of software engineering would want to do. But the different flavor to his reasons for doing an MBA was the unavailability of ample jobs in the market, which is pretty understandable, considering that this sector is very mature in India, and place for today's youth who is constantly looking for a challenging role is scarce.
He mentioned about politics at work place, and I think the unanimity of that can be felt right from service to manufacturing to home as sectors. So nothing much to elaborate on that.

All in all, during the course of the conversation we came to a point wherein we said that though the problems that we both were talking about have similar underlying principles, another major problem that we have had is that after having spent time in IIT (me for 2 years & him for 4 years) our definition of intellectually challenging jobs had changed leaps & bounds. Which was also one reason why we were in the state of believing that our jobs have an element of mundanity. I confessed that my demand for intellectual challange had changed so much in the 2 years I spent at IIT & I wondered what it did to someone who spent 4 years there. To that Yash made a very unforgettable comment. He said " It wasnt about 2 or 4 years, It was all about the air we breathed. It was about the air of that place that made so much difference in the way we think & percieve challenges". I couldnt have agreed more!!
I told him that last week was MBA alumni meet at IITK, and I didnt go. One way I had convinced myself on not going was by asking myself whether I had achieved enough to go back & stand proudly in my alma mater. But the truth remains my alma mater doesnt ask me that, my alma mater is indiffferent to that, my alma mater is off the rat-race of assessing someone by their resume, their visiting card or their payslip...that is where I know that my alma-mater has more substance, and there is something about its air that makes it overlook so much in me and still consider me a part of it.
Even across sectors - manufacturing & services, there seemed to be unanimity on the fact that "There was something unusual in the air of IIT..."