Just Cognizant'ized

Well into the 101th hour of being Cognizant’ized , Iam compelled to say so far it has been wonderful time yet. Having planned since last night to scribble a few initial thoughts on the blog , I have had multiple revisions and re-statements of the lines just over a zillion times in my mind. How to sound knowledgable ( apparently ) , how to sound politically correct , how not to raise many an eye-brow over the write-up et al are just a few of the scares that pushed-n-pulled me simultaneously. In the end , jovial as my nature is , the best way to compose the first blog-post concluded to be the most natural way I know how to write. So here I go with the 100+ hours journey of entering into this wonderful place called Cognizant.

I shall recount my sojourn with the flashback which was no less than a filmy ‘Hera-Pheri’.

Sometime mid-2010 ( while I was in the US and planning to return to India )

I started having the four-year-itch (vis-a-vis the seven-year-itch) when all of a sudden my brother,who is a Cognizant’ian and my room-mate,yet another Cognizant’ine started speaking so high of their company’s. Afterall , who in this IT-world could ever be so very satisfied and contended with thy-company. Admit it or not , we all have constant whinings and complaints about every other thing pertaining to our employer. I too had many. Here, these two innocent souls were singing odes, which made me wake up in the dead of night in sheer disbelief. My employer too was among ‘The Big Daddy’s’ of IT world. How can other companies shadow the benefits of a behemoth of a company of mine?After so many interminable how’s , why’s and what’s I convinced myself that may I was sitting comfortably in my own cocoon of a la-la land without much attention to the market place. Absolutely oblivious to the market-heating up to the IT jobs , I was far off from India, the center of action, the eye of the twister. With the growing number of ‘knowledge sessions’ these two people subjected me to day-in and day-out , I made my resolve to check out if the reality is somewhere close to where these guys had been tormenting me about. There comes a point in your life, when you feel awkward seeing your own resume as compared to peers. In my case, I was never bereft of such feeling for even a single moment. My resume looked atypical of a 4/5 year experienced candidate, nothing to show-off, nothing which jumped off the page to wow anyone , no significant achievements to boast , not many awards to cite , not many technical skills to blurt , absolutely dead-meat resume, plain vanilla cut n dry profile. Quite surreptiously my brother had earned himself a large fan-base of friends who had approached him to “touch-up” their resumes with his superior command over language. He was so good at it, he managed to have a strike-rate of 100%, wherein he would “brush” their ordinary looking resumes elevated to the position wherein Sir Winston Churchill would feel slighted with accomplishments and citations of brilliance. I immediately summoned my brother in the dead-of-night ( EST) and discussed length and breadth of the polishing that needs to be done to my resume. There it all started, we time and again came back to our most revered SCM ( Software Configuration Management ) parlance , versioning of the resume. Versions 1.x did not go well ; so did versions 2.x; 3.x were the versions which seemed more likely of a good resume. My brother untiringly complied with all my requests and codified all the changes ( fonts, spacing,alignment,content,verbiage et al). In the end, it was decided that the “breathing document”(yes another term borrowed from IT) , it ought to be sent out. The countdown of my arrival started and we timelined that the interviews and all should be coincided aroundthe same time ( which was around the same time last year). He posted my profile somewhere around the last quarter of FY11 ( wow I sound like a manager) and “late-latief” as I am popularly known , it did not get much of attention till about closing days of December. One round of interview and I was pretty certain that I stand a very bright chance of breezing past the interviews round. ( Albeit less knowledgable , God has been kind enough to bless me with a decent level of communication skills, which saved my days many a time in the past as well).

Fast forward Jan 2011

With no response in sight and time running up, started the mutiple-chaining of emails with discussions going time and again. Soon enough, I was getting doubled ( no reference to size ) , my marriage got fixed after months and thousands of man-hours of discussions. She was employed with yet another IT major. So making a job shift was becoming the task-of-the-hour. Round after round, telephonic discussions went on until we aligned on the final list of Go-No Go issues.

Come Feb-2011

Raj gets married and lives thereafter.

March-April-May 2011

The resignation from my company, notice period discussions, retention strategies , onsite travel lures, accomodative work-schedules, the proverbial “Work-Life Balance” promises , promotions et al, all came my way. However, after deciding , there should be no turning back, or in IT parlance “Point-of-no-return”.

June 2011

The ninth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month of 2011 was the reporting time to the Cognizant office@DLF,Hyderabad. It is precisely at such impending moments of life when the whole Big-Bang theory comes to life. The entire universe seems to be conspiring against you making it almost impossible to make it through. The auto-driver who had sworn the previous evening to pick me up does’nt show up;the stand-by autos nearby to my house suddenly vanish into thin air;the distance to march towards the next main road seems to be increasing at the rate of 10-light-years per second;one auto-driver sensing my desperation quotes exhorbitant money to land me at office;one of the experience letters had not been photo-copied;the auto-driver who agrees to drop drives at a sweet-own-leisure;the traffic signals seems to all get in sync and blink only red one after other;the driver misses the right-turn and instead races past ahead of the campus;the designated place of the induction is changed due to reasons best known to nobody so on and so forth.

Finally, I arrive at the board room and immediately get nostalgic about the last time when I had seen such a array of strewn papers to be signed on till the ink in the pen is over. That was four years ago. Now again, the same time, same ambience. The HR team had lined up a ton of rim of papers to be read and filled and signed and dated on. The tonnage of the paper work could have not been lesser than 2 tons per candidate. A few shockers sprinkled here and there;a few jokes,a few games, bundles of presentation sessions,volunteers walking in and out of the room articulating the ‘Sea of C’s”. I just got to wondering if there are as many C’s in the decks , then how many more would be encountered while working. The answer struck me almost instantly. To count the C and get over-whelmed is nothing new, better stop the count and concentrate more on the operational aspects. My previous employer had the noteirity of sloshing everyone with the sheer number of acronyms, the longer you stay the more number of acronyms get into your head. After the second year over there, I could make up a few of my own. After a point , my name as well got acronymised GRS with one of the client portfolios. Then I ended acronymization lest it should creep up to my family members as well.

So finally after an 8-hour shift of reading and signing documents infinitely the day came to a close with opening of the new bank accounts. The 22-member batch of new joinees bade good-byes and good lucks to one another promising to keep in touch. The presenters wished good stay and long tenure at Cognizant to all of us. Prominent members from our batch were very very jolly and we all were happy to start our new innings in our professional careers.

Here I am sitting in the confines of one of the premises of Cognizant and trying to post a blog and multi-tasking with the initial formalities of system updations.

Concluding my post with a few words of genuine appreciation and support to all who had helped me come on-board with a lakh of other Cognizant’ines , I can manage to say a whole hearted Thank You. I appreciate your help and support. I truely feel blessed to be in such a great place to work,have fun and grow professionally.