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FROM KOOT ROAD TO HOSUR ROAD


Well KOOT road is ...(with no gravel......only mud and stones ) adjacent to my place madipakkam ,which I have to traverse daily to connect to the outer world ..(chennai is where the outer world begins :-) ). This brief article talks about how a solitary email changed the way i think and can possibly make my future (to be decided in 2 weeks.....stil waiting .... ).
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APPENDIX : koot road is in madipakkam (Chennai )
Hosur road is in bangalore (That's where INFOSYS city is located)
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Rewind a year back.............At approximately this time last year , our placement department head Mr Suresh had announced that a girl from our college of the 2003 of the IT dept(Radha rangaswamy) had made it thru INFOSYS and said it took months of hardwork and preparation to get there for her. I was listening to what he said with .......my eyes partially closed as i never belived a company like INFOSYS would actually be my destination , not even in my wildest dreams ........but today that line of thinking has changed, and this change has been only in the last 15 days.

Until july 18th I never thought cracking INFY was so easy , when my erstwhile benchmate and friend Achut got thru it with panache and he said all one needed was common sense and the right attitude to crack INFY .well that statement did make me belive that I too could get thru INFY incase i got a call to write a test (that was the biggest question ). but the night of July 27th changed all that....when i received an email from INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES... That was when I decided it was now or never for me, as I am not too strong in the technical programming domain (cant use that as an excuse anymore ) and Infy was the only company whose testing procedures didn't involve an ounce of technical in them and that was much to my liking.

But again , things again dont come easy and if they do , they dont last long ............the maxim proved true .......as i had to literally struggle with preparing for Infy as my mind had become rusted by sleeping 10-12 hrs a day. Initially the first few days of preparation with the Books authored by Sakunthala devi and George summers was a nightmare as it took me ages to get an answer to a question , leave alone understanding the question and then the solution ! !
But the concept of preparing with like minded friends who also had the test on the same day as me proved a boon for me as together one realised that .........we were all in the same boat......and other than aptitude , one needed loads of confidence,common sense and a thorough revision of previous papers. The previous papers ........as always were taken from CHETANA groups , thanks to some generous test takers who had the prescence of mind to note the questions they had.....even though their english grammar took a serious beating......and it took us hours to decipher what they meant.

On the day of the exam(august 8th ), I had mentally prepared myself to the fact that I would be attending my interview at Infosys on AUG 9 , and not be joining Polaris at navalur. This positive feeling and a sense of desperation to get Infy made my 60 minutes at the test ........my road to destiny..........and I was happy that I could keep pressure to a minimal extent and could solve maximum problems accurately.

But in this road to success and destiny along with the good news there does tend to be the bad news that tends to seep in . Even though I had qualified , a couple of my close friend with whom I had prepared didn't get through .......and the fact of waiting another 9 months for the next Infy test probably was hard to digest for my friends, and i could sense the dissapointment writ on their faces as I had been through several such situations writing so many tests in this 4 month period and flunking them.

The infy interview the next day at the sholinga nallur campus went off very well. It was more of a conversation where I had to sell myself and tell them .....why INFY needed a guy like me...? I spoke about my hobbies , which to the HR ladies sounded a touch unconventional (Blogging,collecting cricketing stats,trekking and event management )..........I came out of the interview room a much satisfied person...........but still the final decision lies in the HR's hands whether she would like to recruit me to work for INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES. generally it is said among people that if one is shortlisted from the written test for INFOSYS , then the HR interview is just a formality and the rejection rate is very low.............so I hope to qualify.........( I AM NOT JUMPING THE GUN...)

To actually know whether I did qualify for INFOSYS in their final list , just watch this space.
If i do qualify ...........It would mean that the journey from KOOT ROAD TO HOSUR ROAD would just fruition and would mark the end of a lovely journey (preparing for the exam,writing the test....etc) and the beginning of a life defining one .

Well finally comes the T H A N K S G I V I N G A W A R D S

My walkman (for staying with me and supporting me)

Achut (who helped me solve ... questions of past Infy papers )

sid,umesh,santosh and hari (who solved together, as well as wrote the exam along with me ).

KIRUBA (for introducing me to a unconventional hobby called BLOGGING ).

kishore,prasanna,devraj,joshy and ...vel-techies........for giving me various strategies to go about the exam

and a certain X ..... ( what are clocks and watches for anyway ? )
bye
kartik kannan, (kartik.kannan@gmail.com)
www.katchucrap.blogspot.com