Soul Searching at 4 AM: Never a good idea

There is something mesmerising about watching molten aluminium flow. Those few seconds between ladle and furnace were one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. As I stood transfixed on the cast-house floor, a crane passed overhead, and the shouts of my fellow students shook me out of my reverie. If that thing fell on you, your hard hat couldn't save your ass. After a considerably pissed Sreedhar - who I suspect is scared of me - gave me a lecture on safety, I thought that for the first time in my life, it all meant something. That being an engineer wasn't just memorising Reynold's Transport Theorem. The sheer brilliance of that pink liquid drew me to a life spent in factories like this. And then, the BLC tour guide ruined it all by rattling off figures and capacities and temperatures and procedures.

I was never meant to be an engineer. Well, I was, but only in the life planned out for me by my parents. In the larger, dare I say cosmic, sense, I was always meant for greater things. Or so I said to myself on numerous occasions. The seminal novel in Anglo-Indian literature, the Pather Panchali of the twenty-first century, the celebrated role in breaking the deadlock in multinational trade talks, the daily dispatches from the latest African war zone... these were all, and - I'm not ashamed to say it - still are, roles that I saw myself playing in my eventful life. A bestselling biography, starting with, "To everyone else he was an enigma. To his sister, he was just a pig," would be written by the Roman Rolland of the day.

But, life's a bitch that way. Through some bad decisions, quick capitulations and great expectations, I find myself at the end of two years of engineering. I'll make a bad engineer, I know that much. Why? Because I do not, can not, love engineering. Because I will always be drawn to the poetic splashing of rapidly cooling aluminium, or the redness of the furnace, rather than the beauty of the elegant Hall-Heroult process or the complexity of an Integrated Circuit. Because when someone tells me about how the unions are ruining their industry, I retort by saying that the unsafe conditions at the plant are a good reason for the latest strike. Because I recoil at the amount of pollution spewed out by the massive chimneys more than I am impressed with the 13 Thermal Power Plants in Korba.

I'm not taking the high ground here. I know how important aluminium smelting is for our economy. It's just that I could not live with myself if this became my life. Not because it's inhuman, but because it's not me. I couldn't take the pressure that the engineers I've talked to live with. Not because I can't take pressure, but because my heart wouldn't be in it. Of course, it'll be extremely hard to walk away from engineering, considering all my formal education is centered on it. And I'll be turning my back on a comfortable lifestyle, the kind I've been brought up on (let's face it, for all the leftism I claim to possess, I am but an upper middle class kid who can't use an Indian style toilet).

The dilemma depresses me. And it troubles my parents. But it exists. And it must be resolved. The thing is, I've been digging myself a deep hole for the better part of twenty years. And the prospects of getting out of it, and living the life I alway wanted to live, and signing copies of the biography I always wanted written about me, are looking bleaker every day.