"This is the story of my classmate. It took me a little time to share this as it is prudent to take his permission.
He's an NRI from Japan, who was forced by his dad to do his engineering from an Indian University. His family moved to Japan when he was in 6th grade and with 6 years in Japan, he was very fluent in Japanese. Before moving to Japan, as he was studying in a small town Indian school, his English speaking skills were very basic, what you can expect from an average primary school Indian kid. He was able to speak Telugu, his mother tongue quite fluently though.
So what happens when you want to converse with people and you can't? He was able to talk in neither Hindi, which is understood by most of the people in college, nor English. He liked a girl and wasn't able to get along with her with this barrier. Imagine what would happen to the confidence levels, when a guy with a half-Portuguese girl friend in school is not able to converse with an average Indian girl in college. He was brilliant and had always scored good grades in Japan. But here, in a physics class, he asked us what acceleration was. We tried to explain him in layman terms, how a body moves and the velocity (speed with direction) increases at a constant rate. He had done his schooling in Japanese medium and all the English technical terms were alien to him. He had a very hard time coping up with the language.
And then one day he was caught in a ragging case. He was along with his friends who ragged another classmate of theirs. That classmate, being a little sensitive, mailed the Vice Chancellor reporting on few. The hostel warden found the videos of the sensitive guy getting ragged and almost everyone who were found in that were dismissed from college. Our guy was also in that video sitting on a bed and smiling. Most of his friends were out of college in few days and he was given a strict warning and sent out of hostel, but not dismissed as he was an NRI student. He wasn't allowed to write exams that semester and he had got 8 backlogs with that. And because of his difficulty with language, they kept piling up. He was staying with people completely new to him, from different schools of Engineering. Since he couldn't reveal all this to his parents, he had to adjust outside the hostel with the money equal to hostel fee. It was almost impossible.
When life was getting tougher and demanding for him, then came the IPL.
I think it was the second season of IPL and betting became quite prevalent in college. With most of them being filthy rich, and others wanting to extract money out of these, it was a rage those days. He started out with a thousand bucks and made 5k in the first betting itself. His predictions were so accurate that he made money out of almost every betting. He made 70k that season and bought his own ticket back to Japan for the winter break. He told his dad that he got the money from an internship.
The next semester, he joined a Japanese language teaching program where he was paid up to 12k a month for teaching on weekends. He was asked to take a Level 1 (Top level) Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), which he topped in India, by scoring just one mark less than a perfect score. The next highest score was around 200 marks lesser than his. Pay increased to 20k a month and he got to meet many old and experienced people in different industries who were trying to expand their opportunities by learning Japanese.
Meanwhile, back in college, he started improving his language skills. His English improved a lot and he was able to converse very well by his third year. He took French and did well in that too. He cleared his backlogs slowly and maintained a decent GPA. He started freelancing by translating Japanese documents into English and made a few bucks quite fast. They never paid him less than 5 grand for a one/two day job. He built his resume further and applied for a company which was ready to pay him 6 lakhs annually irrespective of his attendance in office during weekdays. By this time, he was in the final year. The courses got over fast and this guy started working full time. He switched to another company and now this time for a 9 lakh package when everyone else in college was preparing for campus recruitment of TCS/Accenture IT jobs which pay a paltry annual package of 3.16 lakhs.
I still remember the day when the placement coordinator was trying to counsel him when he said that he doesn't want to sit for the placements. The coordinator wasn't convinced when he said that he already had a job. He was trying to woo him into the perennial money making software field. But was shocked when he revealed how much he was already getting paid for doing the work he loved. This job of his was to sit on Japanese social networks and write detailed reports on changing credibility of the company in people's minds expressed on a social platform and how it can impact the stocks on a higher scale.
By the time everyone got placed, this guy had already started earning shitloads of money. He bought a Tag Heuer for 1.5L, invested in plots, bought stocks (profits again), partied hard. He fell in love with a girl, broke up and started reading philosophy. He received his half Portuguese ex-gf in Delhi when she visited India, took a Merc for rent and toured places. Right now, he has got an offer back in Japan in Toshiba with a fucking handsome package and is leaving India end of March this year. He says that it has been a roller coaster ride for him, loves the country and wants to come back. Coming to India was the best ever thing that happened to him. College fucked him up, left him in deep shit and somehow he managed to come out of everything and is able to live a good life, in spite of all those depressing moments. "
He's an NRI from Japan, who was forced by his dad to do his engineering from an Indian University. His family moved to Japan when he was in 6th grade and with 6 years in Japan, he was very fluent in Japanese. Before moving to Japan, as he was studying in a small town Indian school, his English speaking skills were very basic, what you can expect from an average primary school Indian kid. He was able to speak Telugu, his mother tongue quite fluently though.
So what happens when you want to converse with people and you can't? He was able to talk in neither Hindi, which is understood by most of the people in college, nor English. He liked a girl and wasn't able to get along with her with this barrier. Imagine what would happen to the confidence levels, when a guy with a half-Portuguese girl friend in school is not able to converse with an average Indian girl in college. He was brilliant and had always scored good grades in Japan. But here, in a physics class, he asked us what acceleration was. We tried to explain him in layman terms, how a body moves and the velocity (speed with direction) increases at a constant rate. He had done his schooling in Japanese medium and all the English technical terms were alien to him. He had a very hard time coping up with the language.
And then one day he was caught in a ragging case. He was along with his friends who ragged another classmate of theirs. That classmate, being a little sensitive, mailed the Vice Chancellor reporting on few. The hostel warden found the videos of the sensitive guy getting ragged and almost everyone who were found in that were dismissed from college. Our guy was also in that video sitting on a bed and smiling. Most of his friends were out of college in few days and he was given a strict warning and sent out of hostel, but not dismissed as he was an NRI student. He wasn't allowed to write exams that semester and he had got 8 backlogs with that. And because of his difficulty with language, they kept piling up. He was staying with people completely new to him, from different schools of Engineering. Since he couldn't reveal all this to his parents, he had to adjust outside the hostel with the money equal to hostel fee. It was almost impossible.
When life was getting tougher and demanding for him, then came the IPL.
I think it was the second season of IPL and betting became quite prevalent in college. With most of them being filthy rich, and others wanting to extract money out of these, it was a rage those days. He started out with a thousand bucks and made 5k in the first betting itself. His predictions were so accurate that he made money out of almost every betting. He made 70k that season and bought his own ticket back to Japan for the winter break. He told his dad that he got the money from an internship.
The next semester, he joined a Japanese language teaching program where he was paid up to 12k a month for teaching on weekends. He was asked to take a Level 1 (Top level) Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), which he topped in India, by scoring just one mark less than a perfect score. The next highest score was around 200 marks lesser than his. Pay increased to 20k a month and he got to meet many old and experienced people in different industries who were trying to expand their opportunities by learning Japanese.
Meanwhile, back in college, he started improving his language skills. His English improved a lot and he was able to converse very well by his third year. He took French and did well in that too. He cleared his backlogs slowly and maintained a decent GPA. He started freelancing by translating Japanese documents into English and made a few bucks quite fast. They never paid him less than 5 grand for a one/two day job. He built his resume further and applied for a company which was ready to pay him 6 lakhs annually irrespective of his attendance in office during weekdays. By this time, he was in the final year. The courses got over fast and this guy started working full time. He switched to another company and now this time for a 9 lakh package when everyone else in college was preparing for campus recruitment of TCS/Accenture IT jobs which pay a paltry annual package of 3.16 lakhs.
I still remember the day when the placement coordinator was trying to counsel him when he said that he doesn't want to sit for the placements. The coordinator wasn't convinced when he said that he already had a job. He was trying to woo him into the perennial money making software field. But was shocked when he revealed how much he was already getting paid for doing the work he loved. This job of his was to sit on Japanese social networks and write detailed reports on changing credibility of the company in people's minds expressed on a social platform and how it can impact the stocks on a higher scale.
By the time everyone got placed, this guy had already started earning shitloads of money. He bought a Tag Heuer for 1.5L, invested in plots, bought stocks (profits again), partied hard. He fell in love with a girl, broke up and started reading philosophy. He received his half Portuguese ex-gf in Delhi when she visited India, took a Merc for rent and toured places. Right now, he has got an offer back in Japan in Toshiba with a fucking handsome package and is leaving India end of March this year. He says that it has been a roller coaster ride for him, loves the country and wants to come back. Coming to India was the best ever thing that happened to him. College fucked him up, left him in deep shit and somehow he managed to come out of everything and is able to live a good life, in spite of all those depressing moments. "
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