Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - THE WHAT & HOW

    Personality development should ideally be an integral part of formal education, like sex education and ethics. You cannot stride out of the sublime portal of an institution waving a degree or diploma in your hand to hear the job market proclaim that you lack smarts, tact, finesse, dynamism, alacrity, presentability, confidence, and brilliance to qualify you for the post.

  What the interviewers find missing is personality. They advise you to work on it. Develop it. Enrich it. Once you have accomplished it, the market will unroll the red carpet for you to tread on towards the corridors of power and glory. Mere paper qualifications are not enough, cowboy. You need complementary skills to fortify your horse for the daunting tour of the rodeo.

  So, you join one of the parallel coaching outfits to equip you with all the accessories of the armour the job market found missing.

  Their cast iron, prefabricated modules consist of theory, practice, photocopies of notes, and audiovisuals. The transmission is punctuated with frequent demonstrations of role play, simulations, and skits calculated to enact stress situations that may arise in the workplace. At the end of the course, you are given a certificate, which you may or may not include in your job application.

  You are now an impressively harnessed, captured, and saddled horse. You are not only suffused with personality but also with the upbeat surge of pizzazz. The world is your oyster. You can pick and choose.

  The market rejects you. More than once. They still find you raw and inadequate. You have filled yourself with hand-me-down information and trivia. Yes, you have a personality, but it wobbles and crashes on account of brashness and gaucherie. Try to unlearn all the boilerplate rubrics that so-called education and training have stuffed you with.

  Cultivate the lightness of touch. Learn to carry the mountain as if it were a grain of sand.

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