BHEL Diaries

I started reading English August by Upamanyu Chatterjee. It is a story about a new recruit to IAS and his travails in his first year of training. It is a fun easy read. Reading it, though, took me back to 2009 and my first year of training at BHEL. My experiences were also somewhat similar.

So the story starts in May 2009. It was just after the great financial crises. There were no jobs. The hostel was unplaced. It was so bad that even one job was celebrated. I was a directionless soul who had squandered the opportunity BITS had given. My CG ( short for cumulative grade point average) was bang on average, not good enough to apply for MS abroad, and not bad enough to leave engineering completely. I had screwed up the CAT that year, so MBA was out of the question. With no jobs, the days were spent whiling away time and taking solace in being in the same boat as others. BHEL had come in once before and had rejected me. When I entered the interview room, they were packing up and had already filled the seats. The interview was a formality. An exercise in rejection.

Something changed then, though. I decided to get serious about my studies and health. I started studying seriously and running and decided to bring discipline to my life. As luck would have it, BHEL decided to come to campus again. This time, I was early in the interview and got selected. My English worked more than my engineering education.

So on July 28th, I reported at the BHEL Hyderabad campus at Lingampally and walked into a world very different from the one I had experienced before. The township was slightly outside the city and was self-contained. It demonstrated the confusion of post-independent Nehruvian India. While it aimed and was modeled on townships in the West, the resource constraints of newly independent India meant that while on the surface everything looked western, under the hood, there was a lot of jugaad. The township was old but had its charm about a time gone by. The walls of the official housing were damp. Some did not have earthing so on some days, the walls used to carry current. The original houses were supposed to have lawns. This was when the mode of transport was bicycles. Those lawns then transformed into car parking for which they were too small. There was also an officers club. The old-timers used to talk about dance balls and parties, which used to happen where liquor flowed freely. Now it was mostly used to host Durga pooja and other functions where the fare of mostly vegetarian and the only dances were by the children.

I was put in the newly refurbished Engineer Trainee hostel. It represented the new wealth that was just coming in the country. The rooms were big. The walls did not electrocute you and the beds were big and comfy. I liked the place immediately. The main avenue in the township was wide, tree-lined, and 3 Km long. It was perfect for my evening runs. The place had a bakery. The food was mediocre but it gave me freedom to opt out of the mess. The manufacturing plant itself was a behemoth. I was totally at sea in there. A person who had hacked his way through engineering was now supposed to design and produce machines that would power the country. I hoped that I could coast through and not be called out. That was my biggest fear in the earlier days.

I was assigned to the oil rigs division. It was the smallest department in the complex. A forgotten department whose revenue was probably a rounding-off error in the company’s income statement. I was sent to meet the GM, who used to sit in the main annex, about 2 km away from the department. He had an air of officialdom and brusqueness which usually comes when one has to show that one is excessively busy. He welcomed Rohit and me, a graduate of IIT Guwahati, who would join the department with me. Rohit was as clueless as me. We both encouraged each other and said we were not alone in this. The GM talked to us for 2 minutes and told us to be frank with him and share anything that was bothering us whether official or personal. I did not know whether to take this up seriously or let it pass. I decided to let this pass. We were ushered out of the GM’s cabin, never to see him again in two years of our stay there.

We trudged to our department two kilometers away. The lone floor in a standalone building. There I met the team that was to be with me for the next two years. There was my immediate boss. A man who wanted to do everything except work. He was from Bihar and always wished that he had cracked the civil service. He acted like an IAS Babu. He treated me as an IAS trainee. That meant that he was more interested in teaching me the art of bureaucracy and officialdom than in teaching me engineering. He had arranged a table, a chair, and a cooler for me in his innate desire to be an effective administrator. I was the only trainee to have them on his first day. Then there was our department head. A frail man who was a promotee. He had started as a supervisor and then risen to be in the officer cadre. He was usually quiet, did not have a lot of work, and preferred to take a nap at his desk after lunch. But he was good at his job. He knew all the manuals by heart and could tell the time a job would take by just looking at the drawing. There were others, our AGM who was efficient and a person who had a soft corner for me. He gave me large projects and trusted me. The head of engineering whom everybody hated because he was a bachelor and was arrogant because he was competent. He liked me, took me under his wing, and taught me the nuances of design. There was the senior engineer, the one who did all the work of the department. He was usually overworked and frustrated. He did not like me a lot. Most of my work was with him. I think we both liked frustrating each other. But towards the end, we both developed respect for each other. We won a national prize and also filed a patent for the design we made.

When I look back at my life at BHEL what strikes me is how simple it was. There were no pressures of rat race. Because the job was guaranteed by the government, people were not trying to pull each other down. There was a lack of ambition and it frustrated me, but there was also genuine concern about the other person. This extended beyond work. I was invited to be part of the personal ceremonies and celebrations of the team and the workers who worked in the factory. They opened their houses and their hearts to me. The seniors had a paternalistic concern for me. The only time my department head admonished me was when I did not go to a function I was invited to. He admonished me not as a boss but as an elder who had to teach something to the younger members of my family. The team taught me everything I know about engineering. Perhaps they were awed by my degree and thought I already knew about it. But I think they were more indulgent and knew I did not know anything and did not ever make me feel small. It was not a flashy workplace, the kind I was exposed to later in my career. It was more like a family in its truest sense. There was a DGM who had risen through the ranks. The most knowledgeable person I have ever met. He taught me more about life than any boss I had. He had told me to spend time with workers. Get to know them and win their confidence, because finally, when the targets are to be met, they will work for me, not for their Overtime ( which they will anyways get). It taught me to always look at the people I work with as humans and not as human resources.

I always knew I couldn’t make a career there. The place was too organized and too dull for what I wanted to do. I wanted to fly and leave, and I eventually did. But I always look back on those two years with happiness. It taught me a lot. I was still a kid when I left, but I had wisened up a lot.

I was ready for the next adventures which I wanted to have