Campus drive at RCET, Bhilai

This is how my vacation started... Syntel had a campus drive planned for Rungta College of Engineering and Technology(RCET) on the 7th and 8th of April and then another one at Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management(LBSIM) on the 27th and 28th of april.

I just thought of clubbing my vacation with these two campuses so as to fly for free ;) but he GRC(Global recruitment cell) spoiled my plan on the very last day. Most probably some bigshot who belongs to delhi gave his name for the technical panel and I was thrown out.

It's kind of irritating that no one gives his name for places like Bhopal, Bhilai and Bhubaneshwar but when it comes to Delhi and Goa the slots are lapped up by managers.

The trip started OK, nothing noteworthy. Manish and Smita from GRC and Shyam, Rajul and I from Delivery were the people chosen for this campus.

The flight was to Raipur and from there we were driven to Bhilai. People staying in Mumbai would really need to see this place to believe it.... bare naked land for as far as you could see.

The drive was alright, the new four lane highway under construction between raipur and Bhilai is really good, very very smooth... I thought it was smoother than the Mumbai Pune expressway.

The hotel we were put up in was quite nice too, I guess the RCET people chose wisely. The hotel had a pool table, a swimming pool, a gym and a TT table. During our stay we couldnt make use of the swimming pool or the gym but played a lot of pool and TT.

Mr. Mehta, a veteran from Bhilai Steel Plant, and Mr. Trivedi, and ex-armyman, were our guides and incharge of almost everything involving us and I must say they were very competent at their work in addition to providing us with good company.

We did make a visit to Bamleshwari Devi Mandir, situated on a hilltop some 60 odd Km from Bhilai, on the day we arrived.

The campus was the usual stuff, nothing remarkable really but he crowd here was way better than the one we had in Oriental Institute, Bhopal. The reason also was obvious... Syntel was the 9th company to arrive for campus at Oriental while at RCET we were 3rd. The difference in quality of candidates was simply too much for this fact to be ignored.

Though we did suspect that the english section of the paper was leaked to the RCET students, some of whom scored excedingly well in that section but it was easy to notice as these were the very people whose english was the worst.

Some of the notable things were:
1. Delicious food... expecially the Dahi-Bhalla and Rasmalai that we had, simply amazing.

2. The Chairman's office, it was bigger than some of the 2 BHK flats that I have seen here in Mumbai.

3. Bad roads. Apart from the Raipur-Bhilai highway, none of the other roads were anything to write home about.

4. Bhilai Steel Plant. As per Mr. Mehta, it employs 13000 people. In comparison, Syntel employs 8.5K people. I think we need more of BSPs if we aim to have a development that is all-inclusive and not limited to a few select cities.

5. Mr. Mehta. The guy was amazing, any place you mentioned he had been there.Most of India and outside India too. Very well-mannered and a thorough gentleman.

Well, after selecting nearly 75 students it was time to leave. I took a flight to delhi and the others flew back to Mumbai.

The next post will deal with what happened on my journey to home.