A world where friends aren’t friends

Professional courses herald the end of otherwise strong friendships. Madhuri Vasudev, 28, was one of 20 women in the IIM Bangalore batch of 2003.

In the new environment, she quickly found her comfort zone within a tightly-knit group of friends. The gang banded together for everything, from studying for finals, to midnight runs for Maggi, to dealing with relationship issues. At the end of the course, when it was placements time, companies swooped down on the campus, offering fat paychecks and one-way tickets to international markets.

Vasudev, who had travelled widely across South-East Asia and Africa, got snapped up on the first placement day itself. It was then the nasty rumours started. “I heard gossip about how I had gotten the job because of my looks, and that the interviewers hadn’t bothered to ask me any questions,” says Vasudev, now an investment banker with in London.

The rumours made their way through the campus with astonishing speed, with even professors getting wind of the stories. “It was utter rubbish,” she says. “I was stunned to discover that one of my closest friends had started the rumours.” Upon confrontation, her ‘friend’ denied this, but the damage was done.

Vasudev felt betrayed, and placements, jobs and salary hikes became the main talking points every time the former best friends were face-to-face. After her placement, her group of friends drifted further away from each other, only to resurface occasionally in Facebook albums dedicated to their new Porsche or exotic holidays. It has been six years since Vasudev has spoke to her erstwhile “best friend”.

Anything for success
Getting ahead in the cutthroat competition of the rat race is fast becoming the top priority in life for the young Indian professional. They measure their success in life by how their own careers compare with that of their peers.

They compare pay packages, the car they own, and the size and location of their apartments.

In fact, management schools stopped flashing their top students’ pay packets only in 2007, when parents of high-achievers started fearing for their children’s lives. For the students, the placement season became a crash course in adulthood, as job offers brought to light a harsh reality: at the end of the day, friendship is less important than making it to the top.

Avinash Mathur, 26, a graduate from a filmmaking institute, says even creative fields aren’t free from such rivalries, but he doesn’t believe this is a negative phenomenon.

He remembers a good friend Jairam, with whom he made short films in college. They used to have long talks about their future. One summer, a family friend tipped off Mathur about an internship at a university in New York. Mathur did not tell Jairam and went ahead with the application process.

“I told him only after my place was confirmed, and I don’t regret it,” he says. Mathur is now a documentary-maker, and he says that what he learnt in that internship contributed to his success.

“Nobody is rivals because they choose to be,” says. “We live with demanding parents, limited opportunities, and circumstances that demand a cut-throat attitude.” Mathur is no longer in in touch with Jairam, and seems surprised at the question. “No, I haven’t heard from him since college.”

Middle-class insecurities
“The middle-class, urban youth is fed by a unique insecurity,” explains Ravinder Bedi, a higher-education expert. “Their parents have fought their way to financial security. Children inherit this ‘each-one-for-himself’ mentality, which doesn’t kick in till the real world does.

Till then, they live in an idealised Dil Chahta Hai-Friends kind of world where friends are their number one priority. So these sudden rivalries catch them off-guard. They realise that they are hard-wired to be resentful of their peer’s success.

” Bedi does believe that certain friend-groups can avoid this rivalry, but it is rare. “It’s only years later, with the perspective of a career’s ups and downs that we can move on from this me-first attitude,” he says. 

Sabina Marseles, 45, can talk for hours about her love for advertising. A veteran in the field, she conducts research into the dynamics of consumerism. She graduated from a top school with a degree in economics and a burning desire to rise to the top. “A friend and I decided to branch off into advertising,” she remembers.

“We would sit together and dissect ads for hours and hoard CDs of international commercials, downloading them slowly over a dial-up connection on campus.”

The two graduates moved to Mumbai together with the dream of one day opening their own ad agency. Marseles recounts how she and her friend laughed at the narrow-minded competitiveness of their peers, declaring their partnership to be above such considerations.

“But it didn’t work out,” she says. “It’s not a good idea to work with friends. We clashed over ideas and clients.” Her friend accused her of lacking ambition, and left to join a company in Delhi.

“It was later that I realised he had used several of the drafts we had drawn up together for his work at the new agency. I felt so betrayed, but I realised this is how it is. Work has to be kept separate from friendships,” she says.

The exception to the rule, of course always exists. Swapnil Krishna, 43, a Delhi-based cardiologist, insists that after graduation, he and his colleagues stayed united like “comrades” in the face of harsh superiors and unforgiving schedules.

“A job is just a job at the end of the day. The people I went to college with have remained separate from that world.” He insists that friendships made in postgraduate courses are the strongest ones.

Karthik Ghanekar, 25, rubbishes this point of view, calling it a “touchy-feely” understanding of a high-pressure environment. The IIT-Delhi graduate is now involved in researching markets and advertising.

“Any professional school is based on the concept of competition. You enter these schools to study amongst and learn from the best. This hopefully results in you getting the job you desire. There are tens of thousands other applicants just like you, who want the same job. To bemoan the lack of friendship in such a high stakes environment is to miss the point entirely. Nobody is there to make friends.”