Sunday, December 27, 2009


This is my first post and it has to be about my experience at a uranium mines about 10 km from jamshedpur .Dont ask me the name of the place.....bcoz ur immediate reaction would be....wat??...wat!!!....nara......no...no...narpahar.......what did you say was the name??....where is it??....So leave it ....spare me the pain of explaining u the details......I spent one month at this place and it can very well be described as the most traumatic one month of my life.When a friend of mine asked me what was the nature of training i told him that it was a vocational training in a uranium mines so as to sound like an engineer with a purpose but the truth is, i wanted to say that it was a horror show organized for mining engineers whose tickets cost us a cozy winter vacation at home.My friend replied-" awesome!!! it must have been a great experience??".Now, wearing a 2kg helmet ,a 5kg caplamp and boots that tear into your flesh and then walk 5km daily 1000 feets below the ground ,if that sound awesome then i'll say India-Pakistan relation is just awesome.When we first went underground we all were childishly excited.....we all thought that we would now get a live demonstration of what we read in books(its a different thing that we hardly read books but it sounds nice)....and you know what when we were in the cage(its an apt name for a box of metal that brings people out of that hole which, had it been in a MNC's office would have been called an elevator but the case here is different as mining engineers dont deserve anything that sounds or LOOKS good!!!)it was not mining we discussed.I asked ashesh as the cage moved -"whats the eligibility criteria for appearing in CAT".Now dont get me wrong ...CAT is not a term we learnt underground neither had T.I.M.E put up a publicity stall down there.....but that was a question that came up spontaneously when i saw what mining engineers did underground.After my first day@underground i had lost all interest in mining and only thing that kept me going was that at the end of the horror show i would be given a certificate signed by Charles Darwin (Mine Manager in this case) aknowledging in this case my struggle for existence in this case.I have realized that at this moment in life im making a DRIFT(a path made in a mines through waste)in the engineering field and until and unless i find a CROSSCUT(a path that connects DRIFT to ORE BODY)in this case MBA im never reaching that ORE BODY which here refers to a decent career.Dont think i mentioned those terms to show off my knowledge but i mentioned it as they are the only terms i could gather in my one month of hell and they deserved a place in this ode to uranium mining