Job tensions

Well,
Here I am in Bangalore! Here to begin a new phase in life, I suppose. I am a "working man" now, though I have not done any work in the past 10 days!!! All I have done is learn a lot of jargon. It is not so bad now but my first day was full of abbreviations and ideas that I had never been introduced to before. imagine that on your first day, you are given an ebook that lists these abbreviations - JMI, JAT, JTI, JSP, J2EE, JNDI, RMI-IIOP, JAXP, JCA, JAVA IDL, JavaMail, JAAS (Of course, most of these are based on fundamentals taught to me during my years at K, so it was not all that hard to pick it up). Whew! my mind was whirling that day. All of these make your life easy if you know how to use them but till then they are like monoliths standing in my path to be a software engineer. But then that is just one aspect of software engineering, isnt it? Making web applications and deploying them in a application server is not all that great! In fact, it is downright boring. :(

The job as such is ok, I suppose. It pays well for a relatively easy task. Everyone (read, my relatives) say that I have done something great and I should be happy. Particularly my sister's mother-in-law said that there are some things that are very hard in life - getting a good education, a good job, and a good wife. "Good" is a relative term and what is good for me may not be good for you. But she was using this term in a generic, society-defined way and I felt that there is some truth to that. After all, illiteracy and unemployment are some of the major problems in India. So, I suppose I am better off than quite a lot of people my age (though I dont feel like that; because "good" IS a relative term).
I do not know about doing something great but I definitely feel that there is more to life than being happy with a software job. I have done some things that have helped me reach this state. Getting that "IIT" chaap has helped many of us get high-paying jobs so easily. We were discussing this in IIT and we had felt that IIT had become a much-hyped polytechnic institute that churned out software engineers. People get into the IITs because it is very easy to get a job after getting a degree there and the purpose of higher education is lost when that happens. But thats a different discussion.
After a long time, I am having black coffee regularly mainly because it is available to me in the cafeteria! Nothing like unadulterated caffiene to perk up your concentration. My father warns me of its harmful effects but today I read an article about how caffiene could prevent the occurence of a very common varient of liver cancer! "Everything has its pluses and minuses."