Watch Out! 9 Lies We Speak In An Interview (And What We Really Mean)

Purba Ray reveals how job interviews have become great opportunities to exaggerate your insignificant skills, veil the not-so-impressive truths about your previous jobs and appear as confident as a lion even though you are more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

- Purba Ray

An interview for a job is like meeting your date for the fi rst time. You simply cannot risk being yourself. If you do, you will either remain single or jobless or both all your life. These are tough times in the job market, especially if you are not someone whose ancestors were oppressed for centuries. And unlike the Jats, you cannot go on a rampage, burn or pillage public property, hold up traffic on the national highway and bring an entire state to its knees, only to demand to be declared backward enough to get secure government jobs not based on merit.

Once you go to a government office or a public sector bank and see employees working hard whenever they get time from having endless tea, cigarette, lunch and snack breaks, you realise why so many of our brethren are dying to be labelled backward. If Amroha Nagar Palika received 19,000 applications and that too mostly from BA, BSc, MA, BTech and MBA candidates for 114 posts of safai karamchari [sweepers], you can imagine how scary it is out there.

Conquering the final frontier

It is a huge achievement when you finally get an interview call. So what if it’s after 5,874 rejections, heartbreaks, and ‘how-dare-they-think-I-am not good-enough’ rants! Now that you have reached the fi nal frontier, you transform into a marketeer about to sell a ghastly tasting tea as a weight reducing miracle beverage. Not everyone is your Mom who thinks you are the best thing to have happened to mankind after Darjeeling tea.

I’m not suggesting everyone lies to get a job. But then even Yudishthir ‘misspoke’ the truth to put an end to a bloody war that lasted 18 days. Thankfully, a typical interview lasts anything between 20 and 30 minutes within which you have to convince a bunch of grim looking strangers that you are the harbinger of their