suicide attempts?

We worship snake gods, but kill them if they appear alive in front of us. We kill the civil engineers too, without shooting them at sight. We use the poisonous dose of lay-off period, to eliminate them. Yet we are lucky, as many civil engineers will be born as many die, to provide us the luxury of monumental structures, majestic highways, massive irrigation/power generation water spots and what not.

In the present economy it is no wonder if an upper middle class family needs atleast Rs 50,000/- per month to live with dignity. But we don't care if a civil engineer's family falls into nil earning and ignominy for months and years, after it was used to solely depend on his remuneration earned for a period of time while project work was progressive.

When project work is there, there will be no lacking for the daily needs in a civil engineer's family. Petrol tank will always be full in his two-wheeler. Children enjoy his rare (I say rare since a normal civil engineer's to and fro from routine will be before chidren wake up in the morning and after they go to bed in the night) presence in the house as there will always be a chance to roam with him, packed at front and back of his two-wheeler.

But the situation is reverse during lay-off. Due to frustration for this or that could not be bought for the house, his wife may taunt/tease him and ask him to learn how to live from any government employee civil engineer who made lot of money. Children hate to see him in the house since there is no petrol in his two-wheeler and he ill-affords to take them even for a movie. It is no surprise civil engineers are the most amongst professionals indulging in suicide attempts.

To beat the heat of lay-off periods, without hesitating, civil engineers travel from state to state and country to country for work leaving behind their families in native place. They become physically stubborn being forced to get adjusted to frequent change in climatic conditions. They acquire unimaginable communication ability as most of the time they work in a place where they must learn a new language for survival.

Civil engineers could surprise us by chanting rituals and let a marriage ceremony move smoothly, when a priest is missing! It is possible a civil engineer holds the marketing flag aloft for a new product, when a company is in a sorry state where its director-sales might have eloped with his secretary! Civil engineers become competent in any area we point out because of their worst situations of living, project after project.

But civil engineers get no nod at their present scale even when they prove that they are the fittest for correspondence, public relation, marketing and other managerial responsibilities. We fill these vacancies with people who most of the times produce no result, by paying 5-10 times more than what we pay civil engineers. We discriminate civil engineers like beggers during their lay-off period.

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