AIB’s Honest Engineering Campus Placements: Much Food for Thought

AIB’s new sketch delves into the life of every engineer, before and after that much sought-after “placement”.

AIB has been lately swinging the spotlight on the plights of students during exam time in India and how detrimental the exam pressure is. On Air with AIB 2 has been a lot about encouraging students to not think of exams as the be-all and end-all of existence, and how the aura around IITs and engineers is a lot of moonshine.

Now they have taken it a step forward with Honest Campus Placements: Engineering Edition. The 3-part series delves into the life of every engineer, before and after that much sought-after “placement”.

One of the two things that really makes this sketch work is the fact that’s it’s entirely made by engineers - check out the end credits to figure what I’m talking about; they run AIB. So there’s no imagined fluff - it’s as they say - from the horses’ mouths.

Secondly, it’s the incisive writing that’s pretty much the trademark and cause behind AIB’s success. Honest Engineering Campus Placements is not a satire. It tells you exactly what’s happening and what each character thinks, but coupled with the (fake) expressions one would use in real life in such a situation.

For instance where Overachiever (Rahul Subramanian) and Failure (Kumar Varun) - yes the characters are named according to their performances in the engineering world - console Average (Naveen Polishetty) over not being able to bag a job, they say exactly what they think of him but with all the sympathetic and awww-worthy emotions that mark such moments.

Particularly hard-hitting is the scene where the Mass Recruiter (a completely believable Tanmay Bhatt) comes and assesses (and sniffs) the applicants, who lie like corpses. It emphasises how there’s no place for individuality in this world - people have to be dead inside to tick all the right boxes.

I also liked how the series ended on a realistic note instead of taking a Bollywood-ish escape route.

The sketch is a serious comment on our education system and how lives are wasted because everyone has to fit a standard hole. Hopefully, it will make some think - it’s clearly what the makers aim to do.