45 LPA. One guy from our batch. And the group chat, which is normally a nonstop stream of memes and nonsense, just... died on the spot.
Three days of silence. Complete. The kind of quiet where you can feel two hundred unspoken feelings hanging in the air. Nobody knew what to say. What is there to say? "Congrats" felt too small and anything else felt like exposing your own soul.
Then someone sent a meme. A tentative little offering into the void. It got two reactions.
More silence.
And then, finally, someone types: "so is everyone free for lunch tomorrow?" As if the last three days hadn't happened. As if we hadn't all just collectively confronted our own career mortality. Total reset. Pretend nothing occurred. Move on.
We are built different, apparently. Not built to process, built to suppress and reschedule lunch. Honestly it's healthier than whatever we were doing during the silence.