Interview

I didn't bring my C.V.

Name -

Date of birth -

Address -

G.C.E. O/L five, three

A/L bio one C, Two S

any job will do

One hundred thousand

square pegs

vying for

half a dozen round holes

keeps on turning out

the carpenter

thousands more of square pegs

no one bothers to tell him

all the holes are round

and too few

Daya Dissanayake

Background

Daya Dissanayake had begun his career as a teacher, and had worked as a quality controller at the Cement Corporation before embarking into international trade as the General Manager of a pharmaceutical company in Colombo. daya dissanayake does not believe in using capital letters to write his name. He uses the simple letter "i" to refer to himself. "I'm not important. I'm a simple person 

Form and Structure

Free verse 

Setting 

A job interview with a prospective candidate in Sri Lankan context 

Themes 

Mismatch between job market demands and Sri Lankan education system 

Analysis 

The poem begins on a note of despair as the first person narrator, the job candidate acknowledge his failure with the line "I didn't bring my C.V". It highlights the lack of preparation by the candidate as well as the hopelessness of the situation. Next three lines of the poem closely resemble a CV format and interestingly the fields for basic details such as name, date of birth and address remain blank. The caesura used in these lines further highlights this as the common fate of the Sri Lankan youth rather than an individual experience of the speaker. The exam results of the candidate portrays his mediocrity and also defy the popular trend of following the Bio Science stream in Sri Lankan education system. The line 'any job will do' highlights the despair of the Sri Lankan youth. 

While "one hundred thousand square pegs" may seem as a hyperbolic statement it justly symbolizes the large number of unemployed youth ill-suited for the job market. "half a dozen round holes" metaphorically stands for the handful of available job opportunities. 'the carpenter' represents the government/ authorities or the education system which continues to worsen the situation. In the next line "no one bothers to tell him", the poet as a social critique levels his accusation against all responsible parties including citizens for their indifference. Thus the poet cynically underlines the disparity between labor market demands and the prevailing education system using simple yet symbolic language. 

Daya Dissanayake is an award winning bi-lingual author, the only Sri Lankan to have won State Literary Award for English Novel thrice. He won it for the first time in 1998 for kat bitha which was his first novel. Eavesdropper won the award in 2007, and Miracle under the Kumbuk Tree in 2013. His The Saadhu Testament; is the first electronic novel by an Asian Author. He followed it up by releasing Wessan Novu Wedun also as an e-novel thus becoming the first to publish a Sinhala Electronic Novel. He shared the Swarna Pusthaka Award for the Best Sinhala novel 2007 for iChadraratnage Bhavantara Charikava. 

He had begun his career as a teacher, and had worked as a quality controller at the Cement Corporation before embarking into international trade as the General Manager of a pharmaceutical company in Colombo. Daya Dissanayake does not believe in using capital letters to write his name. He uses the simple letter "i" to refer to himself. "I'm not important. I'm a simple person". In his collection of poems, inequality (simple letters), Daya makes inequality his theme. 

Carl Muller states " In inequality and let me tell you that Daya deplores capital letters: he is, one supposes neither capitalistic nor capitalised - he offers us a collection he had written over 40 years, and, as he says, they arose from an "insatiable itch for scribbling".

Critical Analysis

Unemployment rate is high among people with the highest level of school qualification and higher educational qualification. Higher unemployment among the educated is attributed to a skills mismatch between labour market requirements and the education system. Yet the educational institutions produce large number of graduates who are not required for the available job.

This concept is sarcastically penned down in Daya Dissanayake’s poem Interview. The speaker of the poem goes to an interview without his CV. The readers come to know from the first stanza that he got through his Advance level in Bio Science and is seeking a job. In the present time it is not possible for all the bio science students to enter the universities similarly it’s not possible for them to get job in their respective fields. To secure any job in this scenario is very difficult and this makes the candidate to request for any job. The candidate is very reluctant to take his CV to the interview as he is not going to get a job according to his qualification. Whatever he studied in school for all thirteen years becomes waste as it becomes inappropriate to get a job.

The writer symbolically expresses the carelessness of the higher educational authorities in changing the education system which is not suitable for the present job market. He uses the image of a carpenter producing ‘square pegs’ instead of round pegs and it struggles to fit in the round holes. Here the poet highlights the present scenario of the candidates who get placed in a job which is not relevant to their field of studies. Carpenter here symbolizes the education system and the pegs symbolizes the products of this education system and the ‘holes’ symbolizes the availability of job.

no one bothers to tell him

all the holes are round

and too few

These lines convey that no higher educational authorities are bothered to change the prevailing education system according to the demand of the job market. The poet also conveys the message that the job opportunity in the present world is very competitive and less in number. Thus the candidates have to compete to grab their opportunity in the quick span of time. The poem ends in a sarcastic tone.