Blame it on the Rajesh Jain deal. This was the deal that launched a thousand dotcom dreams,'' says Praveen Varma*, explaining why he gave up a stable job with Wipro to hitch his star to the dotcom bandwagon three years ago. ''Wipro was an excellent learning ground, but after the Rajesh Jain deal we felt that anything was possible,'' reminisces the XLRI grad, who at 29 today is a grizzled veteran of the dotcom era. Rustling up a few lakhs of rupees from friends and well-wishers, Varma and a friend of his launched a youth portal. In those days when venture capitalists were falling over each other to fund anything with a dot in between, Varma's life seemed made. He went ahead and bought himself a Lancer and a three-bedroom apartment in Bangalore. Soon afterwards the bubble burst. With VCs running for their lives, money dried up. July 2001 was the last time Varma updated his portal.

Once a co-CEO, he is now an assistant manager at an FMCG company. The Lancer has been traded in for a Maruti 800, and his new pad is a one-bedroom apartment. By the way, he is still paying off some old debts.

Pick any twenty-something resume today and you'd probably find a similar story underneath: boys and girls who, thanks to dotcom's dizzying promise, went from being college grads to vice presidents and CEOs of start-ups. But with the tech wave crashing and the overall economy sliding into a trough, they've been served a double-whammy. No seasoned business would hire them anywhere close to their previous positions or salaries. That leaves dotcom's troubled children with only one choice: to start all over again, typically at lower salaries and more modest designations. The result: placement agencies are flooded with CVs of such twenty-somethings. ''The candidates are now willing to settle for a more stable job, even if it means taking a substantial cut in pay,'' says Gurdeep S. Hora, Managing Director of the Delhi-based Synergy Consultants, which specialises in middle management placements.

Anand Swaminathan is a case in point. Last year, the IIM-Lucknow grad chucked up his first job at FMCG giant Hindustan Lever Ltd to join a little-known Smartcc.com in Chennai. It wasn't money that lured him to the dot-world. Rather, his three-year stint as HLL's sales manager in Kolkata was getting to be boring. Besides, he says, he found the company's structure too bureaucratic and unreceptive to new ideas. ''With an upstart like Smartcc, I felt I could make a more direct impact on its fortunes,'' says the 26-year-old.

Unfortunately for him, the Smartcc dream is proving to be shortlived. It now appears that the dotcom has just another month's lease on life. ''When I made the decision to quit HLL, I perhaps lacked the maturity, but I also had the opportunity to learn a lot,'' he says, putting up a brave front. ''I've now understood how hard life is and the importance of staying power in business,'' he adds rather philosophically.

Given his IIM tag, Swaminathan gets plenty of job offers, but few are up to scratch. His CV is still out in the market and he surely isn't turning his nose up at companies like HLL any longer. ''This was a year of pink slips, and a 20 to 30 per cent pay cut has become a norm these days,'' points out K. Pandiarajan, Managing Director of the Chennai-based hr consultancy firm Ma Foi.

According to Pandiarajan, the trend is most evident in the southern tech bastions of Bangalore and Chennai. Now young execs make a beeline for good old manufacturing companies like TVS or TAFE-companies they wouldn't have touched with a bargepole not too long ago.

Happily for the young dot victims, companies aren't holding such failures against them. As LG's Senior Vice President (hr), Y. V. Verma, says, ''As long as the candidate is competent, we don't care if his venture failed or he got laid off. But the compensation will be in accordance with the company's standards.''

Few are cribbing about pay cuts. Certainly not Maneka Singh. Until recently, the 28-year-old was a senior hr manager at a Delhi-based job portal once famous for its ''thinking rooms'' painted in 'crazy' colours of red, blue, and yellow, and the delicious sandwiches it served round the clock. For Singh, the move from a nuts-and-bolts body shopping software company to the real new economy was a dream come true. In one stroke, her salary rose from a mere Rs 16,000 to Rs 65,000 per month. At the portal she was heading an eight-member team across three metros. Five-star luncheons, a new car, and foreign jaunts simply fell into her lap.

But like all fairy tales, this one too had to end. Exactly after six months, the company, burdened with losses, went in for a more austere look and fired Singh along with 70-odd others. The division that she was heading was dismantled. Now, Singh is back with her old software firm at a more realistic salary and, of course, those juicy perks are only fond memories of a bygone dotcom era. ''At least I have a job in hand that pays me alright,'' says a sobered up Singh.

Some, however, are undeterred by failures. One such is Gopal Subramaniam*, a graduate of IIT-Madras and iim-Bangalore. Rejecting campus offers from reputed companies, he joined a b2b portal as vice president in 2000. But barely nine months later, it was clear that the unsegregated portal would not survive. Accustomed to unlimited expense account and first-class air travel, Subramaniam found himself unable to accept a job that offered anything less. ''The marketplace is unforgiving, and I was in denial mode,'' admits the man. ''But as things deteriorated, I had to compromise.''

Today, Subramaniam runs his own firm in Bangalore offering hardware technical support services for laptops. He isn't making any money yet, but hopes to be profitable in a few months. Luckily for Subramaniam and his ilk, age is on their side. Which means they can afford the Dickensian reflection: ''It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...''

-additional reporting by Venkatesha Babu
* Names changed on request