Mysore Memories...

This one's for the two of you, A and V.. and am not even sure if you'll ever read this!

It was on 22nd of February that I got my posting as "MFGD-Hyderabad" and I can't put to words what sickening feeling it had on me for the next few days.The SWAP portal closed on 25th midnight and I was "sick,tired and frustrated" of being "sick,tired and frustrated" at the end of it. I was myself surprised at the intensity of such feelings, such desperation to get to Pune, a city I had never ever stayed in! I was surprised at my madness because in the past 10 years, Hyderabad was going to be the 5th city I would be living(yeah, Living, not just visiting) in. So, I am very much used to entering a new city completely on my own, making friends for a lifetime, then bidding an emotional goodbye to all of them,packing bags, travelling alone to my new temporary home, making new friends, having a good time again and the cycle continues...! So much so that with the passage of time the word "emotional" had been struck off from the phrase "emotional goodbye". BUT.. THIS WAS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT! I knew it straightaway that this goodbye was not going to be easy by any means.

For the first time in all those years I was afraid of missing my friends. I gave it everything I could to get a transfer to Pune but nothing materialized(apart from an offer to work in Infosys Pune in CME in night shifts, which I outrightly rejected!). I felt like cursing one and all. I felt like quitting the job and finding a new one in Pune. Yes.. all this because I absolutely did not want to miss my newly formed group of 3(Ashish and Vinita being the other two), come what may.The best moment of those days was the 3 of us sitting in one of the food courts, doing absolutely nothing and all of a sudden, one of them would start with,"Jayant, chal na Pune". I hated that conversation then, as it was not going to help in any way but now I miss it badly.I don't feel like entering the food courts here without you guys because whenever I'm sitting alone in a food court here at Hyderabad, I feel the two of you would walk in out of nowhere and start playing pranks at me. I want you to try and snatch my Litchee shake because it tasted much better than your experimental order! I want to be kept waiting for 1 hr after being told to wait for "just 15 minutes". I want to pursuade both of you to keep sitting at FC3 for some more time, despite your eyes crying out for sleep, not because I didn't feel sleepy, but because I wanted to hold on to every single second.I want to snatch the chocolate ice cream from you, not because I loved eating it but because I loved to see your expression and a near-crying face(which,put together with a near-crying voice produced an effect only you are capable of) when someone dared try getting even 1/50th of a spoonful from your cup. I want to keep arguing with you people that shifting to Bangalore is not such a good idea, as getting a swap to Pune is equally unlikely, be it from Bangalore or Hyderabad. I want a totally unplanned outing with both of you, in which we straightaway headed for the exit gate of the campus without having decided where exactly we were heading to. I want Ashish to get into arguments with auto drivers over the nomenclature of eating joints around Mysore and then see his embarrassed face when the auto driver corrected him!

Miss you guys badly. Not so long ago we used to be with each other from 9 a.m. to even past midnight and today, we're so busy that talking once a day doesn't seem feasible.. talk about how times change!!!

Hope... I read somewhere.. is a funny word. It doesn't assure you of anything but it keeps the entire world going...!!!

Adieu to Infosys Mysore and discovery of a new emotion - Sadness!

What a roller coaster ride the past ten days have dished out! I always took pride in the fact that I've outgrown "emotions", in every sense of the word! Staying out of home for long periods and meeting your family once every six months or so fills you up with a false sense of confidence, that you have bravely deleted the words "sad", "miss you", "loneliness", etc, etc from your dictionary. But then, God has strange ways of making you realize that you're still as fragile and vulnerable as you always were.

Stepping into Infosys Mysore campus on 13th September 2009, every other of my 483 batchmates had the same objective as mine in mind, i.e. to successfully complete the training and get out of that campus asap. The initial days were great, as one tries to explore every inch of the 335 acre campus. As time goes on, one starts getting sick of seeing the same food courts, the same cycles, the same hostel room and on top of that, the monotony of alternately going through slides and taking up tests. Initial couple of months were the saturation point for me and I prayed every day to get out of that campus at the earliest.

However, about 5 months after stepping into that campus, i.e. 21st January onwards, my feelings underwent a 180 degrees turn that I still find hard to believe! The 36 days that followed after that(till our batch was released) brought with them a few words and feelings that I had long buried and had decided never to reuse! Words such as "lifetime friends", "crush", "companionship", "trust", "care", "butterflies in stomach", "nervousness", "going weak on my knees on facing someone",etc, etc had sneaked into my life again and the worst things with feelings as these is that the more you try to drive them away, the more you try to kill them, the stronger they emerge. Now I understood why they compare good times with a fist full of sand. The harder you try to hold on to it, the faster it slips out of your hand. I didn't realize that time will eventually come to an end until my batch owner announced it one fine day(10th of Feb, 2010) that "The release date of your batch is 26th Feb".

"God, why do you have to be so cruel? Why can't you put us into extended training?" was my first reaction to it. I decided that to make those 16 days count would be the best thing to do, rather than brooding about why there are only 16 days. And, the 16 days that followed really did count for a lot. Companionship I had never before experienced followed and I expected our group of 3 to be together always, even though fate would not let us be geographically together for long. The postings came and I was the odd one out, thrown into Hyderabad, though in the company of two old time friends. Still, there's something about friends that makes you never want to compare them. As I had experienced so many times before( in the course of changing cities and schools), I was sure that this bonding will fade away with time. Its always been the case that whenever I get separated from friends, however hard I try to retain them, time takes its toll and eventually the regular calls change to the occasional SMS and then to a once-in-6-months scrap on orkut/facebook and eventually it all disappears, though I'm the one who tries to the most to keep things together.

Today its been exactly a week since the group left Mysore and the role of time is already taking its effect. The frequency of calls hit an all time low of 0 yesterday( though for a different reason). There was a mistake made and one of the the three, as always, has been singled out to suffer the most and he is going through the similar feeling once again.. of being OUTCASTED!!!

Let's see what fate has in store for him next.. does he get the courage to make new friends again or the deep scars that have been left will keep reminding him of the possible consequences.