Settling Down After 100 Days Of Madness!

First of all, let me tell you straightaway that the phrase “settling down” is not intended to mean matrimony in any way.

The Crazy Period:The mentioned period has been important to me in a lot of ways. I don’t like it, I don’t dislike it but most certainly I will never forget it. It has transformed me from a trainee to a professional and now I’m starting to get the real picture of how challenging my job will get with time. I have seen the best and the worst parts of friendship. Have been in troubled waters and then come up trumps the next day. There have been fights with friends and there have been conditions imposed on friendships(which, I still can’t believe I accepted!). Have had my trust broken and have broken it myself. And, if all these things are not bizzare enough, I’ve been through four cities, i.e. Mysore, Hyderabad, Delhi and Pune during that period over issues that aren’t completely unrelated to those mentioned earlier. Anyways, let me get to the point straightaway instead of continuing with my gibberish phrases.
What I thought I've always been:I have taken great pride in believing that I’ve never been much of an emotional person. Not that I don’t care for family/friends, but there is always a practical angle to my thoughts/actions. I would like to believe that I never let me heart dominate my head in making decisions and that has kept me going all these years. When it comes to expressing emotions, I’ve always followed the mantra:
“I will never show, and you will never know!”
What I have actually been: And now comes the twist to it. I have hardly been the above mentioned person during this phase which ended recently. The misadventure is rooted in Mysore so let me handle the events chronologically. I used to be the first person to get out of office during the training days in Mysore but I have sat on my PC uselessly for hours and HOURS(most of the times till midnight, after which you’re kicked out of office, as it’s got to be locked by the security people), doing absolutely nothing! I have delayed my lunch and dinner purposelessly, I’ve lied left, right and centre, for anything and everything.I have flunked a paper for the FIRST TIME EVER in my life and that too, a paper which was supposedly “too easy”. I’ve gone to a re-test full of over confidence(and, given the fact that there was about 40% of the course which I had not even touched, the origin of the over confidence is still mysterious!).
For those who are not aware at all of the marking pattern during the Infosys Mysore training here’s a quick introduction to it, without understanding which you will not fully comprehend my stupidity! You have to write a 30 marks Hands-On(Practical) exam, followed by 70 marks of theory.The Hands-On is an open book exam and, as is the case in all the colleges the practical marks are supposed to help oneself “sail through” the paper, as you’ll hardly get below 25 out of 30 if you attempt all that is there to be attempted, in the right or wrong way. Well, at least this was what I felt about it until… well, read on.
So, as you might have guessed by now, I DID manage to comprehensively flunk the Hands-On exam, with a grand score of 13.75 out of 30! Infosys requires you to score 65/100 to pass a paper and there I was, looking down a tunnel with no light at the other end, requiring another 51.25 out of 70, i.e. 73%. However, given that in the Hands On exam there is open book system and, needless to say, there’s no such system in the theory paper, there were ominous signs for the things to come in the paper.To make matters worse just one night stood between me and the paper. The final result was assuring enough, as I scored 89% the next day but then, talking about crazy things, this much score from me can easily be counted as one of them!
Enter the partner in crime:The rest of the deeds also feature a partner named Ashish, who has played the lead role in most of our acts I’m going to mention here. Just a quick intro to my engineering college batchmate, Ashish. For a batch of 800+ people, its not easy to know everyone so there's no surprise that there were people in Manipal who didn't know Ashish, despite being from the same batch. However, I found out recently that almost everyone knows him as "the guy who used to abuse Bansal on basketball court during cricket matches!" Now let the story continue.I have got in arguments with auto drivers, trying to defend Ashish(who, in turn, was on the wrong side of the argument so in this case, “defend” implies talking endlessly and disappearing from the scene asap). Following Ashish’s lead, I’ve ridden bicycles on the footpaths in the Infosys Mysore campus without being whistled at by the security guards(and mind you, its no mean feat, given that there are at least 3000 security guards monitoring the campus at any given time!) and parked them at the exact places where they’re not intended to be parked. Walking casually through the corridors of our hostels in Mysore, Ashish would all of a sudden ring someone’s bell and then we were left with no option but to get out of sight. And then, how can I forget Ashish’s favourite game, i.e. getting into the life on the ground floor and then pressing 1,2,3,4,5 buttons just as the lift passed each of the floors, without causing the lift to stop on that particular floor!Another popular lift-game was to rush into the lift and take it up, when we knew that there’s some poor soul a few metres behind us who’s also headed for the same lift and hence, causing him discomfort, which was our idea of happiness! Just to add to the list, I once bought a whistle used by the security guards and tried to confuse the people in the campus by blowing it off everywhere and trust me, someone like Ashish too stopped me from doing it as he found it “embarrassing”!!!
And to add icing on the cake, I recently went to a salon and stole a comb, which, in turn, I lost!
So, there have been enough acts of stupidity and now there’s neither time nor the company to continue with them. I cannot thank The Almighty enough for not getting me posted to Pune, something that I was willing to kill for two months ago!Getting posted to Hyderabad seems to have released the previous, more stable, sane version of myself, who is quiet most of the time, sincerely goes about his job and has a thousand thoughts going through his mind all the time, jostling for attention. The past week has given me the chance to get my head down and think about the direction I am headed/want to be headed to. Getting paid for sitting idle in the company a.c. for the months of March and April seemed to be a dream come true but now the realization has sunk in as to how much time has been lost in that. All of a sudden, ambitions which were buried deep inside have erupted and suddenly I want to do a lot of things and, for a change I am willing to put in the effort as well. Felt good to find a few readers for my blog and recently I was over the moon when I took my first step towards becoming a published author. 24 hours in a day are no longer sufficient, being at home no longer means either watching t.v. or surfing the internet, the IPL games are no longer a must-watch and time spent on the internet is no longer synonymous to gtalk,orkut and facebook!
Office: The best part about office these days is that I do not have to keep looking at my watch repeatedly during office hours to kill time. Got to meet the top brass of my department yesterday and had a sneek peak into the kind of work I am expected to do in the future. Thanked The Almighty again, as I didn’t get posted to some testing unit. Got to know that we are into delivery and the kind of work that we’re going to do is purely developmental. The only thing I was concerned about when I got into the I.T. sector was ending up into support/testing job and now that has been taken care of. Thus, office no longer means having to stay in the campus for 9 hours 15 minutes before you go back, watch TV, chat and then doze off.I do have things to keep me engaged through the entire day.
There are times when I sit back and think about the time that sped by and then questions such as ,”Could I have done something differently?”, “What could have happened had I….?”, “Why did I have to ….”, etc mushroom up. There cannot be any clear cut answer to those and with time I have started to stop losing sleep over it. Being a spontaneous, impulse driven person, self-examination has never been my forte but this time it has yielded a positive result, for a change. It tells me that once again I’m lying at a highway where there are only two possibilities. The first one is to go back to where I came from and get stuck in the same circle I had so desperately wanted to get out of. The second, and more realistic one is to look ahead, pick up the pieces, gather myself, dust myself down and carry on into a little known territory, carrying with me nobody’s support but HOPE. The last week has made me realize that the possibilities that lie ahead of me over the next 18 months are immense and even though it’s a long shot now, I am up for it in a BIG WAY! After all,
“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

No More Hyderabad Blues!

I’ve had 45 days of Hyderabad and it has been a fitting experience. Although I’m so much used to living out of home, this one has been different.

The 7 semesters of hostel life in Manipal provided various types of shared and single accomodation. But at no point of time was I required to worry about laundry, arranging drinking water, paying out bills, finding a house to live in, finding someone to clean up the house once a while,etc,etc.

Then followed a heaven called Mysore, which took the definition of “hostel” to an entirely different level.One cannot complain when you’re provided with LCD TV, intercom, lamps for various purposes(one on the supposed study table and other on the side of the bed, either of which were hardly used by me), no roommate to have differences with and when someone’s there to arrange your bed, dust and sweep your room, replace the used tea and sugar bags with fresh ones. However, the cribber that I am, it didn’t take me even 24 hrs to find faults with the housekeeping people. When I entered the room for the first time, it was all spick and span, cleaniness to such a degree which was(and will be) alien to me. So, I decided to mess it up a bit and give it a familiar look, the kind of look I was so used to during my hostel days in Manipal, in which there was a bunch of clothes which would be lying either on the chair or the bed( I was in a habit of shifting them from chair to bed when I needed to study(come on, whom am I kidding?... when I needed to use my laptop placed on the table as a desktop) and then back on the chair when I needed to get some sleep). To my surprise, the moment I came back, I found the bed to be as it was before, as if no one had used it, ever!My shoes and socks were in place and I was about to lodge a complain with the reception people, alleging that the housekeeping guys had stolen my belt, when 3 days later I found it out in the drawer of my study table!!

I must confess that throughout my stay in Infosys Mysore, I was wondering what right have I done all my life that I managed to find my way to Infosys campus interviews by fooling the HR people ‘n’ number of times(Yes, unlike others, I was interviewed more than once..thrice to be precise.. before joining Infosys but then that’s another story in itself!). And, to be honest, I’m still quietly smillng at these god-sent Infosys people, who have been paying me for about 7 months now for doing practically nothing.

Anyways, cut to the present scenario. When you’re determined not to go to a particular city but are left with no other option, the first aim is to start finding faults with the city the moment you enter it. My entry to the city didn’t give me much opportunity to do that, as I entered it via the RGI Airport at 11pm, HUNGRY! And, trust me, Hyderabad airport is clearly the best managed airport I’ve seen till now, which includes Mumbai, Mangalore, Goa, Bangalore and of course, New Delhi. The moment I step out, I found McDonald’s, which was something I had missed too much in Mysore and Manipal. That was another thing to be happy about. Moments later, I was in an aero-express bus, which saves you from getting into arguments with auto/taxi drivers, despite which you end up paying an astronomical figure, just because you’re new to the city and have no idea about the rates. 40 minutes later I was with half of my college group(half, because only 2 out of the 4 were there) and from there onwards, things never looked back. From finding flats to stay in to celebrating birthdays to night outs, everything has been fun. The best part about staying in Hyderabad is that it takes me barely 20 mintues to reach office and I have the flexibility of timings, as I don’t even need to take office transport!Bangalore and Pune are notorious in this regard, where you need to spend at least an hour and a half in traffic on a daily basis.I have my friends staying very close by for any kind of need(varying from work to party to getting me something from the market when I'm not in a mood to,etc,etc).

It’s strange how people adjust to different things. When I went to Mysore and I came to know that I’ll no longer have 24 hour access to internet, I thought I couldn’t survive there and wanted to get out of it asap.Then I started liking the place and started spending time with my friends doing everything apart from studies. Then,during the last month, just when Mysore started getting boring,god sent one more person who, strangely enough, found our company interesting!The days that followed were exciting, challenging and memorable and Mysore rounded off with the best 20 days of my life!Then came the postings and I got posted to Hyderabad. I so very much wanted to go to Pune and didn't leave any stone unturned to find a swap for the same.I got a feeling as if I'll not survive in Hyderabad and imagining life here was becoming difficult. However, it has turned out to be a college reunion of sorts and I do find myself very much settled here, despite three out of station trips in a short while. Not for a moment am I trying to suggest that those days have been replaced by the ones in Hyderabad, but then, this is the way the world goes!

Lance Armstrong, the 5 time Tour de France Champion has an interesting way to share his idea of happiness in his book, “It’s Not About The Bike”. In the mid 1990s, when he was a challenging cyclist who had not been able to clinch the world championship crown, his idea of happiness was to “Win the Tour de France(Considered the world’s most physically demanding athletic event)”. A few years later, some time during 1998, he was being diagnosed against cancer when the doctors didn’t give him more than 10 percent chance of survival. Chaemotherapy virtually killed him for three weeks, one loses his strength, can barely walk, leave alone cycling. Then, his idea of happiness was “Waking Up and being able to crawl”, as it gave him the assurance that he had lived through another day of Cancer(Which, however, was no assurance that he’ll live on to see the next day!)

That gives us a reason to think and redefine our idea of Happiness, doesn’t it?

More to come...