Why at all I am in this city? That’s the question I ask to myself when I’m alone, now a days such occasions are not rare. After all I ran away from this city two years back for MBA deciding never to come back again. Life was so good at AIM with good friends around – 135, Shorkar, dost, dada…Manila was a beautiful city. …But thanks to some great structuring by Wall Street Wizards (actually I should not be so critical of them, in my cherished dream they would have been a fraternity some day) I had to revise my career path or more accurately, it got revised. I would not work for IT, Consulting, Marketing, Strategy or HR and would not become an entrepreneur (the last option though appealing didn’t appeal in the existing scenario, thanks to some good amount of education loan)… To be true, it was like to say – “I would prefer any color provided its blue”. I had taken nothing but finance electives quite confidently thinking that, that was the area I was made for. But post Late Lehman, sticking to such conviction proved to be a tall order and a rather idiosyncratic desire. But ‘Being Bullish’ in my pursuit helped. Infrastructure Finance was not in my scheme of things but that’s the nearest bet I had. Six months down the line, I feel, it’s not a bad deal at all. It’s only that I sometimes start cursing myself of being no more than a mere excel sheet jockey and start thanking Mr. Gates for giving me tools which would help me in earning my bread…and that my MBA and Engineering cannot give me enough analytical skills to match Microsoft’s smartness which can do lightning fast analysis and can make such ppts seeing which my bosses would throw a strange look at me as if questioning why was I so dumb and why not even fractionally as smart as them.
Coming back to why I ran away from Mumbai. No qualms with my job, my boss also took good care my increments. No social life and no girlfriends, no girlfriends because in Mumbai you can have girlfriends in only three ways – You get one in school, you get one in college or you get one in office or rather there is a fourth way as well. You can get them as serendipity. I entered Mumbai after the first two stages. Preetam Chandra’s luck and Preetam Chandra stay in different planets that never cross each other and all girls in my work place were married or engaged or feigned engagement to keep me at bay. So I was there alone and lived with this fact…But one pain…I had to travel 35 kilometers in train for work and that travel done for days, months and years had enough of me. In Mumbai you don’t just travel in a train, the train doubles up for your gym, body massage and gives you exotics like a sauna free of cost. But such freebies didn’t keep me going for long. I could not afford to stay in South Mumbai, because a couple of years of work experience and an engineering degree would not elevate me to a VP’s post to enjoy such a luxury. Travelling in my own vehicle would have landed me in my office four hours after I embarked on that adventure and in order to avoid reprimands for late arrival I would have to wake at four to keep my job intact. So I carried on with this Hobson’s choice of train journeys but not for long and when I left, I thought…Now for ever I was a free bird.
I am back in Mumbai since the last six months. Things have not changed much, apart from my new job profile and the train. The Train is still there but albeit with a lesser pain. Travelling time is lesser. People and I can be seen sitting quite often, very different from the previous travelling where people were always travelling in kissing distance. But such luxuries come with a cost. Between Kurla and GTB Nagar Station you have to be careful not to feel that you are inhaling because when you inhale with sensory neurons on, you get an unpleasant sensation and secondly you should not venture to look out while travelling. Squatting figures all along the railway line are ubiquitous and may give you a queasy feeling for the day. But life does not give you everything in a platter…That’s the way it works.
Anyway 135 is in Mumbai Tomorrow. The guy is trotting places giving others his bachelor’s party…Last weekend he was in Delhi, Machaan, and had such a terrible ‘Hangover’ that he discovered himself in Chennai the next day…
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