Thursday, July 15, 2010

Bangalore diaries - Chapter 1

My memory begins with the crack of dawn on 31st July 2006 when Rajdhani express arrived on Bangalore central station. Being armed with a address of the Adobe guest house, phone numbers of some friends and the advice to take a prepaid auto only, I took my first steps in Bangalore. The handle of my bag broke up with me within couple of minutes to make the morning a bit more eventful. Though I had to give the auto driver 20 bucks extra, I was relatively happy with the way I had managed with the auto driver on my first day when I reached my first destination : Pai comforts, JP Nagara, Bangalore. I joined Adobe the next day and after 4 long years, my first stint with this city has ended.
In these 4 years, I have lived in 3 different houses with different sets of people. And ended up collecting memories whose binary value is 10+ GB. The jumbo prawns treat whose jumbo bill became the talk of the IITK kingdom, the n number of trips with either Mtech or office gang and the elementary Photoshop lecture I gave at IISC are few of the events whose memories I will always cherish. Some of the pictures which have been splattered on facebook or orkut depict the good times I had here visiting new places, keeping in touch with old friends and making new ones at office. And then there are some memories which can't be captured by your camera lens nor can they be memorized completely. The saturday morning conversations with Anna over the first few years we stayed together along with the nonsensical lunch or hallway conversations full of laughter and banter at Adobe will always be cherished among the good times . Ofcourse there were some rainy days, but then those are the days that make you appreciate the sunny days even more.
It's never easy to embrace change, especially when it's self-inflicted. But then in chase of a foolish childhood romantic dream, I had to move on. I can always take solace in the fact that there is this warm and sunny corner in my heart filled with wonderful memories to visit whenever some more rain comes along my way. The Bangalore chapter forms a significant part of this corner :-)

Thursday, July 08, 2010

3 idiots - my story!

There are many people who walk in and out of your lives. Only few leave their imprints behind. And even fewer never leave! They are always there in that special corner of your heart from where you can always view the ocean of wonderful memories!
It was the summer of 1998. The 3 care-free enthusiasts(Me, Abhishek and Kaustubh) had joined a so-so junior college with the aspirations of any 16 year old kid i.e. to top all the exam charts to get into a good college. With all due respect to our aspirations, we also promptly decided to warm the backbench of a 120 student classroom to maintain sufficient distance from any educational activity happening in our vicinity. And it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship! Most of the daily classes were turned into a comedy show. They were duly complemented at our tuition classes which our parents paid for ;). And if that was not enough, we rode our bicycles to nooks and corners of Nagpur to explore the boundaries of the beautiful city. Distances are never an issue when the company is awesome right :-). And perhaps even god liked what we were upto! How else did we manage to get the tickets of a movie show for the current day which was fully booked for the next 2 days. It wasn't the age of cellphones or social networks, but still these million little things made us always feel connected. But the best part was yet to come..
We joined a computer course at CDAC to get some really basic computer skills while we were waiting for our 12th results. It was supposed to be a daily 2 hour course. But we made it into a day long activity. We sat in the lab whole day to talk about life, universe and everything while doing some super-cool stuff with MS office!(Remember, we were innocent 18 year old's then. Apple meant just a fruit!). Between the 3 of us, we topped all the exams of the course along with DAVE scores ;). We indeed had the time of our life!
And then life happened and we all went to different colleges. But we still "keep in touch" though not in the usual way. There are no hello's, no goodbye's. It just feels that you picked up the conversation from the same place where you left it the last time, which may be months. We call each other occasionally, atleast on birthdays irrespective of the fact that we may be on different continents! And we still can talk for hours about the million little memories we have of....those wonderful 2 years :-).