My Mumbai Saga - Creating a new world

Having a place to go to, when in a faraway land, is the first step to building your own world. To make a home you need a house and get a house you need to house hunt.

Finding a place to live, in Mumbai is like trying to find oasis in a desert. If you love the place the rent will eat your salary. If you find an affordable place there are loads of other comforts you compromise on. They say marriage is a match made in heaven but no, housemates are a match made in heaven. You hand your life to destiny when you move in with other people. We learn the true meaning of adaptability and adjustments when you share your home with strangers. When it was time to move out of my temporary abode (which the ladies had made me come to love) I was just sure that I wanted be near my lovelies. Going through every classified and every portal that had advertisements for roommates I made long lists of people to contact. Each phone call was interesting and I met a lot of different types of people and saw various places where people lived. With a small budget not everything you find interesting can be yours. Realities of life are a little more, cruel than that. After a lot of searching, calculation and analysis I decided to move in with 2 other women. I think my planetary alignment was extremely favourable and matched theirs. So 2 years we had created a home to come back to. If you could sit in silence together and just know that you can be yourself, you know you live with the best people.  

Unfortunately though, I like all the other employed adults, spent more time in office than we did at home. So it became necessary to have comfort people at work as well. Of course my 4 ladies were around initially but work and life didn’t always let them be there. But through some past connections I met some wonderful people. A brother, a soul sister and a kind being. Talking to them opened up a greater awareness and gave me the much needed respite from the ghosts of office. They were the people through which I understood and connected to the new culture. New worlds are not just physical places they are also in thoughts of people. A brother who is so different from you that he would force you think in a space which you never knew existed (while he constantly bickered and argued of course). To balance it my soul sister and sanity plug who added fun to every thought. Giving everything a fair and tolerant thought the kind being made accepting myself easy. Office became a better place with these three people around.

There are many more who added sense to the seemingly pointless work we did. Each had their influence in enhancing my life in Mumbai and hence making me write #myMumbaiSaga

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Mumbai Saga - The First Monsoon

Rains are a blessing. Fresh, soothing and cleansing. That is what you think till you see monsoons in Mumbai. The heat drives you nuts through the summer, June starts, the monsoon sets in and people are overjoyed. Just like I was when it rained on my first day in Mumbai. I was staying over at a friend’s place for the initial period. I step out into their balcony and it had just stopped raining. The air was alive and a sense of relief sat on all things living after the long har sh summer. It seemed like the trees were smiling. Gulmohar trees. If you are from Bangalore you have lived around Gulmohar and Ashoka tress all your life. They spell home wherever you see them. So 1000km away looking out of the balcony, I was home. I never realised, how necessary it was to draw parallels, in order to feel comfortable in a new place. Most of the times these resemblances are only in your head, but help you pull through a lot of things that might have otherwise been alien. I loved the rains for b...
Read more

My Mumbai Saga - A new job

The various experiences we have in life, shape us and let us grow. Major source of these are the changes that occur or we create in our lives. Adulthood with its responsibilities becomes a burden to enforce change too often but in the early 20s when you are just being learning to be a mature person, you can go ahead experiment and make some probably risky transitions. So even though my life was quite stable with a healthy mix of work and play, I decided it was time to move forward and switch jobs. In today’s fast changing world a job switch is not a major phenomenon. Not a lot of people in the IT industry stick around too long in the same company. Even the most mediocre of talent have a pool of options. But your first job change is a feat like no other. When you sit at a lunch table and hear about how a peer has so many offers, you tend to think, it must be piece of cake. You are all fired up and you decide to take the plunge. When that happened the first thing I did was start ...
Read more

Musings on an Early Summer Evening

Image
It has been 9 months since I moved to Delhi. I have evolved during this period into a sponge. The extensive knowledge I have been exposed to has set a different perspective on life. I have changed so much that I can’t remember how I was before. And Delhi is not done with me just yet.  Delhi is a city of history. The air rings with stories and the roads have random markers of the past. But they are not explored and understood enough. I was astonished at people’s disconnection with the place they live in. This made me think how less we appreciate the things we have at our disposal. As humans, we only value something that directly provides us with tangible results. Like how a tree’s shade is undervalued when placed against the money the timber would fetch. This mindset of only seeing profits have led us humans along a path of self-made destruction.  While we still have the time before we walk ourselves to doom, it would be refreshing to spend some time understanding the...
Read more