Reminiscence of Academic Days

I had being surviving at least for 2 and a half years now in the cosmo streets of Mumbai, working for almost 12 to 13 hrs a day without fun and frolic. There are many complaints against Mumbai that food, travel and half a dozen other problems. I have always thought that leading life in Mumbai is extremely difficult. The people out here are lazy not so interactive as the usual acquaintances I used to enjoy company with in Chennai. I had a great liking to bike riding in Chennai and almost every weekend we used to do so many things.

I used to visit many of my relatives when I was working from Chennai, and its extremely difficult here for me to visit any of my relatives. Though I know couple of relatives here, its really difficult to visit them since travel here is really paranoid. We will have to catch a public road transport (BEST) to reach a midway point and then another train to reach the place. It doesn’t end with that, you will have to finally hire a rick to reach to the place. Normally its really expensive over here to hire a rick all the way to the place, so this is the best advised method. Normally most of us staying over here being lazy ducks we normally avoid such a circumstance. Wherever we went we went only in a rick and we never liked to take the bucks of traveling because it either cost us heavily or we had to undergo lot of physical strain to do something.

Another major complaint that we had was for food. Initially for many months I used to survive on one meal per day and that too lower than ordinary. We used to get chapattis for lunch and some rice with horrible side dishes. Particularly myself, having great taste for food preferred to starve rather to eat that food. We had almost exhausted all the stuffed crusts and thin crunches of pizza varieties and we were left with no other choice. And we were having a maid who prepares dinner for us @ home. She also prepares chapattis and some rice for us. She used to prepare very strange combinations of sabzi which I really refused to eat every day. Ladysfinger with potato, Beans with onion are some of the dishes, which she normally prepares for us. I was really aversed to such type of food and I literally ignored dinner every day. I was feeling sick at one point of time and there was no cheer at all, at professional and personal levels.

Slowly the evolution of the HR department in our company started turning things around. The first thing we really appreciated was the introduction of the evening snacks with Chai. That was a real success because every one bought snacks from the caterer. Normally lunches he would prepare for guys like us bachelors and a few other people who don’t have the habit of bringing lunch. Slowly the caterer also started bringing lot of variety in the snacks and the lunch which he would prepare, the employee size was on the higher side by then. And prima-facie he started making lot of money. Gradually our food problem was solved and surprisingly the maid who cooks at home has also improved to high standards and now that is not much of concern to us.

As steven covey keeps saying the paradigm influences a great deal of your outlook, my impression about life in Mumbai being really substandard, I had always felt that Im suffering. Nowadays due to financial constraints, I have started traveling long distances in public transport since it would cost a bomb in ricks and cabs. To my surprise, I find that public transport is really good and I wonder why I had been shelling out so much of money on private transport. Every time I took a bus, I saved at least 100 bucks and that was the best thing available. And trains are really comfortable here, but not during peak hours. There’s a lot of crowd during the peak hours of weekdays and during weekends when we normally want to roam around the trains are empty. We get seating facility in public transport during the week ends and the trains are the fastest mode of transport in this cosmo city.

After spending quite a while here, I had realized that this city is not such a bad city to live in, there’s a lot of transformation of values. I started looking everything about Mumbai as a respectable point, and almost everything is available to you over a phone call… There were certain things with Chennai, which were fun like movies and freaking out in bikes etc. Even the movies here we felt initially that it was too expensive for a movie, but after seeing the comforts available in these multiplexes, again there was a paradigm shift. It is too comfortable here to go out for a movie with family and the crowd at the theaters are of high quality. There is good sound quality in theaters and good booking systems. Everything happens through the internet these days and it has become inevitable to come out of these comfort zones. We also gradually started acquisition of furnishings at home and we have more than everything at home. I really feel comfortable and satisfied living here, at a time when Im expecting to move to Chennai within a dozen days or a couple of weeks.