Power of Togetherness

What is the good part of life – you know you are well educated, you have a secure job, you are getting a salary and you are living. What is the bad part of life? You know you have to keep working for the next 30 years to enjoy that good part of life! Yeah thirty long years… muddling in the corporate world! Not that everyone needs to sweat it out in the corporate rat race but those who need to you know what I am talking about.

Sometimes you envy the guys in HR depts or other departments where they have it relatively easy and are home on time. But month after month when you have fight with the deadline you feel like you are losing it, you are just on the verge of insanity somehow. Does that happen with you?

I have also seen myself and many more colleagues who don’t take our mandatory paid leaves. When you have responsibilities on your shoulders you seem to forget totally about the leaves. And when they get lapsed you brood over it.

Now this happens often with me that I am working round the clock and sometimes even over weekends! The family sulks over it that I am forever missing from all the important dates. And when I get sometime over the weekend or a national holiday I don’t have the energy to do anything, or go anywhere, forget about visiting a relative!

All you want to do in such times is sleep over and get yourself charged up for the next day. But that always doesn’t help. It does nothing to uplift your mood. It might just relax your body – nothing other than that.

A few months back my friends decided we should make a trip. When you are planning a trip with six or seven people it’s difficult to get everyone ready on the same date. But after the initial hiccups and shortening of the trip plans we decided a same day trip to a nearby fishing camp. How’s that for some time off.

I purposefully left the phone back home. [Wife never leaves her phone, so its okay]. We were so close to nature and so far away from the bustling city – it was enough to calm myself down. From having a hearty south Indian breakfast with friends to jumping in the river without thinking anything it was pure fun and bliss.

I was meeting my friends and their spouses after a long time but you know when you meet your buddies you just pick up from where you had left without a trouble. We gorged on fishes and took the coracle ride and spotted wild crocodiles. By the end of the long day instead of feeling tired the only thing I felt was happy, relaxed, rejuvenated.

Was it the break? Was it the friends? Was it the nature? Was it being close to my wife without worries of next day’s work? What had worked? May be it was just the togetherness.

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This post is part of #Together campaign by https://housing.com/

A decision to #StartANewLife

There are some traits in Bengalis which you just can’t miss - their passion for education, interest in cultural activities and being a foodie. Being one myself I don’t miss a single trait from the ones listed. Bengalis give a lot of respect to education – for any respectable Bengali family knowing where your son or daughter is studying and what is he studying means a lot. Same was the case with me. Physics, chemistry, mathematics – the subjects which are not favoured by a lot of people were very dear to me. Being a science student is a prestigious thing.

My dad has been a gold medalist engineering student from one of the most prestigious colleges in Kolkata. It has been an inspiration for me through out. I wanted to follow in his footsteps too. And I was pretty sure I would have done well.

But things are always not that rosy. It was also a time when there was a huge slowdown for all engineering students. Engineering colleges were mushrooming up across the country but there was a big lack of good faculties. But the aftermath was even scarier – no jobs. I have seen engineers’ applying for job posts with as meager a salary as of three thousand a month!! That is not a situation I wanted to be in – nor would anyone.

It was a time I had to decide my future. Which stream would I choose? And there I was, leaving the dream of studying science and taking up commerce instead. Believe me it wasn’t an easy decision. It meant focusing on numbers and figures and no experimentation – which originally I wanted to. But I had to choose a path which will secure my future.

It also meant I had wake up and start college at 6 in the morning! Those who are aware, St. Xavier’s B Com department functioned early in the morning earlier. Now they have an evening dept. too, I have heard. But that was a boon in a way because we had the entire day free. When some guys proffered to take up sports I took up courses for Chartered Accountancy. I had enough time in the day to go for my CA classes and the eventual articleship.

It finally helped me to clear all the CA papers at one go without losing a year. It was practically graduating and becoming a CA at the same time. It also opened up opportunities to take up lucrative job in one of the most prestigious auditing firm which brought me to this beautiful city of Bangalore.

Sometimes I do feel that I missed out on studying science, but mine was not just a decision that I had taken – it was a practical decision. The situation of majority of engineering students in the country has not changed much ever since. At least I secured my future.

It is just right sometimes to deviate from your path and #StartANewLife

This post is part of #StartANewLife campaign by https://housing.com/.

Home sweet home

When you decide to buy a house for your self in another city which is not your hometown you know what is up for you – long conversations with builders, weekends and weekends of house hunting, increasing your budget from where ever you can manage to compromising on what eventually buy. Since I have done that not so long ago things are afresh in my mind.

Me and my wife had set to out check prospective homes for we had decided to move in to our own home – an apartment which will be just ours, no tension of rent, landlord, separate rules for tenants etc. We wanted to be the landlords for a change!

But we were met with several builders, brokers who promised something else and showed something else. We were looking for a spacious apartment and not a match box like one since this would be our home for a good period of time – but we were surprised to see the size of apartments which were advertised as 1900-2000 sq ft and looked like not more than 1400-1500 sq ft.

I can’t even count how many apartments we had checked. In every corner of the city may be. The ones we liked little bit were not favorable for distance or amenities, something or the other always came up. I was losing hope. I had given up for some time. Thought of not wasting any more weekend over this.  I was actually getting frustrated. But my wife held her cool. She declared, till we are satisfied 90% with the house we’ll not buy anything random and waste money. Now when you are buying a property in Bangalore you know how much you have to shell out.

She kept looking at property ads, visited property fairs, went through online ads without letting me know all the hassles. We finally arrived one day to check an apartment in a huge complex. I was initially wary of staying with 1000 more families. But frankly when we stepped inside the apartment it was bliss. It was a ready apartment and just like what we had wanted – peaceful, serene, private, large balconies, large rooms, airy and spacious. And more technically – clear titles, reputed builder, hassle free bank loan from nationalized bank. Without wasting any more time we simply picked it up.

We built our own home sweet home with baby steps. Getting the interiors done, getting our own furniture and electrical appliances. Our apartment today has turned into a home today – home sweet home. A home that I will cherish for life. A home that both of us have built up with lot of love and affection.

It is true, you need to believe in your heart you will get what you want – it feels my home sweet home has always been in our destiny.    

Source: peloruslearning.com

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This post is written for the #LookUp campaign by Housing.com. Visit https://housing.com/lookup.

Rising above Fear - It's okay to beat fear sometimes!

As a child I remember going on various holidays in the hills. No Bengali vacation is ever complete without a trip to Darjeeling or Gangtok. This was back in my childhood when I visited Darjeeling. The Mall Road in Darjeeling is quite famous for some great restaurants, scores of handloom shops and quite a big population of horses!  Going for a horse ride through the entire stretch of road there is the favorite past time of all tourists in Darjeeling. And I gave in to it and went for a horse ride. I must be some 6 or 7 year old that time.

This horse riding is nothing like a horse riding that we understand from the movies or anything. They simply strut and walk in the slowest pace possible and you get to enjoy the scenery of the lush green hills around you. Now these horses have this uncanny habit of walking on the extreme edge of the road. I don’t know if they are trained that way to give you a scare or something else. So every time I pushed it towards the road it came back walking on the earthen stretch that you have between the road and the deep gorges. And the sight of the depth of green scared the hell out of me. It was a scary horse ride of the life where any moment you could have fallen down the slopes.

When I came to Bangalore later with work we used to plan several weekend trips with friends. Bangalore is a lovely place with great connectivity to many tourist spots. We went rock climbing at one instance. The fear of height was like a latent force in my mind and I had forgotten almost about it. We trekked for a few hours and then climbed up this hillock. As we started climbing up – the first moment I saw down I felt the fear rising through my body. Can I do this? What if I fall? What if I broke my legs? Too many thoughts clouded my mind. But I held on to my nerves. It’s best to resist looking down or looking back. And without shifting my eye sight anywhere other than the top of the hillock I climbed up along with my friends.

Reaching the top gave a huge joy and boost to my morale. The light breeze the morning sun shine calmed us down. I dared to look down the depth from top and it definitely was scary. But now that we were on top the fear was little less. May be I had just risen above my fear. We sat there chatting on top for a long time and the trainer explained how many groups of youngsters came climbing there and how some of them always waited at the base and never muster the courage to climb up!

And guess what I have done. Much later when we were planning to buy our own apartment in Bangalore we picked up one on the 12^th floor!! So now I don’t mind looking down from my 12^th floor balcony and enjoy the awesome view.    

Check out this video by Mountain Dew on a very similar incident

Visit https://www.facebook.com/mountaindewindia for more awesome videos. 

This post of mine has been written for Indi Happy Hours in association with Mountain Dew India.

Let us clean our Neighborhood

So everyone is taking up the cleanliness drive these days – from celebrities to politicians to sports personalities and even corporate houses. That’s a good initiative. But is it okay to take a drive for 1 day and leave it at that? I was going through some celebrity photos of their cleanliness drive and the only dominant element in their large bins of garbage were dried leaves!!! Now the question is  - do you just see dried leaves on the streets?? I see a whole lot of things – old clothes, stale food, wrappers, vegetable peels, scrap metal, dead rats and just about everything. Definitely much more than just dried leaves.

Our apartment community had taken a cleanliness drive in our neighborhood in Bangalore once to free our streets (the then pot holed roads) of nails and metal parts. Many of our residents had participated in the drive and there was an incredible amount of metal junk collected from a stretch of 2 km road! Think about all the cars that have been plying on the busy road. We went up against the odds and started this drive early morning on a weekend so that commuters didn’t have a problem. We could do that because we stood up. The corporation, municipality turns deaf and blind in these situations. But should we stop at just that? Isn’t it our responsibility too to take up the responsibility of cleaning up. We don’t have a problem in cleaning our own house, terrace or balcony. We only use the roads – then why can’t we help in cleaning them?

When we travel abroad we take care not to throw a gum wrapper or a coffee cup on the roads, we take care to throw them in the designated bin, but as soon as we reach our own country we don’t think twice to throw a coffee cup on the roads, or spit on the roads. We learn to do what we see around. No one is throwing a single thing anywhere other than the bins so we don’t litter. We behave like a responsible citizen as we step into London, Paris or Singapore. And back here we don’t mind throwing the cigarette butt anywhere – because everyone around is doing the same. Wrong. We need to learn to a responsible citizen in our own country first. What legacy otherwise will you leave for your next generation – a country full of filth (pun intended)!

Let’s drive a campaign to clean our neighborhood. Let’s be responsible citizen. Strepsils India has come up with this campaign to encourage Indians to speak up against all the wrongs that we see around us. #AbMontuBolega. Join the campaign and lets stand up against all the wrongs – harassment of women, or littering roads. Lets strive to make the society a better place to live.  Visit their webpage, FaceBook Page orTwitterHandle 

http://www.abmontubolega.com/

This post of mine has been written as a part of Indi-Happy hours  on Indiblogger in association withStrepsilsIndia #AbMontuBolega