CHAPTER -2-CHENNAI ?????

June 18th 2007
Palam Domestic Airport
New Delhi


The airport was exceptionally crowded today, probably because it was summer vacation time for schools throughout the country and as a result I was not able to find a place for my luggage trolley. I was sitting there waiting for my flight announcement with my parents and they were bothering me with their repeated questions about packing everything, carefully keeping all my documents and all that. I thought one more question and I will blow up and my flight announcement at that very moment came to my rescue. It was time to go I thought and looked at my mum, she hugged me and I saw tears in her eyes. She was not crying she was happy and those were the tears of joy. All her life she had just dreamt of one thing, seeing her children off at the airport when they went for their jobs and became successful in life. Today I think her dream had partially come true.

I proceeded for the baggage check in and it was then that I realized my flight was delayed for more than two hours. Now I hate it when I have to stand in the center of a crowded lobby all alone and figure out how to kill time for two hours. I finally found a couch and settled down with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and started reading but couldn’t concentrate. The past five months and the flurry of activities that went on in these months kept coming to mind.
Time goes by real fast after getting placed if one is still in college. December turned out to be a month for non stop partying because all my friends one by one got placed and celebrations went on week after week and continued in the new year as well. January came and for two weeks everyone got busy with studies. This time it was a different feeling all together. Before this exams were always taken seriously as we had to maintain a good CGPA for placements but this time almost everyone was placed already and there was a different kind of relaxed feeling and a laziness which I had never seen in exams. Like other times we did stay up nights for weeks together not sleeping for more than two hours but most of the time went to bed chatting. Dinner like other times was not so serious and no one said please don’t play loud music. Exams came and went and so did the feeling that MBA was over. The very thought brought tears to our eyes. No matter how much I cursed the college, the impossible schedules and assignments, presentations and professors who loved taking our happiness away but I knew I was going to miss it all.

The two years of MBA had been the best days of my life. I had made some amazing friends and spent the most amazing time. These two years were full of learning, soul searching, introspections, some amazing revelations about overselves and emotional bonds. We came face to face with certain aspects of our own personalities which we had never known earlier.
I was not sure if I will ever be able to do what all I did during my MBA. Nostalgia overtook everyone in the last month. Everything was forgotten and everyone started planning how to spend the last few days of our MBA and maximum time with our friends as much as possible. No one slept or studied. We stayed awake nights together just chatting and looking at old pictures and reliving the past two years. It was not easy to let go off the relationships that we had built in the past two years and the college which had become like a second home, so much so that none of us missed our real homes.

February was the time when most of us had decided to go out for trips and my group decided to go to Amritsar, Wagah, Vaishno Devi. It was quite a long trip and I didn’t want to miss it for anything. Last few days of togetherness and time had come to say goodbyes and head for our home towns, which, in my case was Delhi, so I didn’t take a lot of time to shift back to my home.
A major concern now was what to do till I had any information on my joining. After two years of non stop activities and a very busy schedule it was very difficult for me to sit at home and do nothing. I decided to work in a company to kill time and joined in the first week of March. Two months went by smoothly though I was waiting anxiously for my joining but no news came. Till April I was fine but it was in May when I started getting really restless and I would have called the head office myself if I hadn’t received my joining notice on the twenty ninth of May. It was all ok before that and I was happy cribbing about not receiving my joining date but hell broke lose after I got my joining date. I had to do so many things that I thought I wont be able to complete all the formalities till seventeenth, it was the day I was to leave for Chennai.

Today sitting here at the airport waiting I couldn’t help but smile when I thought how worked up I got when I had to collect all my joining documents from my college and complete the paper work. And I live in a family full of hyper active people who always get worked up at the slightest of provocation so it was very difficult to discuss anything without arguments even if it was the timing of my flight or how to fit all my bags in the car.
At five forty five finally I heard the announcement that I was to board the flight so finally got up and headed for the gate.
It was raining and that is why the flight got delayed in the first place but I was happy about it because the weather was unbearably hot from the past one week. As I boarded the flight I thought about the new journey that I was embarking upon. As soon as I settled down I started feeling really sleepy so dozed off and before I knew I was in Chennai.

My first thought as I came out of the airport was I hope the place is close to the airport as I was tired of sitting. My entire day was spent in sitting and waiting for something or the other to happen. But I was proved wrong. As I headed for the pre paid taxi I realized a lot of rickshaw guys approaching me and saying something that I did not understand and then it dawned on me that I was in a place where Tamil was spoken and I knew nothing of that language and I panicked at the thought of not being able to make the taxi driver understand where I had to go. I was lucky as he knew how to speak English and my day was saved but also told me that the place I was supposed to go to was 35 kms and will take at least two hours and I groaned but I had no choice.
He said he took many shortcuts and that is why we were able to reach forty five minutes earlier than we were supposed to and I could not doubt that simply because I didn’t know the geographical ABCD of Chennai and the thought of getting lost in an unknown city at night was terrifying enough for me to believe the driver.
I finally reached the Polaris campus tired and battered by the potholed road at around eleven I was too tired to notice how my office looked like that too at night and was greeted by four guards who to my dismay did not understand English or Hindi and I did not understand what they spoke and finally one gentleman came to my rescue who knew English and asked me if I was the management trainee and I said yes. He then asked one of the guards to carry my luggage to my room and asked me to follow him to the reception there he handed me an I card and a small sachet which had a green chilly and a toffee and I was confused as to what it was and asked him and he just smiled. After that I went straight to my room or rather a dormitory as it was a huge hall which apart from me had thirteen more girls staying there, who were all asleep. He left and I found a bed slumped on it and slept but was woken up in the middle of night because I found myself shivering, weird though but it was true the AC in the room was too effective for comfort and I did not have a blanket while the others did and that is why they were so blissfully asleep and I was chattering I tried to sleep with a single sheet but to no avail. I remember staying awake till three o clock and I don’t know when sleep took over me finally....