Bangalored - Part 2

Many of my engineering college batch-mates were not too pleased with my previous post (Bangalored - Part 1) where I was not exactly full of kind words about my alma mater. Quite a few of my friends expressed their displeasure regarding the post on GTalk, although I would have preferred them to post their comments on the blog’s comments section, so as to carry forward the discussion. This post is the 2nd and perhaps not the last post on the “Bangalored” series; I would try not to be sarcastic and take the high moral ground as I give a personal account of some of the most cherished days of my life.

As I had mentioned earlier I was living in a flat in BTM Layout with my friends Shashi and Deva. Well Deva is actually Debashsis, but due to his misadventures in love he is called Deva, inspired by Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s epic work “Devdas”. I had cajoled Shashi to stay with us and initially he was not thrilled to bits at the prospect of staying with two fairly boring Bongs, who would converse all the time in Bengali, oblivious to his presence. We had a 2 BHK flat and I was successful in arm twisting the others to get a single bedroom for myself, and that too the bedroom which had an attached bathroom.

My life followed a fairly predictable pattern; I woke up early on the weekdays so that I could easily get a seat or two in the company bus. I was reluctant to wait for my other two room-mates lest I miss the bus or do not got a seat. Shashi and Deva were not really the “early to bed and early to rise” types and would often miss even the last office bus at 10 am. On such days they would be found strolling into office at about 11.30 (almost my lunch time) after paying the quintessential Bangalore auto-wallah over Rs. 100 for a Rs. 60 auto ride.

Although I was very particular about reaching office punctually, I hardly had any work at office. I was put on one of Infosys’ famous internal projects, aptly named “Center of Excellence”. No one cared for such projects and the Project Manager on my project changed at least 5 times during my 1 year stay. My 8 hours in the office were mostly spent having breakfast and multiple tea-coffee sessions in the canteen, surfing the internet, visiting the library to read newspapers and sleep there and timing my lunch so that I could “accidentally” meet one of the girls who I liked from the Mysore training days and who was also posted in Bangalore. Even when I accidentally met her, I could hardly muster the courage to join her table for lunch, as there was another guy always hanging onto her coattails. So my lunch companions were always either my college or other Bengali friends and the normal lunchtime discussions centered around the disgusting practice of use of coconut oil in food by South Indians, the love of fish and whether PwC was hiring in Calcutta.

Since I had very little work to do in office, I invariably took the first bus home which left the Infosys campus at 5.30 pm. On the way back home I would generally visit the BTM Sweet Chariot pastry shop, hoping to strike a conversation with the cute girl who worked there. I did not know her name and so Shashi and I referred to her as the Sweet Chariot-waali. Although she would speak to me out of courtesy, she was interested in Shashi; this was the north Indian connection working much to my chagrin as she was also from Delhi.

My evenings were spent watching my at times colour and at time black-and-white 14 inch TV which my father had graciously carried on train from Calcutta to Bangalore. But I would soon get bored of watching TV and then start calling my other 2 roommates, asking them to come home early and arrange for dinner.

The weekends were more interesting when Shashi and I would go over to the house of our friends Dippy, Abhishake, Haju (all from JU) and Shamik (Bengali guy from NIT Nagpur). I was supposed to share houses with these people but an unexpected turn of events forced me to ditch them at the last moment. (I am grateful to them for they still entertained me at their house during those days and also for them being friends with me to this present day.) Deva generally did not join Shashi and me for these sojourns as he spent his weekends on the phone, trying to keep alive his long distance relationship with his girlfriend back in Calcutta. This was also the time that I grew distant from Deva, as my friendship grew with Shashi and Shamik, partly due to Deva being occupied on the phone and partly due to me getting exposure to college life anecdotes from DCE and NIT and realizing what a waste my college years had been.

The weekends spent at my friends’ house were mostly spent drinking and discussing about the future, how most of us wanted to do MBAs in our lives and that we all would collectively set up our own company and hence always be able to stay in touch with each other. It is not without a tinge of sadness that I remember those days as we have spread to different parts of India pursuing our own respective careers and hardly get to meet each other even once a year. We might be earning much more than those days and living much more comfortable lives in bigger houses with our own cars, but somehow I feel that spark in our lives and the dreams in our eyes have gone. Back in those days there was always this sense of yearning to achieve something in life, to build our careers and so on, but as I write this post today, it is only a sense of emptiness and vacuum that remains. The sacrifices and prices paid for reaching where we are today, where our egos are so enlarged that some random girl can break our much cherished friendships, where I hardly talk to a guy with whom I spent my every other weekend, and all the surrounding mental baggage are perhaps just not worth it.