the final goodbye

Hi..
Same old id, same old person, that’s what must have gone through your mind.....
Nevertheless I just want to thank you for being associated with me for the better part of my life, you must feel what better part, but ask me,,,
The time we spent while walking back from school....
The time we spent waiting and then sometimes walking back from Mr. Arvind’d tuition...
The time we spent talking in your balcony at house no. 82, at timarpur....
The book (maths) you allowed me to borrow before my class tenth examination.....
The small chit chats we had in the house no H 292, at patparganj,
The visit to the mandir be it at maha rani bagh or at Ramakrishna app.
Be it the eternal wait for your replies...
Be it the wait to catch your first glimpse at timarpur....
Be it cycling around your house, in the evening , to just catch a glimpse of a person called .......
Be it gathering courage to propose you for the first time...
Be it waiting eagerly for your Jiya Jale performance, or still better the first thought that appears on hearing the song is you....
Searching for a white maruti 800 whose reg. No has the digits x,x,x,x
Same goes for a wagon r with the digit xxxx, or a steel grey swift.....
Associating st. Xaviers with you......
Getting excited still to see a lingya;s bus, or to hear about Infosys...
I love it how every conversation i have with my friends ends with you,
I love it when its 28 november,,,,
I still love it to end my day by having a look at your pic....
What more I love the way you are, love the way I spent the golden days of my life and these few pointers just being a part of the book I may write on you.....
I just loved liking you, caring for you, missing you.... I just love the name .........
But I got what you always wanted.....
I loose you win......
Bbye , do something good in your life, which I believe you would,,,,,
P.S. I love everything that at least brings you closer to me.......

So finally the idols has again touched the waters of our holy rivers, and it marked the end of the celebration time especially for the bongs,
somewhere deep down my mind this phase brings in a period of thought provoking sentiments and most of the times the emotions and sentiments take over..
but why this happens,
okay so a brief history of our puja, started in 1991, and to be precise i was a 5 year old kid at that time, slowly with each passing autumn , has slowly transformed and taken me from being a child of class one maybe to a first year masters students, so much has happened over the years, with each passing year the gap widens, and we are expected to be more sincere, the kids who roamed about a few years ago( or as it seems ) are now gearing for their boards, or entrances, the uncles /aunties are slowly turning grey, what i cant observe is how i am also changing, how people must say that even we are growing, people like me, kaushik, dodo, who once used to be the most adored kids are slowly no longer kids,
everything is changing, the strength of the committee is reducing from a decent 40 families, to at most 15 now....
every passing year makes us think whether it will be the same glory and charm next year or ........., it sends shivers even thinking about life without it, but yeah some things do happen, but just hope it continues that extra mile....

i am afraid, cant catch up with the fast slipping time.......

LIFE AT A B SCHOOL THATS ALSO CALLED D SCHOOL

SO FIRST POST AFTER GETTING INTO COLLEGE, AM REALLY ENJOYING MY LIFE OUT HERE,
THE PLACE IS CALLED:

FACULTY OF COMMERCE AND BUSINESS,DELHI SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS,DELHI UNIVERSITY

THE COURSE IS MHROD THAT IS: MASTER OF HUM AN RESOURCE AND ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT :
LIFE OUT HERE IS VERY DIFFERENT, COMPARED TO MY PREVIOUS COLLEGES AND SCHOOL,PEOPLE COME HERE TO STUDY, TO LEARN NEW THINGS AND TO QUESTION THE QUESTIONS WHICH DO NOT HAVE ANY ANSWERS,
EVERY SECOND DAY WE HAVE A PRESENTATION OR GUEST LECTURE OR SOMETHING ATLEAST WHICH KEEPS US BACK,
LAST WEEK THE COMMITTEE SELECTIONS WERE FINALISED, THE SENIORS SELECTED ME FOR THE STUDENT DEVELOPMENT CELL AND THE MEDIA CELL, HAS TO MANAGE THOSE THINGS, BUT THEY PROMISE TO TEACH ME LOT A LOT OTHER THAN THE REGULAR HR GYAAN.
HAD OUR FRESHERS YESTERDAY,GREAT PLACE, TASTED THE BAR AFTER 2.5 YEARS, LAST TIME IT WAS AT KASAULI WITH THE "BANISHED KNIGHTS" OUR GROUP IN THE COLLEGE,COUPLE OF SHOTS ARE ATLEAST REQUIRED IF YOU GOT TO DANCE FOR FIVE HOURS NONSTOP, THATS WHAT WE DID....
LOOKING FORWARD TO THE ALUMNI DINNER AND OTHER EVENTS WHICH ARE TO HAPPEN NEXT MONTHS.
FOR NOW ITS A BIT OF SERIOUS STUDIES AS COMPANIES WOULD START VISITING TO HIRE US FOR SUMMER INTERNSHIPS FROM NEXT MONTH....
SO SIGNING OFF WITH A PROMISE THAT I WOULD BE BACK SOON.....

trip to dharamsala, mcleod ganj and dalhousie

Holidays always bring in a special feel and have an aura surrounding it for me, and this time on it was no different when we decided to go out and explore parts of Himachal Pradesh. After much planning and re planning the venue was fixed, and it was dharamshala and the trip began on a saturday evening with we departing for the place from the kashmere gate i.s.b.t., tickets have been booked in a himachal roadways volvo bus and it was quite a respite considering the external conditions prevailing in delhi.
reached dharamshala next day morning and what a place , not the typical indian hill station with crowds flocking in everywhere but again this change is absolutely necessary for anyone coming from a place like delhi.
checked in the hotel kunal,as it was owned by the himachal tourism it offered a great view of the place,that day was given to visiting mcleodganj and the local places.
left for mcleodganj at around ten, mcleodganj is just around ten kilometers from dharamshala and the place is a real showcase of chinese and tibetian culture with the people cursing china but selling chinese products.
while returning back saw many places the dharamshala cricket ground, what amazing location it has, and also a few local attractions, but the best part which i liked the most is the view of the snow capped dhauladhar ranges which can be seen from dharamshala
the next day was reserve for dalhousie which takes almost the entire day as the terrain is rocky and is at a distance of around 150km., we left hotel at around 7 in the morning and the view on the way was just majestic,had breakfast midway and our first srop was planned at khajjiar, heard from many people that the place is called mini switzerland but one needs to see it to believe it,on the way to khajjiar we crossed a village jot(pr. jotte in hindi), visiting these places we get to know how lucky we are to have all the necessities and ammenities of life as for them things as simple as a pot of water makes them walk around ten kms.
so back to the trip khajjiar is a just a place to sit back and relax and to get lost in tranquility .stayed for a couple of hours at khajjiar and then moved on to dalhosie and true to its name it still has that old world charm,with english styled architectures , roamed around a bit and walked the streets, had lunch at a restaurant of hotel manimahesh, tasty food they make, started from there at around four in the afternoon and reached back dharamshala by evening .
FEW POINTERS FROM THE TRIP: places like dharamshala and dalhousie are not the peculiar indian hill stations full of tourist places and crowd and shops selling things at double their prices, but if someone is areal nature lover and loves peaceful and ca;lm surroundings then this is the place.
for people interestedin visiting the place on their own we do get motorcycles on rent

and a warning to people willing to travel by bus, go in for volvo coaches as the ordinary buses will make you suffer big time due to the condition of the connecting roads.

once upon a time, part two

so the girl moved on and the poor boy agian left with no choice but to wait and wait for those lucky moments, two years went by in despair for the boy , the boy cleared class 12, prepared for a year again for the various entrances , the girl was also to give her entrances that very year , and they filled form together, even gave most of the exams together and finally the boy got admission in a very esteemed college , the course not being in lines with something very common, and the girl also took admision somewhere in some course, the guy started missing her further more as, somethings donot happen for the benefit of the boy everytime, the families which were very close initially began drifting away and finally the meetings which were initially once a month or so turned to once every six years to no more meetings except the commuity gatherings , his friends in the college supported him big time to get rid of this anxiety by speaking it out, but actually he never got a chance, the chance he finally got in the year 2007, a community gathering that spans for over five days, that day came on the second last day of the gathering when he had to finally give in to the wishes of his friends who decided to go in on a hunger strike if he didnot propose her, so the boy proposed her not verbally though but through sms, he got a reply but that was not the reply he had waited for ten plus years, again he reproposed her the next day this time verbally though but the answer didnot change and broken and shattered he went on, the boy considered a bright prospect in the college dropped in academically, even his friends tried to talk to the girl but the reply was that she does not had any problem with the boy but she was not going to do anything that hurted her family members, the year passed by, the boy worked, left his job, prepared for mba, joined a prestigious college in delhi to do his mba, the girl is working somewhere , but till today there is a void in the boys life which he is not able to fill, void that remains even today the 24th day of june 2010, and the boy does not know again as to how he will get over this, how he loved the girl and waited for a positive reply since that day 23october 2007 to this date, how he misses her and though they have not had any communications for the last around a year but he still misses her.
many people had said that the girl even liked the boy but if we considered what people said then earth would have been jupiter to say the least,
what more this is one of the biggest dreams of the boys life but again his another big dream was that the girl remained happy in her life and maybe that had come true.
DISCLAIMER:
though it comes at the starting , this post is a little different as you may find resemblance between some characters in here and some person you know in real life:

happy reading

once upon a time

once upon a time, chronologically speaking say in the mid nineties there lived a boy, a boy, yes an ordinary boy who suddenly woke up one morning to find that a friend of his , who he never thought was his best friend or even special was moving out, not out of delhi, but just to another location, heartbroken the boy was,but could not figure out why, yes why would he he was just around 10, he was confused, sad, shocked, everything but never gave a second thought as to why he was getting those feelings, the meetings they had came down to once every 2 months, to once every three months, move on to the period when the boy just waited for the community get togethers they had and found an oppurtunity to meet her, the time they spent together be it 5 mins to sometimes when they (or better said when he) got lucky to around an hour, but the boy enjoyed everybit of it.
time moved on and one day, when nothing seemed special one of his very special friend again made the day special for him...hmmm special is less, he made it very special for him, the day he cherishes till date, he said nothing like winning a treasure or fortune or about going in for a foreign trip, what he said was that the girl who left that place so many years ago was coming back, coming back as she had mved to a higher class, yeah class eight it was and there was problem finding tutors for her, that was january and she was to move in in april, each day seemed like a year but time waits for none, the day came and they were together finally, hope this had been the ending for the boy but alas, happy endings donot come so easy, moments again became special, the boy used to wait for the gal everyday after school as both their buses used to come at almost the same time and somedays he used to wait for 15 minutes to just walk the distance of 5 minutes together, somedays that was not the case as maybe her bus had arrived earlier.cyclerides became very special for the boy as he never missed an oppurtunity to cycle round her house and wait eagerly to catch a glimpse of her..

again came the spring of his life and the girl and the boy studied together at the same tutor and the boy again waited everyday so that he can drop the girl home and spend a few moments with her.
day in day out he grew more and more towards her, he started liking her and that was the first love of his life, he thought of proposing her, but somehow couldnot get the courage to do so, he waited , in between came the boy's class tenth exams and his friends suggested to say it to her the day he finishes his boards, he waited eagerly for his boards to get over and began the countdown, the boards were over, so the next day morning was decided as the day he was going to do it.next day morning he had a two hour task of writting the exam for a blind boy, went there and while returning found the complex filled with cars , the number of cars he had not seen before at a time in the complex, went home but no one was there, waited , waited after about an hour his mother came and they went inside only to listen that the girls someone very close, very special had died the previous night and everything came shattering down, he still remembers the date , the boy went there but to see his friend, his girl, his everything crying over....well destiny played its part and the boy got to learn that the girl and her family were leaving the next day morning to their home town for around a month.

the month passed by they returned back, the boy now also used to wait for the girl, be it tuitions , after school or anything and used to observe the moistness in her eyes, the void that had been created in her life, at the tender age of around 15 when people still enjoy being with family, to loose out somebody ,who constituted more than her family was shocking and can break anyone, time started to move again , she was in class tenth and the boy continued to find reasons to be with her, to spend time together, he came to know about that the girl and her remaining family were again relocating somewhere and the short dream period the boy was having ended , but before that the boy made various attempts to atleast let her know of his feelings , sometimes asking his same old friend who told him earlier about their planning of returning back, the girl also seemed to like the boy as reported by his friends and as suggested by his observations.

glimpses of the real me:part 3

so had a short trip to sikkim before joining irctc, great place to be, especially the monastries and the scenery,returned from shillong and still now had not received the joining letter from irctc,
visiting the irctc office became an alternate day event and calling them up a regular phenomenon so finally got my letter by the end of july and 4 august was my date of joining which was also my parents wedding anniversary, so reached office on 4 august they checked all our documents, and 11 august was the date induction would start somewhere in kishanganj, delhi.
the d day came and all dressed up me and ankit reached kishanganj via auto, metro, and rickshaw.
the induction period went off well, even we didnot knew what lied ahead untill we got posted at the new delhi railway station base kitchen,and man people call it love at first sight, i say it whatever it is other than love at first sight, the first expression i had was how am i going to work over here, but again the fighter that i am,started working and each passing day my level of depression in life increased and my will to do a mba also increased.
work there was nothing more than some 30 odd people cooking the food and another 15 odd people packing the food and looking over the logistics so that they reach the train safely on time,
it followed with ankit saying it quit in the month of january and i still fighting it on with the only thing good about it being receiving the pay check at the end of the month, i could sought of never like that job, the feeling of doing something satisfactory was no there and that blended with the frequent trips to nizammudin railway station in some old motor bike and to reach on time made me think of giving february mat, a b school entrance examination , that too without any preparation, and my plan was to leave the job if i get something in and around the ninety percentile score, but somehow the exam seemed easy to me and i got some98.xx percentile, then came the ultimate test of will power that allowed me to leave the job in early april, but i didnot feel good about sitting idle for so many days so finally i joined a ngo which was working with the times of india group for the teach india movement, that was one of the best decision i took in my life and that gave me immense satisfaction and i felt like achieving something, working with the kids who were not as lucky as we are , and trying to make there life a little better,
i joined a coaching centre and prepared for my dream........
time flows like the dots in the previous line and soon i was writting the real tests and hoping for he best, some of the exams i wrote were good, pretty good like irma,delhi school of economics etc., whereas some like iift were complete disaster in which i couldnot reach the total cutoff.
while others like the CAT were , lets leave it types...
so finally i managed some good calls and some good converts and i am now a student of DELHI SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS..

few pointers and things i have learnt till now, never do a job which you donot enjoy, nor that it adds to your knowledge base, and it further de moralises you like anything, and always do what you feel right ( till the time it is legally right as per the law of the country), i joined delhi school of economics or the d school leaving aside many good colleges , maybe the d school will not be able to provide me with the 7 digit salaries and beat skipping profiles but still i can boast of that i choose it for myself
i left my job at the reputed psu organisation that people call irctc much to dis belief of many of my colleagues and relatives and friends but it is better to leave something you do not like than to cry about it for a lifetime like many of my colleagues would do.

thats me as of today the 26th day of the sixth month of 2010......

glimpses of the real me: part 2

so summer of 2004,went by i took admission in a coaching centre along with one of my dear friend kaushik and started again from the scratch, but this time on i had decided to try everything be it engineering, b pharma,hotel management,fashion designing etc. etc.( the common confused teenager who doesnot know what he is upto), came the time of forms and i dropped a bombshell by saying i wanted to fill in hotel management and fashion designing forms, somehow i knew i was not a engineer type species who could study hard, so as they say "when you aspire for something, the whole world conspires to let you achieve that thing". i got a air 212 in the hotel management jee, people said it was very cool i would get through ihm, pusa, new delhi, the so called best hotel management institute in the country, i decided to give it a try not because i didnot have any other option i had offers from nift mumbai , bit mesra(b pharma) and numerous other engineering colleges which i thought were stupid but now in summer of '10 i know they were not that bad either.
i was excited, excited in true sense of the word, i got through a college (though not engineering, but again it feels good to get through any college which is best in the country in its field).
kaushik got selected at uiet a engineering college under punjab university and my girl yeah the same one i mentioned in my previous post got selected in another college in faridabad.....so fast forward to 16 july 2005, first day ihm, pusa:
there i was sitting and waiting for things to get going, first day at college people have such mixed feelings of happiness, fear, tension, anxiety, a sense of achievement everything, time flew by in college( college episodes would require another blog which i will post pretty soon)
so another fast forward to end of 2007, placement time, around the campus just the same news in different words were flowing, taj is coming , hyatt is coming, x is coming, y is coming.....poor me got eliminated in the final round of taj, so finally my day came and when i narrated the answer i answered to all companies that were retail i got selected for itc retail, then aditya birla group and then irctc(the so called psu and which experts thought was a once a lifetime opp.), so joined irctc and left college with a sense of satisfaction of having achieved something.


but when you gain something you loose something, i lost out on my childhood love, out of sight out of mind, or a so called gap she considered between a hotel management grad and an engineer, whatever i had proposed her finally last durga puja, she said no in a very noble way and that resulted in my percentage dropping from 76 to 67 in a years time, thankfully bhm is a three year old course :p

still to come in my next few blogs about experience at irctc and plans for a mba....

glimpses of the real me:part 1

this is me abhinandan considered to be a bright student till around class seventh, with the only complaint my parents faced during the pt meets was that " your lad is very talkative".

come class eight, ninth the new sense of the teen years come to you and studies take a back seat and that as the case with me too.

suddenly all of a sudden everybody who met me, be it on the streets, markets, get togethers had just one piece of advice for me : beta abb toh boards hain, parr loh", but as they say some things never change and i nearly flunked in my pre boards hindi, but somehow i managed 82% in my boards. one more thing was also cooking up along with my studies and classes, i was falling in, falling for a girl who lived nearby, whom i knew from my childhood but whom i feared to propose, she was a class younger to me and studied at st.xaviers , but again life has its twists and turns and i had planned to propose her the day my class tenth boards ended but something drastic happened which changed everything.

so back to school, class eleventh studies seemed to be the last option for me and all other things had priorities, and as they say "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" i flunked in second term exam of physics and chemistry......

but the fighter that i am i fought had against all odds and somehow managed to get through eleventh and eventually class 12 also with some 74%marks.

the drastic fall with all my friends getting their marks in high 80 and early 90 left me shattered , that was the summer of 2004.

most of my friend got through some engineering colleges or medical but i decided to try once more and for the last time...

i would soon be back with part two with more stupidity on my parts