On 18 July 2016, just out of college, a little reluctant and a lot more excited, I had stepped into the shoes of corporate life. I had come in here with a lot of plans, a lot of unfulfilled dreams but ..
Everything changed. Life became too slow and too boring.
It seemed like there was nothing but just hours of travelling. I was with people who seemed too old, too mature, too reserved and too unlike me. This is the way I would have described my life a few months back, but now this description seems incomplete.
Its not like now I am head over heels in love with my job. Or maybe I am. I know I am getting comfortable with the wrong things, and perhaps the wrong people. But today, when I thought about the roller coaster life I have steered through in the last 1 year, life without BOA in it, now seems scary.
In one year it has become like another school, another VMC, another college, another place it would hurt too much to leave.
Things in my world are supposed to be black and white, but again, they turned grey.
And here go the reasons.
TT:
Its almost been an year, when I first held the smallest bat, way smaller than my once favourite baddy racquet, and a ball smaller than the golden snitch. And its really embarrassing that I still haven’t learnt enough to even qualify the first round in singles. :p But it doesn’t matter, I still like it.
If there is something I got emotionally attached to, more than everything else, it is TT. It seems funny, a game that never even qualified as a sport for me, has become so important . It began with Abhinav and Shubham, who taught me to hold the bat and put the ball on the table, and bore patiently with me in the first few months. It began as the only option I had in office.
And now it is something I really wish to learn. Now I wish to have the same relationship with that bat, ball and TT table, that I have with my project, my VMC, my college, Harry Potter, Enid Blyton, MMA, Baddy and my other favourites. Now, I wanna understand both its fundamentals and intricacies so that I can appreciate it in its true sense.
But still, if there is one thing I love more than the game itself, it is the friends I made through it.
Friends:
The most happening stuff becomes boring without friends,
and even the most boring stuff becomes happening with friends.
And this jail life of BOA changed after I found friends.
There was once an elite BOA group, (https://sportsiesrocks.wordpress.com/?s=Boa) of 9 super energetic kids out of which only 5 remain: Abhinav, Amit, Jatin, Jyoti, Vishnu, Karthik, Nitin, Shubham, Vishnu and me. And the then cameo : Sushmitha. It’s harsh to even think about us, cz we had so little time together. But it was this bunch and its regular meetups, our conference puns, that made office fun. 😀
After the elite BOA folks, most of the others came in through TT.
The people here may be over simplistic, complacent, and very different to the ones I was used to in school and college. But now, when my once 24-7 friends, are so distant that they have become just voices over phone, people at the other end of letters and beautiful once upon a time memories, its these people who make life. Maybe not friends, but much more than colleagues.
TT wasn’t my kind of game to begin with but this changed that one day.
The day I saw someone play. I didn’t understand why it was so different. He was so good that I stopped playing in the middle of my game and just watched him play. I didn’t know him, but his game said it all. I had seen many fabulous people playing and had admired their game, many before him but he was different. He was flawless.
From that day on, TT became sporty, or rather qualified as a sport with movement, techniques, spin and even charisma and style. I wanted to meet that guy again, to ask him to play with me atleast once, but he seemed rarer than his game. And then finally one fine day, I saw the him in the lift. I was so ecstatic to finally see him again that I almost missed my cab for talking to him. I just got his name and number then in a hurry .
It was Prateek .(BOA folks would understand the change now).
It was after many one-sided communicator conversations. :p, that I got to be friends with him, came to know he is a fabulous cartoonist and poet, not just a pro TT player. He introduced me to the Baddy folks in BOA too, and played with me exactly on 2 days.
I was to hit smashes and he was to pick them. No smashes, no spins, nothing complicated. And ofcourse, I lost to him by 11-0. 😛 I was not surprised to lose by 0, it was obvious, just playing with him meant so much. :p
He later told me that I was holding the bat the with a wrong grip. He later suggested a TT bat, coachings and introduced me to the pro-patient world of TT.
For the record, what I cannot take is, I lost to him in baddy, although that was just for fun, cz baddy is my game. 😦
But as much as the guy who changed my perception about this sport, I admire some other TT heroes.
People here who play with me and sometimes teach me to play TT . Like Guru (Yeah, his name is Guru :D). Then people who presently play it with me like Harmeet, Vinay, Rahul, Prabhat, Anshuman and many more I don’t know by name.
I am happy, because there was a time, me and my friends used to watch them all from afar, hesitating to play with them because, for one, they wouldn’t play with us, and two, of course because they played too well for us.
Even today they play too well for me, but its too nice a thing that they play with me. And even though I am nowhere near, they do treat me like an equal.
I wish someday I have an unfailing control and a perfectly balanced game like Vinay and Rahul, popularly called Karan-Arjun here (They even come in same outfits sometimes :p), have a backhand like Ansuman, can serve like Prabhat, hit all shots with the same panache and still have a signature shot (top spin in his case) like Guru, and maybe someday, just someday play with Prateek and not go clean bold on duck.
I just wish, well that’s another dream, for some other day !!
There are a few others, whom I see once in a while :p, like Nitin, Sushma, Mandeep, Abhimanyu and Monica (the surprise champ who really came with a blast :p).
And Shubham and Jatin, you better be more regular if you want your name.
Other than TT folks, there are a few baddy ones, Shailesh ,Abhijeet, Rohit Sir, Divya, and a very chubby kid Ruhani, the daughter of a superb BACI baddy player. (There are many others again I don’t remember by name). Badminton in BACI would always be special cz I luckily won a doubles title here with Varsha. And unlike TT champs, I have a pic with the baddy pros.
People say in corporate life, its not possible to make friends like the ones you made in school and college, and I couldn’t agree more but maybe , just maybe life is in to give me surprises..
Its not like I only know people who play :p Cz some people who make you laugh, without Baddy and TT, Arpita and Piyush, 2 people who can make you laugh without any reason, and tumhaari banda-bandi ki bakwaas, bhaiii seriously .. 😀
And some people make the suffocating cab ride fun, and become your best chat buddies.. waapas aa jaao yr please.. Praveena and Vivek..
A cool manager:
If you are thinking, I have talked about everything, my project, my friends, sports, but in a post about my corporate life, where is work !! How come only work remains. Well, it exists in the backdrop. I happen to be an angular developer who is blessed to have a super cool manager. He perhaps believes in “jiyo aur jeene do” philosophy. He encourages me to learn new technologies. But along with that he not only encourages my interest in co-currics but also takes pride in me winning titles, so much so that he boasts about it to our LOB. He encourages me to follow all my pursuits more like a friend than a manager. No wonder, I blabber everything before him, even stuff like ” I don’t like solving ruddy issues.. and I wanna do XYZ in future, without any filters.
The easy-flowing life:
This life is very different from the dream life I want, but still, even the thought of this getting over is scary.
I don’t know how long this season of spring will stay, before another season comes, but I don’t wanna think about that now.
Although I have mixed feelings about getting an year older here, I still wish this spring stays.
I had come in here with a lot of plans, a lot of unfulfilled dreams, and here I saw many more.
Vidhi 🙂
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