What have I signed up for? I thought as I looked at the scene around me. Standing on a teeming platform at Vapi station while a million eyes watched my every move was pretty disconcerting. The lack of women amongst the crowd added to the feeling of being put under the microscope. The station in itself was as non-descript as they came. Hawkers, Coolies, Gujarati traders, the odd beggar or ten, and animals (stray dogs, rats, cows, did I mention rats?) all jostling for space, the 1 sq feet of place that they called their own. The railway announcements added another hue to the canvas of the great Indian rural in which I found myself in. The latest proclaimed that the Shatabdi Express was going to be delayed by an hour. I groaned and thanked my ‘lucky’ stars for placing me in this place at this time. I walked to the vendor selling coffee and bought myself a cup. The short distance to the vendor felt like an eternity when people followed your every move. I might as well have been dressed in a clown costume for all this was worth. The coffee was passable, but it brought me to another place, another time.
Coffee under the moonlight, surrounded by a cluster of trees and a comfortable chair, with music in the background and a raging debate on the superiority of Kieslowski’s films took away from the fact that it was 4 am. Chotta had always been the place where people could do just that and more. MICA does that to you. It makes you feel as if you are stuck in a time warp- a different world in which the outside world- with its politics, chaos, and the regular 9 to 5 clockwork routine is a distant reality. MICA exists like a mirage in the desert, real for the time you are in it and an illusion for when you are not. It is amazing how much we packed into the 24 hour day at MICA. Assignments, projects, classes, walks around campus, sport, music, hobbies, committee work, festivals, movies, dining out…the list was endless. Sleep was the only casualty to the time spent in living our life just the way we wanted to, getting the maximum possible from each day. Once you step outside of this haven however, stepping back into the real world is not an easy transition. What hits you the most is the routine. A fixed time to do everything. From sleeping, eating, waking up, work and back, the same cycle continues for the entire week, with weekends being the only relief. Suddenly, the real world and its problems swirl around you, voices silently screaming at you to listen. It is moments like these that make you want to escape, escape back to MICA and its idiosyncrasies.
The blast of a horn jolted me out of my reverie. As the train glided into the platform, I slung my backpack and walked to my compartment. Visiting factories to follow up on vendors who supplied apparel to my company was a job I wished I did not have to do. But cross-functional training meant that I had to do a stint in every department of the fashion house I worked for. And that meant visiting factories in places such as Silvassa, Tirupur (Tamil Nadu) and even Ludhiana as part of the merchandising stint. The life of a management trainee was not one that afforded a choice of where you wanted to be. You were given orders and you followed those to a tee. You went where you were told to go- big cities, small towns, far flung villages. Your individuality was something that did not exist anymore. And then it hit me. I had turned into one of the million rats who went about zombie-like, doing their job, always crawling toward bigger positions and better salaries, achieving goals and quarterly targets…Was this a new beginning or the end of a chapter in my life that I wish had never ended...
Coffee under the moonlight, surrounded by a cluster of trees and a comfortable chair, with music in the background and a raging debate on the superiority of Kieslowski’s films took away from the fact that it was 4 am. Chotta had always been the place where people could do just that and more. MICA does that to you. It makes you feel as if you are stuck in a time warp- a different world in which the outside world- with its politics, chaos, and the regular 9 to 5 clockwork routine is a distant reality. MICA exists like a mirage in the desert, real for the time you are in it and an illusion for when you are not. It is amazing how much we packed into the 24 hour day at MICA. Assignments, projects, classes, walks around campus, sport, music, hobbies, committee work, festivals, movies, dining out…the list was endless. Sleep was the only casualty to the time spent in living our life just the way we wanted to, getting the maximum possible from each day. Once you step outside of this haven however, stepping back into the real world is not an easy transition. What hits you the most is the routine. A fixed time to do everything. From sleeping, eating, waking up, work and back, the same cycle continues for the entire week, with weekends being the only relief. Suddenly, the real world and its problems swirl around you, voices silently screaming at you to listen. It is moments like these that make you want to escape, escape back to MICA and its idiosyncrasies.
The blast of a horn jolted me out of my reverie. As the train glided into the platform, I slung my backpack and walked to my compartment. Visiting factories to follow up on vendors who supplied apparel to my company was a job I wished I did not have to do. But cross-functional training meant that I had to do a stint in every department of the fashion house I worked for. And that meant visiting factories in places such as Silvassa, Tirupur (Tamil Nadu) and even Ludhiana as part of the merchandising stint. The life of a management trainee was not one that afforded a choice of where you wanted to be. You were given orders and you followed those to a tee. You went where you were told to go- big cities, small towns, far flung villages. Your individuality was something that did not exist anymore. And then it hit me. I had turned into one of the million rats who went about zombie-like, doing their job, always crawling toward bigger positions and better salaries, achieving goals and quarterly targets…Was this a new beginning or the end of a chapter in my life that I wish had never ended...
