Friday, August 1, 2008

snailing through

I am travelling to Egypt on August 3, 2008, my first international trip as a Journalist, and the feeling hasn’t sunk in yet. I sometimes wonder whether God or the third force as I like to call has held my hands to help me tread the path less treaded or is it like the dialogue from the movie Kung Fu Panda, we often meet our destiny on the path we try to avoid it!
As we grow in life our priorities change as Nirmal pointed to me during one of our discussions that, “as we grow we realise that at times what we believed was wrong or may not be wrong, its all about experiencing everything in life but gradually.”
I always made others believe that the only thing that is constant in life is change but personally when I gauge my coming of youth I realise that I have not been able to change.
People around me believe that perceptions change with time but my inability to walk with the changing pace has cost me a lot but on other hand it has given me the power to achieve what I wanted.
When I was in sixth standard my teacher asked me what I wanted to become, I thought hard, real hard and realised that I don’t want to become a doctor or an engineer because Ambarnath is full of these. Thus I decided to go through the dictionary and find a career which I thought nobody will be able to come up with, so next day I went in my class and profoundly said I want to become a Journalist! My teacher was dumbstruck and she asked me whether I knew what I was saying, I said of course I do and I will become one, one day.
Thus the seed was sown and rest the nurturing was done by Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Arnab Goswami and to top it all Sir Mark Tully (he received knighthood when I was in tenth standard).
The grooming was difficult but then what is success unless faced with hardships…like the swan rearing to fly but tangled in seaweeds, I started speaking in english, my English teacher Ms. Esther Philips, told me that I speak English like the loafers standing at railway station.
Her cunning words have been the key ingredient of my dreams to be served well cooked.
She always thought I was a blot on the English literati of my school. So I decided to prove her wrong and began my journey by reading magazines like Gokulam, tinkle, and wisdom since sixth standard and held the newspaper from eighth grade, which my friends couldn’t even dream in their wildest dreams.
I owe my vocabulary improvement award to Times of India, india’s leading daily, which has been a phenomenal knowledge bank for me and my dad for keeping 24/7 news channels playing loud in our house.
I also realised most of my knowledge came from television, radio, newspapers than school books. And the day I realised this I stopped doing my home works followed by class work also. During my ninth and tenth standard I never made any social studies notebook, neither did I have any hindi note book. I believed that writing those paras would neither help me nor my sir, so better I didn’t attempt.
After tenth board exams my parents forced me to take up sciences, which I knew I would never be able to fare and after two years of coaxing I some how passed junior college and sighed relief. My parents were disappointed and disgusted I actually thought my father is going to disown me keeping in mind the fact that he is considered as one of the most intelligent chap at his workplace.

Finally it was time to decide where to head, and I decided to go ahead with the dream that initiated as an attempt to differ from the crowd and thus I got myself admitted at Somaiya college. Then began the journey of trials and tribulations, happiness and bounty of sorrow but nothing could deprive me from the goals that I had set for myself as a kid.
The day I wrote my last board exam at college I landed with my first job and today on my second job I have surpassed my own imaginations.
My father who always believed that going America is the only way to prove my intelligence is finally proud of the fact that I am the one who writes, uses brain for the benefit of others and helping the mass to understand what I know and fulfil their aspirations.