Initial couple of days in Chennai Chapter

After waiting for full one year for the coveted "ordinary job of IT" in one of the extremely common company. I landed up in Chennai, one of the metropolitan city of Globalised India.

After all because of globalization and low standard of living in India I got the job in IT sector.

I came by train which took some 36 hours to reach Tambaram, Chennai from Delhi Station. Journey was good, Informative about south India and full of apprehensions about my new life in one of the fastest growing IT Company. Languages and weather changed as I traveled from Delhi through Haryana, UP, MP, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh to reach my destination Chennai.

After Reaching Chennai I realized I am a north Indian, I never felt like that before or never thought that knowing Tamil could be the only tool of breaking the linguistic barrier of southern India.

The moment we got down, struggle initiated itself upon us. The direction to scholinganallur side exit from station was difficult to understand. The reasons were not knowing Tamil and not able to pronounce the tongue twister word "scholinganallur" but we being the "sher da putter" managed our way out carrying 30 kg of load of our luggage ranging from toothpaste to steel plates. People all around were talking in some language which we thought we could never understand in our whole life. We were used to Hindi so much that any other language being spoken would irritate the hell out of us though English being the usual exception. For the 1st time in my life I thought British were not that bad, had they not given us English we could never understand how it feels to be in south India. While I was thinking of this weird consequence of British raj, we came across one of the most dreadful professionals in Chennai the Auto wala. He came looking for his victim, launching hand grenades by asking 300 400 500 Rs to carry us to our hotel in scholinganallur, which was hardly 70 Rs distance had we been in Delhi.

After lot of negotiation we managed to convince auto wala on 300 Rs. Hotel was decent but the food was not. We ordered Kadhai Paneer , dal makhni and Naan but we got one banana each they call it as their custom, sambhar flavoured kadhai Paneer and Fried sambhar dal. I never had such a democratic dinner with flavors of equal representation from north and south India.

Then we thought it’s better to sleep in the foreign land than to be in active state as we did not have any more stamina to experience the surprises.

Morning view from the hotel was good, Coconut trees being all over the place.  Felt nice place for vacation but may not be for long stay for which we came.

We mustered the courage to experience more surprises. We left to search for a place which could be our savior from strange atmosphere. When we went out I realized there could only be 2 kind of reviews for the city, one could be “I love the city” and 2^nd “I hate the city”, 3rd kind of review was difficult to think of. we saw couple of places to stay as we were looking for accommodation on a permanent basis, we liked them but zeroed on only one that was Ashok's pg as it had everything AC, fridge, TV with Hindi channels, North Indian food which was good by Chennai’s standard and it was affordable also, after all IT sector does not pay you much. I could never understand the fuss about IT but then I thought I could do nothing other than the highly common, easy, yet time consuming task of coding, testing, documenting the things that nobody understood.

IT came as a boon to people like me who were average in their academics, because IT needs people who are willing to work irrespective of their skills that they have.

After we finalized on ashok's pg we thought of experiencing beach. We went to beach around 2 in the afternoon in the month of July. The first question that came to my mind after landing on the beach was why are not many people around? Guy with us who is from Chennai told us no fool from Chennai go to beach at 2 in the afternoon. That comment made me think am I a fool by being on the beach at this time or by thinking of living in Chennai? Either ways we were fools and I being the leader as I forced everyone to go to the beach. When I saw the sea I forgot everything, so much of water it felt as if how the hell they managed to get so much of water? I realized that it was a stupid question but then that thought came to my mind at the moment. I preferred not to say this to anyone because nobody could understand it. The huge volume of water caught my attention and I could not move for about 15 minutes. I just loved the view, forgot who all were there with me. That view made my journey to Chennai worth cherishing.

After some time Ashish Ankit started shouting in the usual Delhi tones making me realize they are there for me may not be entirely but as and when I need them. Together we would face the hardship and experience the joy whatever we could gather from here.