To the People, To my Friends, To Chennai…

I remember when I reached Chennai for the first time. I had two bags with me. But today when I am leaving after spending four beautiful years of my life in Chennai, I can say that I am not leaving with just two bags. I am leaving with a lot of great experiences, stupid mistakes which changed the course of my life and tons of crazy yet wonderful friends. I am going to treasure all those moments in my heart and play in the theatre of my head whenever I miss Chennai. I remember my first opinion about Chennai, it was way too different. I didn’t like Chennai at all for first two years of my college. The hot climate, the language barrier, the food taste (people from north India have a complete different taste) and things like hangout places etc. But today I know that I cannot say anything bad about Chennai and I feel a bit bad when others do that even though I may not tell them.

I am among those people who has pursued his engineering and chasing his dream to become a great writer. However I don’t like the fact that it has become a tradition now that after completing engineering people actually starts thinking what they should do with their life. Instead I want people to explore their talent and choose their stream carefully. It should not be a trend to spend four years of life for something which you may not use as your professional career. It totally depends on how one uses this as a part of life as well. But still if you want to do something different which the main crowd is not doing then I would request them to be a little more straightforward about what they want from your life.

When I finished my 12^th grade, I wanted to pursue journalism. I even did my part of research but then when the time arrived to confront this to my parents I didn’t brought this up. Although my parents have been really supportive, I was not sure how they will react back then. And when I was again clueless in life after getting rejected in fifteen companies (not because I was not deserving, because they needed marks not talent) I decided to tell my parents. It did hit them hard at first as they were expecting another engineer but later on when I cracked every entrance exam for PG course in Journalism in every colleges around India, they understood my thirst for writing, the need for my dream to be alive and engineering is not everything. No one can ever thank his/her parents for what all they have done for us. But we can thank the others who were associated with it.

All my friends in Chennai who always kept me motivated to write more. Although many never read my blog but their motivation helped me to gain many more readers around the world. And I am very glad to say today that in one year my blog views has increased from 1000 to 48065 (as per now). Many people, especially middle class people have a mind-set that we can never go for things which might make us famous even though almost everyone who is more famous belonged to middle class background, many from lower class too. But if you tell them you want to become a writer they will laugh at your stupidity to think beyond your level. How anyone can forget that anyone can achieve anything they want to achieve in their life. I have another great Indian dream and the best part is I am going to chase it. This time it will be very different from how engineering was, but all I know is whatever happens in your life it happens for a reason. When I was not getting a job that happened because it was in my destiny to go for journalism. But we cannot live our life depending on our destiny, we must work hard to get where we want to, we must put all our efforts to make sure the path our destiny shows us we are able to follow it. Once you do your job, the universe will do its job.

I am really thankful to Chennai for giving me so many things. I don’t know when I will come back. It is also very far from where I am going – Delhi. But whenever I will get a chance I will surely come back. It is my second home now after all. Four years is a long time but it passes so quickly that by the time we realised we were at the gate of college. And the sad part is I am the only one in my group who is going so far, the rest managed to bag a job either in Chennai or Bangalore (which is so near). But I believe in the saying,

“Kahin pahuchne ke liye kahin se nikalna zaroori hain…”

And I only want to wish that all my friends do well in their life and make it big (and never forget to give me treats).

Hasta la vista! Sayonara! Au revoir! Goodbye…