Tired of being a small cog in a large wheel, I’m moving on to be medium cog in a smaller wheel. For the last three new years all that I changed in my life was the calendar on the wall, but this year finally (to all my friends’ great relief) I’m switching jobs.
“…you will be relieved with the close of working hours of 11-Feb-06,” says the relieving note. That gives me a few days of unemployment – an opportunity to recollect my initial few days of struggle in an unknown city. What days those were. Though not exactly a rags-to-riches story of a Bombay struggler, ours does come close (minus the sleeping on the footpath part).
Weeks of uncertainty, knowing not what to do, where to go. No bank account where money could be transferred from home, no fixed address for the money order to reach. I almost forgot about an interview which I had appeared for during my last visit to the capital. At the insistence of my dear friend, I called up the office to discover that my days of unemployment were numbered. Then inertia got better of me and I amused myself with skipping stones on the water rather than taking a dip into it. A few days past the ides of February, I’ll be taking a fresh plunge.
A struggler day entry in my diary (nowadays I only blog) reads, “Some days you are the dog, on others the lamppost. Today I was the lamppost…” Tomorrow too wouldn’t be much different. The lamppost remains, the dogs change.
