Part A:
As a kid, I wanted to be a Mechanic. It sounds funny in the hindsight, but I was adamant about being a mechanic. For the kid inside me, Mechanic represented the epitome of human ingenuousness. A mechanic is the one who can get to the bottom of the issue that has halted the movement of a behemoth machine-like truck, a truck was the largest machine I had seen in my life till then and solve it. I remember seeing a mechanic in the garage as he was walking back after work. The sight was tantamount to a surgeon walking back from the operation theatre with his hand dirty. Being from a humble background, my family did not raise any alarm at the size of my dream. But my teachers did. They tried to persuade me to ponder over the economical and physical hardship of the job, to no avail. Nothing worked.
The L&T cement company was acquired by Aditya Birla group in 2004 and rechristened it as UltraTech cement. The ABG group had made a marketing campaign called “The engineers’ choice” for the Ultra Tech cement. The advertisement changed my perspective. The truck was not the largest thing a man could build, and the mechanic was not the best career I could pursue, Engineering was!
Part B:
It's February 2015, I was working in a software firm as a Software Engineer. I was fresh out of college and had all the money, I would need. I along with a friend had a bike trip planned Chennai – Pondicherry – Chennai for the weekend. However, fate had something else in the store for us. Unfortunately, we met an accident. My friend and I were admitted to a govt hospital then subsequently moved to Chennai.
Fast forward three months, I had almost recovered from most of my injuries. By Gods grace, my friend had recovered more expeditiously, and she was kicking and jumping by then. However, my biggest challenge was not the accident or pain associated with it. The challenge was boredom. I was supposed to rest on a bed. No movement nothing for the period I was recovering.
One day I came across a saying by the Sadguru, “If you are bored when you are alone, you are in the bad company.” The words struck the right chord, I mentally embarked on the journey to improve my company for myself. I took the habit of reading books. I started with Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It was a journey of a person who is in search of ultimate knowledge which he ultimately earns. Reading books gave me the power to fly across the continent and live a different life vicariously.