Change Management

As I now prepare to leave for the place I call home, I can only wonder, if the meaning of the word ‘home’ itself has lost relevance.

Four years I spent in a place, an average joe at Hyderabad would not even recognize. Always, when I told some person who was either a friend of a friend or a friend of my father, that I study in BIT mesra, an incredulous look preceded the question “Do you study at BITS pilani?” and then I would do all the explaining about how BIT and BITS were actually sister colleges (a slightly more palatable lie) and that they were established by two brothers of the same family.

When I joined this college, it was the farthest I had gone from home. A different culture altogether. People speaking a Hindi dialect we had only heard in movies and television. It took me some time to get accustomed to that place. And when I did, it became dearer to me than Hyderabad. Every break, be it the winter or the summer or that of the puja, I used to think of ways and means by which I could come back to Ranchi. And always, since no one else was there, I had to stay back in Hyderabad. This feeling was there beginning the third semester. I used to go home and each time I felt I was becoming more and more distanced to my home. I had no friends save 2-3 school mates with whom I spend most of my time there and are my only contact to that place apart from my parents. Everytime I stepped out of Godavari express at Secunderabad station, it was as if I was back to an alien planet.

Don’t think wrong of me. My parents still reside at that place and (un)fortunately that is the only place on earth I can go to if I am kicked out elsewhere.

This increasing gap became more prominent when I joined this company. After more than three years here. Pune feels more like home than Hyderabad. But still, it is to Hyderabad I always go when I can manage a break.

Of cultural adaptations, I have never found it difficult to intermingle once I was out of my college. Be it my initial days at Pune or my period which was spent at Singur or my coming back to Pune, mixing amongst people was never a problem. But then, may be it was the chameleon in me that has led me to this ‘lost’ identity. I have shape-shifted so much now, that I belong everywhere and I belong no where.

Its as if, to mix with the people, I always kept changing and now there is no part of the original me left to recognize.

What should we hold on to if we are to keep our identities intact? Should we face or do we deserve to face the problems which crop up if we take a stand and stay firm on some grounds. How much of our identity, our culture are we willing to compromise to achieve material success? Who shall ultimately win the war called life, will it be the guy who always intermingled and ultimately was left with no identity or would it be the guy who always was the place where he belonged to? Wherever his endeavours took him, he always managed to carve a niche thanks to his firm stand. Is change good or bad? Change is practical they say and yet oppose it in certain respects. Who decides what can be changed and when can it be done.

Maybe these questions shall remain unanswered forever. Maybe fifty years from now, in the twilight zone of my life, I shall be able to understand the bitter truth. Maybe, I will end up on the wrong side. Maybe, I shall change somewhere in between and maybe, a very little but existent chance, that I end up winning the war though I have lost this battle.