From here to where!

From here to where!

I was born in Kashmir, the land of meadows, guzzling rivers and orchards. The breeze there hits your face sublimely as you watch a shepherd grazing his flock in the valleys. The brooklets just pass dancing by as if an egyptian dancer gyrating her hips. The air is cool, the breeze sublime.

There were not many job job opportunities and people just prefer government jobs-the convention is that if you have a government job you get the most beautiful bride, live a peaceful life, everybody treats you with respect, you make enough savings, many people visit your funeral and you get a granite stone epitaph on your grave which reads how honest, humble and spiritual life you ever lived.

For the guys who do not get government jobs, they either buy an auto-rickshaw spending their lives taking people to different boulevards, lanes and bylanes of the city, or then there are always are the shopkeepers who inherit those shops on the busy Lal Chowk streets-those people always require good salesman, the kind that oil their hair daily, have masculine features, are kind of hunks, can haggle aggressively with a customer and most importantly can endure the salary deductions like we endured anti-tetanus injection.

Some people just would not do anything there in my hometown. By that I mean you could see them flying pigeons of the finest variety, or angling on the banks of river Jhelum. As a kid I always thought them rich-with the kind of big roaring laughs they would laugh. When I grew up, I saw them in penury, they would hardly smile, would wear not so fancy clothes and would not even rear pigeons or have time for angling also.

I, honestly, did not want to end up like them. I hit 30, I got married. Job was a small one. A private one, as they say. I would encourage students who had just graduated to take up a personality development program launched by the Central Home Ministry. The aim was to get the haggardness out of them, help them say their introductions in English, make them understand what formal and informal attire was, how to write a formal email and that was about it.

I would go to every degree college of the Kashmir valley impressing upon the students of the final year of graduation that the first thing that they should be doing after their graduation was to enroll themselves in this program. Many would agree to. Many would not. A few would later join me in the SRTC bus to Jammu and there onwards in sleeper class to a big Indian city, to kind of spawn their dreams and later on chase them. The 20-somethings did not like this-the kind of freedom they enjoyed in their colleges, the usual hilly-billy behaviour which they exuded in their hometowns was now being tamed to a more robotic and disciplined life. Many would flee in the first month of joining only. Those who stayed for second and third months always carried a bagful of maladies with them. They would call me every evening with things like: There is a rat in the room, the pulses today were overcooked, some drunk guys shouted at us when we tried to lit up a fire at night in the public park. As more and more students started leaving the program, the more would be deductions from my salary. At one point I got a 100 dollars as my salary, on lucky days I would get 200 dollars. That was about it.

Life had to be lived. I would see huge number of unemployed boys of my age sitting idle in parks, gossiping about politics, saying things things like the hardliners of the 'freedom movement' were too harsh and the softliners were too 'soft'. They would somehow shamelessly enter their homes and have their dinners. Their ageing father had hawked some stray items on some busy street somewhere in the city. I did not want to end up like them. There was something to be done.

At 30, I got married. And after seven months into marriage I lost my 200 dollar a month job. Something had to be done. I had 150 dollar savings. I left for Bengaluru, India's IT hub. Reaching there I got a job as a sales trainer in one of the companies. They provided 180 dollars a month in one of India's most expensive cities. Besides, they provided a shared windowless accommodation in one of the hostels seventh floor where the lift had ceased to function, rats and lizards were most likely to taste the pulses before you did and where the other embittered fresh graduates from Kashmir threw up tantrums for a return 'air ticket' to home. My room was a windowless 10*10 feet where the cigarette smoke was omnipresent and bedbugs ensured your regular visits to city's dermatologists.

After two months, I left the job. I rummaged through my Linkedin Friends to see how many were working and after seeking referrals made it to this company. Here the shift is 6.30 p.m to 4.30 a.m. Enjoyable. Good job. Good 400 dollars a month salary. Intelligent colleagues to work with.

The thing is about savings. I am not able to make any. So , I keep asking myself . From here to where! Back to a shopfront in Lal Chowk sweeping the marble floor or getting a mouthful from the college dropout owner. Or to buy an autorickshaw and ferry people from one lane to another.

Life is unpredictable as they say. The beauty lies in not knowing what will happen tomorrow. You could be in an upscale apartment or a mosquito-filled 10*10 feet room. It is life. It is lived like that.

Unpredictable and surprising. Sometimes it is better if you do not know where to go from here.