The Chennai Diaries: 21/04/2010

Hey!

Its 8:58 am on my laptop and I am at Mumbai's Chatrapati Shivaji Domestic Airport. After spending the past week and a half in Mumbai/Goa on what can be termed only as a paid vacation, its time to do some serious work and hence GCPL has packed me off to Chennai. Its one more of life's jokes that a person who would give his right arm to do this project from Mumbai needs to go to Chennai and work out the project in the south. Hence this series of posts will be labelled the Chennai Diaries, capturing the life and times of a GCPL summer intern in an unknown city.

The past few months can be termed as the months of discontentment. There was soo much internal negativity around everything I did or wanted to do, that I ended up doing quite a bit of crap in the first 3 months of the year. Not quite the way I would have wanted to start of the year! But things are slowly getting better, and I have had probably the best days of the entire year in the last week and a half. So when I was told that I needed to get to Chennai asap, I thought God's magnum rifle is out again. Going to Chennai means leaving a lot of things behind, friends, Mumbai, family, vada pav, but you always need to take the rough with the smooth. But I guess I am beginning to understand how chacha must have felt when he left for Hyderabad and also why the 'cutie pie' had such a radiant smile at the airport. I guess when you live with a bunch of people for 8 months straight 24X7 you get attached wether you like it or not, wether you want to or not. And this attachement is usually stronger towards people rather than the place itself. I mean if I had Sumeet, Maddy, Chacha, Bheem, Balls and the rest of the gang in Chennai, that would become heaven!

So Chennai it is. I have been to Chennai before but that was quite a while back somewhere abouts 2002, gosh thats already 8 years man! I hope that Chennai doesn't turn out to be as boring as people have told me. Language is a big barrier in that city I agree, but that does not mean non-Tamil speaking people don't survive in Chennai. I hope that I can get to know the city very well and explore it properly and have a good time. Prima facie it doesn't look like it, but still, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Work is going to be hectic but I guess I'll be learning a lot since my project involves a lot of field visits ans stuff. My guide is pretty awesome and pretty busy so its kinda hard both ways. Actually I am pretty sacred about my work. I guess its just the fact that I have never worked before, so these are like pre-game jitters and stuff. The FMCG industry is so varied and changes so fast that its quite scary to try and understand the industry as a whole in just about 2 months. I just hope that I don't end up maing a complete fool of myself out there. There are a lot of decisions to be made, right from wether FMCG is the right place for me to work to wether GCPL is worth the effort.

I think I am defined by the randomness of thoughts that prevade my mind at any given point of time. The key is to find the chain that links each of these thoughts together. It sometimes surprises even me as to how many different thoughts can co-exist in a human brain. So I struggle to find that calm, that lost island of equanimity within. Meanwhile, is it a sign from the Gods or fate's way of testing me further, I don't know but my flight just got delayed again!

See you when the rain comes home!

cheers,

Omkar