What gives you direction in life?
“Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life”
It’s always the little things that make a big impact. I finished my course in Mumbai and worked there for a couple of months. The flipside of being an early bird, working in a big ad agency in Mumbai is, that you spend a lot of time with housekeeping. Both the morning and the late-night shifts. You are either working or you are spending time waiting. Things got boring very fast. As one of the many interns, my job was to blend into the furniture. I spent a few months catching up on some of the best reels ever created in advertising and reading everything there was in the library. After a couple of months, I relocated. My hometown was not an advertising hub, but they still worked with clients and made films. Four weeks into the role, I knew this was a goof-up. The town was geared more towards IT and software and advertising while not average, was not stupendous either. I was thinking about the next steps when my classmate decided to drop in on a vacation. It was a vacation for her, and she was choosing to holiday in my hometown. I mean that old place!
To put it in perspective, my hometown was just picking up as the IT hub in the region, but growth and planning were still in the design phase. Localities had been marked, but work was yet to start, and in this current situation, everything nice and peaceful about it had been replaced with the sound of drilling bits and excavating equipment. Why anyone would want to visit, to vacation here, remains a mystery to me. Probably like the mystery of me visiting Mumbai for a vacation. Different strokes for different folks! Anyway, her visit was scheduled in the early weeks of October and unlike the Mumbai advertising world, which would be gearing up for the additional advertising revenue created by the festival season, my hometown had very little planned. As a Junior writer, I had time to meet her and that’s all that mattered.
Our first meeting was four months after graduation, and we were hugging and giggling like we were long-lost BFFs meeting after a decade. The first few minutes were spent catching up on classmates and updates. It was only after the initial frenzy did, I realized that she had a friend who had been waiting politely all this while. R an engineering graduate knew her from undergraduate classes. Politeness and upbringing dictated that I enquire after him, and how he knew my classmate, where he lived, and what their plans were, which I did indulge in. Dad, Mum, and siblings would have been proud. I was not rude, and I did not smirk even once in that time. Realizing that they had plans in place, I excused myself and was about to walk off, when I was also invited to join in those plans. Trying to figure out the logistics of communicating the plans to my folks when I did not own a mobile required me to head back to the office to make that call. Which I did and procured the permissions.
It started as an evening out, with friends and then petered out to a cup of coffee or many cups of coffee over a few months. Eventually, a lot more than just catching up over coffee happened. A small step, in the right direction, transformed into a big step in my life. I still wonder about the reason for that meeting. Four months after graduation from a year-long course was not enough time to bond or make lasting friendships. Yet, I had made the effort to meet and greet one of the most important people in my life.
This brings me back to the topic of direction and ‘what gives me direction’. I take a lot of nonverbal cues from my surroundings. Sounds witchy? I hope not. It’s just one of those things that I have always done, decide based on logic and practicality. My true north.
“A compass doesn’t tell you where you are, and it doesn’t tell you where you have to go. It can only point you in a direction. It’s up to you to always find your true north”
Just a little more 