Living out of ones home can be an awfully big adventure. It is a matter of popular opinion(atleast among my cronies) that this the best time to put ones feelers out for such a shift-ho are the halcyon days of ones youth(ah, note how ambiguous that description is, it accommodates itself to several interpretations, the boarding school, the college hostel or the working woman’s independence), which for me were the years I spent in college. It was one of those arrangements that seem pre-ordained. I couldn’t say whence the noble thought occurred to me that my mother would do well to act as the ministering angel for my dad, who was roughing it out in Saudi alone, instead of expending her energies dishing out elaborate meals for me in the wee hours of the night for four years, as she indubitably would’ve been forced to had I taken up some college in Chennai itself. What made it an act of Providence was that I really dint have a clue of the kind of personal freedom I was availing myself of by this arrangement, and my parents in their blind fondness for me wouldn’t have suspected my actions to any such ulterior motives on my part. Thus we parted in the best of ways, with unvoiced promises of daily messages and weekly calls and yearly visits. But, take heart; I am not about to embark on a long-winded autobiographical exposition of collegiate experiences that are to my mind uniquely personal. But they would most certainly lose out on translation into mere wordy reminiscences of a middling raconteur.
Out of college, and earning my pittance at Bangalore, I have had wider vistas to explore this terra-not-so-firma of living with an assorted bunch. In college one is young, and immature and isn’t presented with much of a choice of inmates, all of which presents a rich breeding ground for skylarking of the order most of the perpetrators of the larks are entirely unaccustomed to. It’s a students life and hence much of it is impelled by the blood of battle with the common enemy, and through the ages history has taught us that if there is one thing that’s always a sure-shot at uniting the masses, the merest hint of a “Mission against the Enemy” will fit the bill entirely. It doesn’t matter what the Mission is about or what the Sins of the other warring faction are. The capitals take care of such nitpicking details. But come to a man’s estate as the term goes, one picks and chooses with a discerning eye. These criterion that underlie the choice of roommates can range from the practical to the paranoid. There are some for whom smoking is a no-no, and others who would recoil from a perfectly sane roommate because her profile seen from the left, at an angle of 30 degrees on the azimuth(above or below depending on which one is the Queen Elizabeth in the duo) reminded her of the girl in school who choked on a fish bone at school at a lunch session where she was narrating a gripping tale about a couple of cycles and an over enthusiastic dog. To each his fancy, I say.
I was fortunate enough though to cut short the roommate choosing ruckus and just go halves on an adorable house with an old schoolmate of mine, who’d played Damon to my Pythias for years. She was interning after MBBS and we rarely met, our working hours being mutually exclusive. Our brief hours of co-existence, exposed quite a few chinks in my understanding of how the priorities and preoccupations of a person varied vastly with ones profession. (Disclaimer: From this point onwards, I shall grossly generalize using vastly inclusive words like ‘Doctors’ and ‘them’ frequently. I am fully aware that this is a travesty considering my limited acquaintance with them, but I speak out of personal experience and that to me is the context I write in) I heard what seemed to me horror stories of her goings on at the hospital, which to her were mere routine occurrences. Her medical sense of humour never failed to shock and stir me to the very depths of my soul, they were so flippant about matters that to use a cliché were those of life and death. Slowly my outlook expanded to accommodate what to her was the most obvious point of view, that doctors dint take their patients as seriously as the patients did themselves. Their commitment to work ethics was solid, the health of a human being was their first and foremost concern, but they couldn’t be expected to take the human as seriously as they did his ailments. And on the lighter side, I also got rid of the misplaced assumption that it was only ones parents and in general the previous generation, who were edgy when it came to computers. Doctors seem to fall into that category too. To them they are merely tools than come in handy when they want to check their mails or send some of their own, which happens once in a blue moon. As for the use of a computer without an internet, that would seem to them like one of the worst excesses after the French Revolution. This was much the best way to begin, what will probably be a long journey of cohabitation.
After a year that provided insights into the mindset of a member of the medical community, I then threw in my lot with a pretty unlikely set of roommates, from the advertising field. And within this short sojourn with these girls, I have seen already seen several old suppositions set aside. For one thing, their job is so demanding, which by itself isn’t too startling, it’s the nature of these demands that most certainly are. For a person who mostly walks into office in tracks and the team tshirt, its quite a shift in perspective to see that in their line of work, the dress makes a real difference to the accomplishment of the task. In my greener days I would’ve roundly condemned that as a vapid point to stress, but now I see that in an industry where presentation is they key, its only natural that these factors come into prominence. So instead of being convulsed by their attempts to walk in high-heels because it gives one such an air of confidence, I cheer them on, and enjoy the skit whole heartedly. Much of the tv-watching experience is a collage of advertisements, and scathing criticism or well-considered approbation of the ones under the scanner. Often have I burst out saying an ad was brilliant, and some of the finer nuances of its merits have been pointed out, with comparisons alongside other ads, on the grounds of creative strength, mass appeal and business effectiveness. At times, I am treated to a closer look at the meticulous details that constitute a poster for a laptop brand, the logos, the fonts, the colours and their sizes and their positions on the canvas, the hassles of coordinating among the creative guys and the client deadlines, the frustratingly differences between whats considered the perfect ad by the client as opposed to the agency. Its all quite fascinating, and though I don’t profess to be in the know-how of the inner workings of these widely differing professions ive been given a peep into, I definitely have the satisfaction of knowing, like the guy in the ad for Bytes, that not all dogs are called Tommy and not all snacks are salty :)
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