From Home to Room - an Essential Journey

Imagine yourself sitting in a flight. You just buckled in your seat belt. The cabin lights are being dimmed for takeoff. You take out your mobile and quickly type in a last Whatsapp message. 

"Hi Mom. I'm taking off. See you in 6 hrs". 

Your destination is your own home. Is there any other feeling that is so relaxing and exciting at the same time?

Ladies and gentlemen, let's dedicate our next 5 mins to the journey almost every one of us has to take, a journey of leaving behind our own homes. It's a rite of passage, of sacrifice yet achievements, riddled with fear yet excitement. Of letting go yet new discoveries.

It was July 2017, approximately one and a half years back from today. I had just collected my provisional pass certificate of M.Tech from NIT Agartala. Also the call letter of Amdocs. I had like a month to spare waiting for the joining date to be communicated. There wasn't much to do. Life was fun in a lazy way. Like running on 1% CPU. This is 3rd of July, morning 8:30 am, I am still in bed, trying to get another 5 mins of sleep. I could hear mom in the kitchen, shouting at me to get up among the sound of utensils and the sweet yet sharp smell of the food being cooked. Seemed like the maid had just swept the floor and she had forgot to turn the fan back on. No choice but to get up. Eyes half shut, I search for my mobile and start clearing the notifications. One email notification makes me stop. It read "Amdocs Joining Date and On-boarding Process" - Sanjay Dcosta. I pause for a moment to fully open my eyes and quickly click  it. I was happy. I jump down from bed and run to the kitchen. "Mom! Amdocs has mailed with final joining date". Mom greeted me with a smile. "Wow. When is it?". I said "17th of this month". She calmly said "Very good. When would you leave for Pune?".  It was at that moment reality struck me. And it struck very hard. Felt like everything blurred and the voices faded for a moment. I bunch of tangled thoughts came up in my head "I will be leaving? Leaving my home? Where I have been for last 24 years? I would forever me a guest at my own home from now? What about that chair in the corner of the dining table, I don't remember having my dinner without sitting there. Who would play with our dog after dinner every night? Who would smuggle biscuits for the cat? The cold early morning breeze on the terrace, the sunshine in our balcony, the one legged sparrow that visited every evening. How would I be able to live without all of these?". My systems hanged.

Brain.exe is not responding. Would you like to restart the process?

"YES".

Everything loads again and I could hear mom saying "Better start packing soon. I will make you some laddoos for the journey".

Fast forward to present day. 
I now have a 1 BHK room that I call my home. 
I have a chair and a computer table where I have my dinner every night. 
I have befriended three dogs who stay in my society and go walking with them after dinner. 
I don't have a terrace here, but the balcony does have sunshine in the morning. There's an one legged pigeon which visits me regularly. I recently bought a bag of rice for it. 
I have started to love my Room here.

This transition is like switching your laptop after 2 years of usage. At first all our files are spread around. Things are working perfectly, but we don't know how. We've forgotten how they were actually set up. It is when we are forced to clear our hard drives and move to a new laptop that we realize the difference between important files and files that are just there, never opened and taking up disk space. Apps that we never bothered using, photo backups that we forgot even existed. This is when we learn to streamline our dependencies, optimize our requirements and learn to use the cloud for better productivity. We learn to live on WiFi rather than fixed Ethernet.

Till date I have visited my home 3 times. Thrice as the guest I feared to be. There's a different kind of happiness in going back as a guest. Of course not to mention the huge number of home made delicious dishes you get to enjoy everyday. Being associated with a big company and working in critical projects has its benefits too. It broadens our horizons and thinking space. I met a few of my college buddies who were launching a small startup in my hometown. When they asked for technical help, I was glad I could help them without breaking a sweat. It was like my brain was running on 16 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB from one year back. I , at that moment, was confident that leaving my home for a rented room wasn't a bad decision at all.

Love your home, keep it and its members very close to your heart. But don't let the geographic distance be a hindrance to your journeys exploring new opportunities and going new places.