Fresher’s and Recollections - III

Back in 1997 when we were freshers in Delhi, most of us come to study. The hallowed halls of Delhi University pulled us to this ancient city to study sciences and arts. Today, majority of the freshers are already working in globalised BPO’s and other service and hospitality sectors. A big leap, if we have to consider our background. The uncontrollable pace reminds me of Eagles’ song, Life in the Fast Lane, which I used to listen back home, where time seems slower and peaceful. I used to imagine how fast it would really be in the city. Our maturity, integrity and sophistication are put to test in this new world, while it generates young economically independent generations. The new generations. People from the North East seem to be doing well in catching up with the changing times. An inevitable necessity if we have to play the survival game. Sometimes I do wonder if the good, the bad and the ugly have also become inevitably ours. Inevitable for all of us. We justifiably gulped them down in the name of sacrifice and in the guise of accommodating ourselves to the new soil.

What worries me most, as a fresher, was the difference in time that we stepped into. When one could not go to sleep at 2 AM in the morning, I enquired myself many a time, if my system has gone wrong? I started relying on alarm clock to wake me up for classes. It shocked dear folks back home too. Few of our girls, who were, then, working late into the night in restaurants, did deliver negative images to people back home. People back home used to think that their girls must have lost everything. However, it was a situation the girls could not help. Infact it was already a culture that is still spreading its wings to toll on us too. Folks back home could never understand why they have to return by 1 or 2 AM in the morning. The single time zone for the big country failed to educate us. Instead it gnaws into us. Sometimes I blamed the one time zone that we seem to be sharing with all unity. If there were different time zones, the radical change would not push many of us to the brink of unanswered questions and explanations. I remember one of my fresher friend resorted to Cypon syrup to sleep on time. However, it acted too effectively on him that he failed to wake up early in the morning again. That spoils everything for him. He could never be fresh since then. Today, the new generations of the working class are enduring and negotiating different time zones in their work place. That deconstructs our practice of sleeping at night and working in the day. If the pace continues, we all might end up working at night and sleeping in the day.

I’ve heard many complaints with the sudden change. A seven year old boy who came to Delhi for his winter vacation complained that he never get to see the moon or the sun. He must also be negotiating the change on his part. King of Sinlung rock and blues, Laltuoklien has a different story to tell, when he was a fresher in Delhi. He said that time is too slow in Delhi. “A day is like two or three days”, Laltuoklien said. Not only that, he also said, “There is no sense of timing here. We only eat when we are supposed to be sleeping. We sleep when we are supposed to be climbing the stairs of many dreams. And we wake up when we are supposed to be eating again. I won’t be able to be creative to write any songs here.”

Since day one, till today, the game is about negotiating the change. We shed everything that we once embrace religiously without much choice. We realised that we cannot be like the firm moulded clay. We created space within ourselves for change, while the boundary could not be fixed. But what if we sacrifice every little bit of us in the process of change? What if the fresher’s stage is the last stage that we get to see about our real self?