Starting from Scratch: Beginning of an Independent Journey

To give a little context, I along with two of my co-fellows, post our training in Pune, moved to our project location on our fellowship journey. Dolvi, a village in Raigad district of Maharashtra is where we are posted currently for our 2 year-long fellowship journey. The place is a 2 hour drive from Mumbai and is a place close to Alibaug. We checked into a hotel, and stayed there for around ten days. 

The true trial or perhaps the adventure so to say, began a week after our arrival in Dolvi. The biggest challenge was to look for an apartment, a task made all the more difficult by our bachelor status. I had never thought that it would be such a task. After almost a week of tireless searching and putting every possible person we came across on our now common quest, we finally found a nice place. It had all one would want to start off in a new town. But now the challenge was that since we were three, two boys and a girl and one 2-bedroom apartment, we all had to live together. And this not so crazy idea was not liked by a few of our neighbours and our initially supportive house owner gave me an ultimatum to move out, or he would have to kick out all three of us! 

Fifteen days later and after bribing the watchman, I finally found a 1bhk apartment in the same society and moved in the day after Diwali. My mother and others in my family wanted me to bring in a small idol of Bappa home when I first entered the apartment, to drive away negativity and to shower me with luck and wisdom in my new journey. I did as instructed, and to be honest I have been deriving my strength from somewhere and I believe it’s him, Bappa. 

I never thought starting an independent life and setting up a house would be thissssss tough until I had to! I mean, the kind of brainstorming it requires to select a mattress that would neither hurt you back nor your pocket! The next couple of weeks went by collecting various household items. The Diwali sale on e-commerce websites was a pure bane. 

It was very difficult to stay sane and all positive initially. With so much going on around, with work, settling into a new place, staying away from family and friends, getting used to the new environment. A few of those things that kept me going were the beach, chai, Netflix and reading sometimes. The phase was not as bad as it sounds, it was worse! A big shout out to all those who supported me, the ones who were physically present and the ones who were so from afar. 

4 months down the road, I feel like this place, the apartment I call ‘home’ now, the community I work with that I refer to as ‘my’ village, and everything around has made its way into the core of my heart. I never thought, like a lot of the other aforementioned facts, that I would miss this place even if I went home for a weekend or out of town for training. So in a nutshell, it has been a tough few weeks and some tougher, but what I am counting are the good days and also the bad ones for getting me where I am today.