A Beginning of Sorts

With a new year at college, came a new phase of life- moving in to an apartment. I was done with my miniscule slice of a room that I’d been living in for a year and after much contemplation was going to live alone, for the very first time.

Although leaving the cushy comforts of home really did make me want to never go back, there was a certain comfort I found as soon as I walked in, through the door.

The space had just the bare essentials, but the excitement and the thrill of being alone made it just perfect. Over the days, (thankfully!) things fell into place, bit by bit and an empty flat turned slowly started resembling home. As it turns out, it’s not all that easy to transform a flat into a home. Wake Up Sid makes it sounds like a cakewalk, a glossed over version of what reality looks like. In reality, it’s more about cutting corners, being street smart, haggling with prospective maids, finding economical yet pretty looking solutions, getting down to unpacking cartons so they could finally stop serving the purpose of a makeshift table, nightstand,etc- Basically taking a lot more responsibility than you had signed up for.

It’s similar to the notions I had before I came to college. I thought I’d have fun, explore the city and I am ashamed to say, was mildly influenced by the image of ‘college life’ created by various media, primarily, Books and Bollywood. Little did I know that soon, the ‘life’ part of it would slowly be wiped out leaving behind killer attendance requirements and copious quantities of assignments. And that is how realization dawned that setting up a house was more hard work than anything else. Courtesy the five star demands of almost all the maids we encountered coupled with their short attention span and lack of will to deliver their money’s worth, there was more hands-on work to do than I had expected.

Even though it’s a huge hassle to run around trying to fit in everything just the way you had imagined it, a couple of compromises and several hours of bickering later, it’s all done! The satisfaction that sets in thereafter, is another feeling all together. For me, it meant having relished that sense of independence I had been vying for a long time. It meant not bothering about where to keep that extra bag, cause there’s space everywhere. It meant being able to eat whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, thanks to the full fledged kitchen.  But most of all, it meant, taking a small teeny-tiny step towards that perfect life, I’d always dreamt of...