1 / 3Sharing Houses, Blossoming Career
It was my second job. I didn't dream big those days. Having just gotten a saving grace, all I wanted was to just make the best of it. I drove my bike around, fooled around with friends, played Cricket and Football almost every day, worked very hard during my day and on the web during the night. Life slowly got back on track. I worked as a Unix Administrator and Nokia Siemens Networks was the client.
I lived in a shared house with 3 other guys - one each from Kerala, Andhra, and Bihar. 2 of them had a room for themselves and I was sharing mine with another. We only had a double bed which meant that we had to share it. My roommate, the guy from Kerala - Pra, was a very friendly guy who went along with everyone an made a ton of friends wherever he went. Many of his friends would frequent the house almost every day. That was the kind of life he lived. After work, he was with his friends, while I was on my computer - a Dell XPS 15. It was the first ever sign that maybe I was a bit introverted. I picked and chose who I got close to. I've been a person who has always wanted to form my own circle. The circles were easy to form in college but became harder after that.
The year after, I decided to move to a better place nearby in a high rise building called Apple Heights. This time around, I shared the room with the guy from Andhra. With the 25K salary, I had to share rooms to be able to save anything. I had seen the amount of struggle my dad had gone through to buy his first flat after 30 years of service, so it was in me already to be very frugal. So sharing rooms was a sacrifice in comfort I did to save money.
But the party house continued here too. I didn't approve of it because we were responsible for the flat but I didn't want to be a spoilsport and so I tried to get along. We often had more than 10 people, all guys, partying in the flat, sometimes even playing 1-touch cricket which ended up ransacking the place. By the time we had to vacate the place, I had to make everyone clean the whole flat like new which to my surprize, they all obliged. Life slowly started getting better.