Once an Infoscion, Always an Infoscion

Today, it has been one year since my last working day at Infosys. The day makes me nostalgic and takes me down the memory lane of the entire span of 3 years with Infosys. After submitting the I-card when I walked back from the building to gate, I was thinking about all the activities done during the day - making some final calls to close colleagues, sending farewell mail, farewell party at the food court celebrated with team and my theatre group, sending the last mail from my ID to my best friend at office, watching my I-card shredded in front of me. I was looking at the buildings and associating a memory with each of them like building 9 - where I got my first seat allocated, building 19 where my team sat together and many more like this. At the end of it I reached the main gate and while swiping out for the last time, I did not know when I will ever be able to enter this campus again. I was surely taken over by my emotions.

Being a less emotional human being than most others, missing Infosys is very unlike me. But there are various reasons to justify this. One gets a lot of things at Infosys like good mentors, lavish infrastructure, picturesque campus, friends for life, love of life and other material things like onsite opportunities, etc. But the best and most important boon that an Infoscion is privy to is the culture of nurturing one's career and aspirations. To quote my example, I got exposure to three different teams across two different locations in a three-year span which enabled my experience in various avenues of HR. I wonder how many companies would give such opportunities to an employee who is fresh out of college. I was privileged to get this courtesy the trust shown in me by all my managers throughout. And this is not just my case. Many have been benefited like me courtesy the culture of nurturing which stands try to the very core values of Infosys endorsed by Mr. Murthy and entrusted by Mr. Sikka.

Personally, to start my career with Infosys was the best thing to have happened in my field considering all the experiences I got. I got to work with some of the best minds in the business. And the fact that Infoscions follow the rule of 'Work hard, party harder' just adds to the youthfulness of the Company. I wonder I was just lucky to get good mentors, friendly managers, awesome friends and preservable learning in my first job itself. Having heard a lot about the training days in Mysore campus, I feel sad to have missed out on that though. Getting associated with a theatre group within the company was one more gift from Infosys to me. I missed doing professional theatre for almost 7 years prior to that. After this association, the graph of my involvement in theatre has definitely gone up.

So this day will be marked in my life as the day when the umbilical cord of my professional life was cut after 3 years for maternal nurturing. I have joined another organization and may move to another or even stick to this one forever. But Infosys will always stay as my first job, and first job just like first love is always special.

PS - This is not an attempt to appease Infosys to hire me back. :-) In fact I don't know if I want to be back. As a person who has been there and now out of system, my position is fair to judge. I have ended Infosys tenure on a sweet note and I would like that feeling to stay. But there is no doubt in my mind that it was an experience worth cherishing through this blog.

Good 'Garden' Mornings!!

All of us want to have a good start to the morning. We believe that a bad start ruins the entire day. Not every morning can have a material surprise for you, nor will every morning have a bad news. Most of the mornings will be neutral and forgotten with time. How many mornings do we remember to be actually Good Mornings? The funny part is we keep wishing a good morning to everyone we meet in early hours just for the sake of it. Little are we aware of the fact that it's up to us to make each morning merry. And this pursuit of happy mornings can be achieved through very small things, which happened to be a small garden in the balcony in my case.

Our house in Nagpur has over a hundred plants, saplings and trees as a part of the garden, thanks to my father's passion towards gardening. It is indeed admirable to maintain such a terrace garden in a city where in summers the Sun makes sure that the mercury reaches 50 degrees Celsius. It requires a lot of personal care and attachment to take the efforts to water all those plants daily twice, to spend the weekends removing weeds, manuring and cleaning the vases. I remember my father's Ramu Kaka look wearing white bandi and putting a red gamcha around his head when he spent the entire Sunday morning with these kids of his, as he fondly calls them. He often asked me to water the plants in the evenings, which I was totally disinterested in but still did it halfheartedly. I could never comprehend the satisfaction he got through gardening but supported out of sheer obedience.

Years later, it was a bad Saturday morning in Hyderabad due to the hangover of the party last evening. So maybe, out of guilt I decided to get some saplings from a nearby nursery. The balcony attached to my room in our flat here was good enough to accommodate a few plants. I went with one of my flatmates and selected 3 plants - a colored-leaf plant, a Hybrid Rose and a seasonal flowering plant. I wanted to see if I can make them survive and then expand the garden. This was followed by a circus of carrying those three vase-based plants on a two-wheeler, finding a spot where early sun would be available for them and shade during the rest of the day, watering them enough to survive the whole day and most of all patiently waiting for them to grow and bloom with fresh leaves and flowers. Sadly, the season plant gave up as soon as the season was over, but the other two bloomed and grew and blossomed. Confident, I got another couple of plants in the Spring and that's how I understood the cause of satisfaction through gardening that almost a decade ago my father was trying to introduce me to. But it's never too late I guess.

It's almost a year now since that Saturday morning. Each day, I wake up and visit 'my kids' as a first thing, water them, take pictures of the new surprises they have for me and send the pictures back to my family in Nagpur, at times post them on Facebook as well. Sometimes, these surprises are multiple buds on a same branch, sometimes fresh pink leaves and sometimes an audacious fiery red flower bloomed in spite of the burning heat in town. When I am out of town, the responsibility to take care of them is over to my flatmates and cook. Once I am back, the leaves and flowers tell me through their appearance whether they were taken good care of, which is mostly the case (not to offend my flatmates). Enthusiastically, I have got a set of gardening tools and dried cow dung back from my trip home this time. This new interest of mine awakes a lot of soft aspects of one's personality like parenting, caring, empathy and many more.

This early morning practice makes sure that my morning is good and happy. I have found this trick to rise happy every morning and it was found through a small step of getting a few plants on a bad morning. Still early days to boast about it.  Some years later when I visit this blog again, I will either feel guilty of letting this practice go off or will be happy to have continued this. Whichever the case, this family of mine will always be close to my heart. This blog is a selfish attempt to bind myself by the commitment of perseverance to maintain this small garden.