Here we come !

Hi guys, ......this is the end of another week choc-a-block with work,.....work seems to spill-over into every free second available,...it just doesn't reduce,..like stacks of raddi which always grow higher no matter how many times you sell to the raddiwala....anyways , work is not junk and certainly not to be trashed ! ( The only similarity is we make money out of both!)

Anyways, i thought of sharing with you all an incident /experience i had while on the local train...sorry guys, its not anything dreadful / funny / sad. It's just plain warm and feel-good and optimistic also ! ......Daily i have to undergo a punishing 4-hour commute to office and back, and to beat the monotony i always end up carrying books to read.

That day i was reading Lance Armstrong's 'It's not about the bike'. The book is written in a very engaging manner and i was engrossed. Suddenly the girl besides me asked if i would answer her question. I was certain it would be about the book ! I noted that though the girl looked very simple, she spoke english. She asked me about the book, where i had bought it from, whether it was a part of my study/ course etc etc. Her english was halting, she was obviously not well-versed in the language, but was certainly making good attempts to speak right. I told her that a dear friend had lent me the book, but that she could buy it from a few shops near Thane railway station, that it was not a study book , and that i simply loved to read. She suddenly brought out a notebook and pen and wrote down the name of the book.

Some more conversation with her revealed that she had recently joined an academy where they taught english-speaking, she was also learning computer basics and with that knowledge she hoped to get a job in BMC ( her father already worked there...so i think she was banking on some kind of help from him )....i was happy to know her views that she thought of women no less than men..that she fought with ppl who thought women are a weaker race, she hoped not to marry ( here i convinced her that not marrying is not the right way to show that you are independent.....interdependency through companionship is a much higher form of understanding and maturity)....she said she would marry a guy who thought of her on equal terms.....since she was a resident of Ghatkopar for fairly long, somewhere through all this the conversation moved towards my college (K.J.Somaiya)....and here , a young lady sitting in front of us also joined in. She was also a former student of Somaiya college , although commerce, not engg,......she was now working in the material planning / sales division at Kodak,.....had got married very recently , and had shifted base from Chembur to her husband's home at Kalyan,...and had woken up to the harsh commute which drained her totally....and yet, to top this all, she had recently started her part-time MBA from Somaiya !!!

She had to leave early in the morning for her office at Santa Cruz and in the evenings she would attend her lectures, trudge back home after that to find a very caring ma-in-law who looked after the house and kept dinner ready ! All of us agreed that it is a blessing to have hot home-cooked food waiting for you at the end of the day ! ......The girl was very tired but she spoke with so much eagerness about her MBA....and was very determined to do her post-graduation....MBA changes your life...she told me....maybe i will be able to experience that soon enough i thought !

What impacted me most was the attitude of both the girls, although their backgrounds were different, both were convinced that there is no stopping a woman once she decides what she wants to do ! They believed women were as good / better than men when it came to delivering the goods and thought of women as equals in marriage , partners for life !.....May the spirit surge ahead !