Real world...

After passing out from VRCE in '02 I joined Parry & Co., a Geosynthetic flyover construction company in Baroda. That was the time when the calm and peace 0f the city was under a veil and it needed just a light breeze of hoax and political gimmicks to burst into a chaos of riots, loot and killings of innocent lives. The reaction of my friends and parents when I told them about my decision to go to Baroda for the job, everyone was not only critical but also tried hard to revert my stubborn head. I decided to go.

I spent a nice 4 months of my training period hovering between Baroda and Ahmedabad where one my friend used to work. In Baroda, after coming to my apartment from office, I used to have dinner at a particular restaurant near my apartment. There were two reasons why I used to stick to this place for food, firstly the dinner was always served with lots of smiling gujju faces and the guys there were of my age so I needed no real time to get along well with them. Everyday after dinner it became customary to spend some time there chatting before heading back to the shack. The discussions were far from serious by any standards, mostly about our day to day lives. One day when the ghastly incident of Riots surfaced in our post dinner chats, I heard some chilling accounts of escapades of 'industrious' and 'maverick' people who did their best to fuel the riots. The worst part of all this was all this time their faces were beaming with joy and satisfaction…sadist it was. It was hard for me to digest the hatred these guys had for the other community. The dinner chats ended soon. I never could erase the memories of the deplorable, to say the least, deeds of those guys.