Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Ujire was 'Love at First Sight'!!!

Here I am, finally putting down my memories and the beautiful stories of traveling a road, that took me from Ujire to Linkoping. I so much wanted to do this, and now after three years of Ujire, I know its time to put it all together.

Well, I have to confess the inspiration to do this is also because of one of my new found treasures, my good friend Nikhilesh, who happened to read through my old blogs and appreciated my stories. He told me it will be great if I could restart my blog.

Have you ever experienced this - sometimes people just enter into your life at the right time, and they tell you something genuinely and it just rings a bell in your head, and you go 'Oh yeah! I should definitely do this. Why didn't I think about it before??'. Thats what happened to me when he said I should blog. It would not be a lie if I said I was indeed waiting for him to ring that bell in my head. Lol :D Trust me, I will tell you more such stories of people coming and ringing a bell in my head and I go 'tannnnnnn'!!!

Lets go back to January 25th, 2012 - I got the opportunity to come to Ujire because I decided to do my internship at Selco Labs in SDMIT engineering college. It was obvious Ujire was love at first sight- the view of the Western Ghats and the Gadaikal, the sheer greenery around me, the birds, the breeze, the fresh air, the peacefulness, the calmness of the town, and I knew I had fallen in love.

Look at the view from the office. Now you know why it was love at first sight ;)

Back then at Selco labs, Dr. Anand Narayan was the Head, Sandeep was the Coordinator, Santhosh was the Technician and Sam was the Principle Mechanical Engineer. My friend Kanmani and me, both from Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai had landed in the lab amongst this wonderful bunch of people, me still unaware of how each one them would be playing a vital role in my life, inspiring me and helping me to be what I am today !!

Before I take you to my next blog post I wanted to share something that happened on the first day of the internship. Me and Kanmani had met Sam in the hostel early in the morning, soon after we arrived to Ujire and after our breakfast he took us to the Selco Labs. Trust me, I didn't know we had to climb six floors to get to the Lab! ;) I decided to eat a bit more than usual for breakfast everyday to climb these stairs to the Lab. But you saw the view right, so it's totally worth it. :)

After showing us the photos of some projects in the lab and some prototypes of the agriculture machines, one more colleague of Sam entered into the lab and Sam introduced me to this new person. Oh at this point let me mention, Sam is from UK and it was my first day listening to someone with British accent and needed more time to get acclimatized to it than to Ujire :D As he introduced me to him I heard him say ' Meet Sandy'. I said 'Hi' and kept calling him 'Sandy' till one more colleague, Santhosh came in after an hour and said ' Hi Sandeep'. Even today whenever I remember this incident I burst out laughing.