Our first official tour...

The first embarkment of my professional travel was to one of our offices at mumbai from Nasik. We were the people fresh out of college (not to mention the overflowing zeal & enthusiasm we all carried) and we were made to travel in a school bus!!!

Though there was not much difference as we were still children, 22yrs young but only the leg room was less (less to be read as zero).

Travelled with just a bag which company had provided and obviously the stuff what the bag could contain.

We started for the journey by around 7 AM. The bus had 40 odd people and almost everyone sleeping including the conductor.

When my mates decided to be awake as the bus was getting hot as it had no AC so we had no option but to be awake. I still remember those glittery eyes of those people, all from one or the other premier engineering colleges, what everyone new was to just make there own car which would revolutionize the way people travel but to again remind back the way we were traveling was just not so revolutionizing.

We reached the office and had a day long visits to various production units and machining shops, knowing that we will be into Research & Development and we were amongst the creamy lot but as its said the cream melts under temperature & so did we under the heat of furnaces & heat treatment units.

Now the best part begins, it was late evening & we were dropped to the guest houses. The apartment was new, so new that it didn't had towels & even the bed sheets were even not taken out of the plastic bags. So there were we, the bed sheets were our towels and the bed were left with no sheets.

Apparently at the same time the admin team came to check out how were placed and they find us wrapped in white bed sheets and the other guys trying to pull it, it looked like the perfect set for an Urban Draupadi's Cheer Haran, but those guys never worried to open the wrap but the fact that there were no curtains as well & the other towers balconies were gazing towards us made them fight back to save the bed sheet being pulled open.

now it was time to sleep, we had put on the AC from mains but realised that the apartment was so new that the AC remotes was not available. So we slept with the room chilling our spines at 16 degrees.

As its said that a Bachelor never sleeps so was the case at our apartment as well, at any point of time some or the other guy was awake & his agony was not why he is awake but rather why others are sleeping. So each one tried there best to keep everyone awake.

The next interesting scene was of the next day morning in the office.

Last night the admin saw us attempting a Cheer Haran, we all had red eyes as no one slept.... So there started the stories about us. But who cares, admin is there to make & kill stories so we never bothered.

And like every story comes to an end so did this one as well but there was no good in the ending as we had to travel back to our base locations in that same Primary School Bus (remember we came here in that) and all the guys slept coz they never slept the whole night & all the girl did what they are always good at, that Talking... There talking soon took a horrific turn when they decided to play antakshari & the consequences were more than thought, all the guys were awake, the conductor was awake & we could see thwarted driver driving the bus much faster & its no brainer to guess why he did so.

That how my first official professional visit came to an end, but there was something I now think back, no we travel in premier airlines, have a car waiting outside the airport to drop me at my office, get the most comfortable guest house (which has towels, bed sheets, curtains & AC remote as well) still I find there is something missing & its those days when we all joined to embark the beginning of our career. Those were the days & those were the guys. There are very few who were with me in that bus who still continue to work with M&M. The dream with which I joined to make a revolutionary car was later realized to be a too big a dream, but as still we nourished on a product which is now called the XUV500 to the world but to us, it was the smaller dream which we all saw.