I had lived in Delhi all my life. My school was less than a kilometer from my place. I then went on to do my engineering from Delhi itself.

I lived out of Delhi for the first time when I got my first job.
I and many of my friends packed our bags and left for the sprawling campus of Infosys Mysore which is a city in itself. We all got a room to ourselves where would stay for 4 months while we were rigorously trained to learn various technologies to work in the corporate world.

Being in an independent room was liberating. Initial few days were spent adjusting to the room. I remember not using the cupboards for the starting week as I had still to decide where to place what.
As a few weeks passed, the room was set and it resonated with my personality. It had become an extended version of me. When I think of my room now in hindsight, my primary thoughts are what I used to think when I used to inhabit it. The arrangement of the table , chair , bed are not what comes to my mind , but my various thoughts , feelings I experienced when I was in that room.
My happiness of working and learning , my satisfaction of earning a living for myself , my nervousness about clearing various levels of training , my anxiety about where would I be posted after training.

Time passed and I got posted in Infosys Jaipur and I took up a rented accommodation at a place called Vaishali Nagar in Jaipur. I took a one room PG.
I enjoyed work. These were the most enriching days of my life. They helped me grow and become resilient. I learnt that responsibility is not just towards a higher authority but also towards my peers. I learnt how to manage work and meet deadlines. But most of all , I learnt how to manage myself.

After a hard day of work , I used to come back to my room , switch on the telly , eat my dinner which used to come in a tiffin and think about how my day went.
The room at Vaishali Nagar in Jaipur became a thinking ground where I spent my time in conducting thought exercises of imagined scenarios about what I should have done in a tricky situation at work, how I should have behaved , how can I be better etc.
My remaining time was spent reading about philosophy , psychology , persuasion , marketing , advertising.

Now when I think of the room in Jaipur , I do not think about my almirah or my night stand or my television set but about my intellectual and personal growth.

After a period of about two years , I took admission in MICA which is perhaps the best communications college in India offering a PGDM. It seemed very natural to me to opt for it since I was always interested in advertising , marketing , human behavior , how to influence behavior etc.

As of now I am living at MICA in a hostel room with a wonderful roommate.
My days are spent not “thinking” or being “anxious” , but mostly in learning marketing and adhering to deadlines for assignments and competitions.
A night before my last finals of the present term ,I was lying down and staring at the ceiling. For a moment my thoughts drifted and I felt a strange sense of curiosity.

The curiosity was , how would the present resident of Building 91 , Room 517 at ECC , Infosys Mysore be thinking of at that moment. Would he have the same anxieties as I had ? Worries about the future , nervousness of present day trainings ?
What would the new tenant at my room in Jaipur feeling at the moment ?
Would he also be intrigued by thoughts of how he could have done better at work that day  ?
Would he also be investing his time in learning what he wanted to learn?

Staying in temporarily rented rooms in a different city for work/education is always a blessing.
I think it forces you to think differently about life which makes you do different things that help you grow.
I am fortunate enough that I have past inhabitants of my present room in my college itself who happen to be my seniors in college. I should ask them if they went through similar thought processes during their stay in my present room.
But then everyone has their own journey and own stories.
A room is merely a connecting point where its inhabitants of different times have a shared element in their life story and not a static personality which influences its inhabitants.

We all have our own journeys. Our rooms do not influence them , they merely help us think.

Fin.