For four years at BITS Goa, I stepped out of the campus gates and found myself on the highway. There are immediate inferences to be drawn from this arrangement, particularly so in reminiscence. A location on the highway is precisely that - hazy and devoid of specific coordinates. It is opposite nothing. It is not the fourth building after you turn left. It's just there somewhere. In this case, about 10 minutes from the Dabolim airport. About is the operative word. This quality of BITS Goa probably transferred itself onto its students. It certainly did to me. With the result, what endures today is a sense of having spent four years without a mooring point. I don't recollect developing any ideals or viewpoints that endure today. It also made me more of a wanderer than a traveler, a backpacker more than an itinerant.
One of the defining features of SIBM Pune is that it is off the Mumbai-Pune expressway. Perhaps I read too much into it!
Three days into my internship, I find that my work location is smack on a pristine Gujarat highway that cuts across Saurashtra from inland Ahmedabad to coastal Dwarka. This time though, I'm determined not to be a drifter. An MBA internship doesn't allow you to be one anyway but every time I walk from Reliance Greens (township) to the refinery, I find the highway hues from my engineering days creeping up on me. Thankfully, it manifests solely in the form of a desire to leave home and explore. I indulge this desire to its fullest.
