Find the purpose, the means will follow ...

Rachna works as a content writer for a Fortune 50 Multinational media company. It was the job she got in the campus placement soon after she completed her course in Journalism and mass communication. It was one of the high profile placements in her college for that year which paid a handsome salary. 

Of course, her work involved long working hours but there is always a trade off that you need to make especially when you are young, ambitious and all raring to go.

She did smell a tinge of jealousy in her classmates after she got her offer. After all not everyone landed such jobs with high profile brands when they graduated from a relativelyy unknown, tier 3 college like hers.  

It has been a couple of years since she started off. Everyday was a new learning for her. Her highly sophisticated colleagues opened up a new world for her.  She was an important member of a team that designed and wrote the website contents for a diverse set of customers who needed to update their site with latest trends  in mobile phone accessories in the United states to hottest deals in the fashion line up at the Milan fashion week.   

She received rave reviews from her customers for her down to earth content and rustic creativity that appealed to the masses and took their website traffic to hitherto unexplored markets where there was tremendous potential. An year from now she could expect a promotion and may be an onsite trip for a couple of weeks if her appraisals went well.      

Long working hours and longer hours to commute from her suburb were taking a toll on her health. But she was hardly complaining. Afterall she was the one who got the most coveted job from her batch. She came from a lower middle class family. Money was always short in the family and it was only after she started earning that her family was finding a breathing space after all the struggles to make ends meet month after month.  Her lower middle class upbringing would not fit well in the work-hard-party-hard environment at her workplace.  She was always conscious of her background and was consistently working hard to live up to the lifestyle and grooming that her colleagues expected of her role and salary levels.

Rachna, lived a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ type of existence. While she was a ‘Plain Jane’ of the neighbourhood by the weekend, by the weekday, she was a neatly groomed, chic career woman who kept up with the latest in fashion trends that befitted the 'international' atmosphere at her workplace. She could not afford to be a sharp contrast from her colleagues who came from posh neighbourhoods and had graduated from pedigreed colleges. They drove their own cars to work and the salary that they earned was their pocket money. They vacationed at destinations that she had only seen in Yash Chopra movies.       

 Today was yet another day at work. She walked to the auto stand and boarded the first  share-auto in the queue. It was empty. She opened her bag and busied herself putting on her makeup before the share-auto got overloaded with all the fellow commuters who boarded around the same time to commute to the nearest station to get to work. This was her ‘transtition ‘ time from being the ‘Plain Jane’ of the neighbourhood. She had finished with a coat of moistourizer over which she applied the foundation, and then she quickly brushed her hair.  Her face-make up could wait and her morning breakfast could also wait. She needed to optimize her time and so she took out the MAC nail polish from her Satya-Paul hand bag and applied a coat on the finger nails of her left hand and then attempted to paint the finger nails on her right hand.  She had to do it before the share-auto took off, because there was no way she could apply a coat while the vehicle was in motion on the bumpy road ahead. The roads were full of huge potholes, that would put the Grand Canyon to shame. But that did not deter the auto drivers, who vented their machoistic aggression on the roads.   

By now, another familiar co-passenger had boarded the share-auto. She was not a regular, but normally got out to work around this time and most of the days shared this auto.  In a few minutes, the share-auto was full with four other regular passengers and took off. There was a traffic jam ahead.  A water tanker had broken down and was creating chaos all over the place. The heavy inflow of water tankers that the entire neighbourhood depended on, for their water supply had created enough potholes on the road and were adding to the traffic woes.

Rachna was making sure her nail polish dried quickly when she started noticing something different that was brewing in the vehicle. There was an eerie silence and a puzzled look among her co-passengers. It did not seem not normal. She looked ahead and noticed that the Auto rickshaw driver just could not take his eyes off the rear view mirror. She knew she had decent looks and would normally attract snide and sometimes vulgar remarks from the neighbourhood men. Like most young women in the city, she turned a deaf ear and was pretty much immuned to such looks and remarks. She was not stupid enough to get hassled by such remarks, unless she instinctively felt that there could be danger lurking around.  As a regular commuter in the city who needed to work long hours, she knew that her safety was her responsibility and with a little bit of common sense and caution, it was not such a bad situation as they made it out to be in the international media.  

Rachna realized that the auto driver was not staring at her.  It was the other female passenger in the share-auto who was attracting all the attention.  Sitting next to her seat, Rachna could only get a side glimpse of this woman who was attracting the attention of all the men in the share-auto.  It was a biting cold, december weather, with the mercury dropping to very low levels. The woman was wearing a navy blue sweater with flowery design patterns, much like the ones that the hawkers from Nepal sold on the pedestrian platform near the railway station. Also she had draped herself with a shawl to beat the cold. She was wearing wollen socks that were probably knit by her grandmother and wore sturdy walking shoes from a famous local brand. The eerie silence continued until they reached the destination. 

Rachna was totally unprepared for what hit their vehicle as soon as it halted by the side of the road. A zillion cameras and microphones thrust themselves into the tiny share-auto.

It was now that she realized that her fellow passenger was Rakhi - her classmate from college.

Until the day before yesterday her classmates at college believed Rachna was the one to have landed the most coveted job. It had all changed yesterday. Here she was, travelling with the most powerful woman of her neighbourhood and probably the entire city. The one who had defeated the three time MLA in the recent elections.

'Awesome … the minister keeps up her promise and arrives by public transport.

Is this a populist gimmick and how long will this last ?'

Screams the reporter of a famous news channel, as cameras from different TV channels zoom in and thrust their microphones into the limited space in the share-auto to capture a glimpse of their Minister getting down from the public transport.

Rachna, alighted the vehicle amidst chaos and waddled her way through swarming reporters. As she was walking across, to board the metro that would take her, to her work place in Gurgaon, she noticed a billboard from her employer advertising their latest hiring campaign to attract young and ambitious graduates.

Find your purpose, the means will follow …

Find your Purpose - the means will follow  

They had indeed picked up a very seductive sentiment, she thought, as she boarded the metro.

While climbing up the escalator she noticed an onlooker on the other side, who was wondering from afar as to what what chaos was happening down at the station that was blocking the traffic.... 

Awesome, said a proud Rachna to the onlooker, over there is a classmate of mine whose steely determination made her find her purpose and follow her heart to pursue what she believed in'. 

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.

This is a pure work of fiction. However it has been inspired by this personality who has been attracting a lot of media attention in the past few weeks.

For a 100% non-fiction account read this blog post that I had posted a while ago.