I had impulsively applied at WONA to write my intern experience but had no intention of doing so before the PPO results were declared.

(Disclaimer: Last summer, I interned as a Software Development Engineer with Slice. No, Katrina Kaif never endorsed it. That was a soft beverage company. This is a fintech startup redesigning financial experiences for Gen Z and Millennials.

Mind you, this article will not be one of those motivational steroids to get you to start coding, nor does it entail a rejection backstory. This isn’t a paid promotion either. Haven’t we had enough of those on LinkedIn already?

Kindly read this as a memoir on the metamorphic preview of life after college assuming you’re still here.)

It is 5:30 am, and I just sat in my cab to the airport. 40kms, and soon I’ll be out of this city(Bangalore) for the good part of a year(at least). The fusty seat covered in grime seems at odds with the pleasant, dewy petrichor that defined the city during my stay. After about 10 minutes of meadow gazing and beholding palm trees, the nostalgia has finally started to sink in.

With every tree that passed by, I am reminded of each day I spent in Bangalore.

For a kid with little experience travelling alone, everything feels like an offering to a novel escapade. You feel like a toddler, gazing out of the windows at anything and everything outside your crib. Sometimes, I’d look at people being courteous to each other and wonder if it was all but a youtube prank or I had a messed up childhood.

The company gave all the interns a week’s accommodation. So that time was mostly spent around intermingling with other co-interns, sharing anecdotes of campus shenanigans.

Our induction was spread throughout the first week of the internship. It included sessions about several verticals, or PODs as they were called, and how each operates. Soon after, we were allotted our setup and the managers we’d be working under. I was a part of the Orbits team, which looked after the creation and maintenance of internal tools that helped facilitate specific tasks for the company. Soon after, my manager gave me my first few tasks to get me up to speed with what was happening. After which, I spent most of my time floundering around the finicky problem statements my manager had inundated, only to realize they were crucial for my holistic development as a Software Engineer. But he came through for me every time I felt incompetent and guided me like a true senpai.

Imagine one fine day, the electricity goes down for a split second, and you see nobody hooting; years of cultivating a practice in schools are now scraped away the moment you enter adulthood. Wouldn’t that shake the very foundation of your cubhood?

I’d sometimes get confused about the terminologies used there. Why would you exclaim with joy confessing that you had BT? Because it meant Bank Transfer, Kritik! Likewise, the context of KT in the IT world and that in college stand in utter conflict altogether.

But then, looking at familiar faces from Roorkee gave me a sense of solace. The friendly banter on Friday evenings would sometimes remind me of the Senate steps meetings (yes, I belong to the era when those were relevant).

The city’s nightlife also had its own bedazzle. Having the streets festooned with pubs and cafes, you’d find all the places overcrowded and exorbitant, especially on the weekends.

Finding a place to sit involved days of planning, but booking and reaching there meant two different things because time and distance don’t follow the usual laws of physics in Bangalore. After the first week, I shifted to my brother’s apartment, which was 15kms away from the office but felt nothing short of 150kms by car.

I spent my first-week street hopping, walking alone, and shooting clips. For the first time, I felt unfettered by familiarity. The wind would feel like a lover’s hug. I’d visit places, observe people, and have conversations almost unique to the place I’d be then. The vehicles on the road were always in a race against time but then I’d also see people waiting near the stand for hours, birdwatching. The nights would witness people beering out their stress, and mornings would be spent under the shade in the parks that were so immaculate you’d want to cry. It almost seemed ironic.

When you observe these things every day on your way to the office, it makes you also want to romanticize the work that you’re doing, even for a guy like me who coded just enough to get an internship and escape every conversation that revolved around it afterwards. But all of it is just a rash motorcyclist away from ruining your entire mood and changing your perspective altogether.

I started writing this memoir on my way to the Bangalore Airport; as I am about to finish this, I am catching a train to Roorkee. It’s almost funny. When I first set afoot in that city, I immediately started mapping everything to Delhi, but now it’s the other way around. I am carrying with me a bag of chips that has travelled three cities with me, becoming heavier with every descent.

It is now stuffed with conversations and inside jokes I’ve had with the people there throughout this internship, all of which started and concluded over a table that served scrumptious paranthas. For now, the packet has memories of all the places that I had gone to or did not.

Now that college has commenced, I feel like an impetuous undergrad again. Maybe deep down, there’s a responsible lad who knows better about survival in the world outside, where actions have consequences. The world where he’s on his own, but also not alone.

fin.