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The bus screeched, cranked, and eventually stopped. Dust flared up in the air. Half of the travelers coughed and whined. The completely comfortable bus conductor in his special seat cried loudly, “Shahadaaaa.” That was the name of a small village en route to my college, my graduation college where I was studying in the second year of BSc. It was a very important year for me to decide my final-year special subject. I could choose only one from Physics, Chemistry, or Math. I hated Chemistry because I was not good at it. I had to choose between Physics and Math. It was a day in March 2000.
“You don’t play cricket when you’re nearing your 20s. You study hard and plan on reaching Ankaleshwar,” taunted Yogesh Bhai, the most qualified person within a 100-meter radius of my house. I was disturbed while emulating test cricket’s fourth inning with my cricketing buddies in my front yard. I have loved test cricket since my childhood. I was fascinated with its pattern, which tested players the most. By the way, Ankaleshwar was a city in Gujarat where most of the guys from my village went to work in chemical industries. It was the lowest-hanging fruit: somehow complete a graduation in Chemistry, get work at those chemical factories, survive. But I never liked that idea. It was lame. It was uninspiring. It was frightening.
Dad didn’t care what I studied as long as I wasn’t creating trouble like most of my other friends. He had already declared me a successful boy for not screwing up my younger days with gutka, cigarettes, or drinking problems. My mother and elder brother, however, were following my studies and were keen on pushing me toward postgraduate studies. And that’s exactly where Yogesh Bhai came into the picture – Guidance. He was a Chemistry postgraduate and a teacher at a nearby town’s junior college, a celebrated figure in my area. His aim was to push every single BSc student toward Chemistry and eventually to the chemical town of Gujarat.
I had possibly my tenth discussion with him, with him convincing me that there was no future anywhere else. “Chemistry is the way of life,” he said. It was for him. It was for a few others. I nodded. I seemed happy that he was getting one more disciple. Halfheartedly and with extreme displeasure, I decided to pursue Chemistry for higher studies. Reason: It was the only thing that would make me earn. I had missed the bus when I couldn’t score enough to get into the engineering college I wanted. Hence, I opted for a BSc.
It was the summer of 2000, a time to visit my maternal uncle’s city, Vadodara. I missed my first bus that day, so I opted for one with a new route. It had a stop at Ankaleshwar. Ahh… the Chemistry town. The bus had a few Chemistry graduates with their families. Their faces were grim; I blamed it on the heat, it was a scorching hot summer. I tried to have conversations with a few of them, but they either ignored me or avoided talking about the city. It built a not-so-good anticipation about the place, which could be my Karmabhoomi in the next couple of years. I was anxiously waiting for my bus to get into the city. When I traveled by road, I had a habit of following every milestone. That was my way of creating a mental map of places and my journey. Of course, there was no Google Maps. As the milestones started showing a single-digit countdown to the city I was waiting to get into, I started feeling discomfort. Maybe I was a little jittery or too anxious. I ignored it and tried to look at the horizon. It looked apocalyptic. Dark clouds formed over the distant city. What was that? A welcome rain shower in the middle of April? No way, and why did it look fiery? I assumed some kind of wildfire had broken out in the Satpura mountain region. It was very common back then. We used to climb onto our roofs on summer nights to watch Satpura burn. Every week, some region or another would be lit. It was a scary yet beautiful sight.
I used to carry a Walkman and a book during my long journeys. I opened the book to distract myself from the discomfort. It was climbing in me. The clouds now looked ominous. We hit the city outskirts, streams filled with black water, the clouds were actually gases coming out of monstrous chimneys in the chemical factories. The city smelled like a chemical laboratory. It was so intense that I felt extreme nausea. It wasn’t the dreamland I was waiting to get into. It was a war zone. My heart sank when I realized I would be here in a couple of years. To fight my emotional low, I opened a book and decided not to look outside. I couldn’t do it. All I did was stare at the first page of the book, which had a few words I had ignored all along. But slowly, like tuning an old TV channel knob, the words got clearer. It said, “Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get.” That was it. I had found the answer to my suffocation, not just today but the one I had felt for the last year.
In a few months, I took Physics as my main subject and eventually developed a deep interest in computers. I went on to do my postgraduate studies in Computer Science and joined the IT industry happily, like I belonged there.
This story is with all due respect to all the people and our workforce who work in chemical industries. Hats off to you and your families. It was just not my cup of tea.
About the Author:
Kiran Puranik, a seasoned technologist in mobile focused startups, has driven innovation across multiple Mobile platforms. A key contributor to ThumbSpeed’s first Symbian App which led to acquisition by Nokia and founder of MangoApps’ Mobile division, he delivered high-impact solutions. As co-founder of QBee, an AI-powered learning platform, and leader of Tessellation LLC’s India R&D, Kiran builds secure, AI-driven tools to boost efficiency in industries like education, finance, and healthcare. Find him on X at @kiranpuranik