Lost and Clueless: Moving from Lucknow to Bareilly

I landed up in Bareilly in 1993, with no friends, nothing much to do and no clue about the direction in which my life would go. All I had was my trusty old Yamaha RX100, the piles of motorcycle magazines which I bought every month and a Casio keyboard that I played regularly. Incidentally, this pic of me pulling a wheelie on my RX100 was clicked by my father!

In 1993, I completed my graduation from Lucknow University and was clueless about what to do next. Unlike young people today, who have access to a great amount of information online and who seem to have their entire careers planned out by the time they clear class 12, I guess our generation was different. In the early-1990s, study and career options were pretty limited – at least in Lucknow – and most people studied to be doctors, engineers or lawyers. Doing an MBA was becoming quite popular and some were even opting for the newly-announced CFA (chartered financial analyst) course. Other options included chartered accountancy, the civil services, joining the armed forces or perhaps joining a bank or the LIC.

It may seem a bit weird but I had no real interest in any of the above. In fact, now when I look back, I have no idea why I chose to study commerce at all. I had zero interest in accountancy or banking. Maybe it was peer pressure – most of my friends had opted for B.Com and perhaps I’d followed suit without giving it any thought. Science was beyond me – I had no interest in science. And arts (what is more commonly referred to as ‘humanities’ these days) was supposedly only for girls. I mean, guys – at least guys in Lucknow – just wouldn’t opt for arts in those days. That I did not give it any thought and blindly opted for commerce was quite unfortunate. The only thing I was any good at, in school, was English, and also found history quite interesting. In retrospect, I now realise that I should have chosen to graduate in arts/humanities. But like I said, low levels of general awareness, limited career options, peer pressure and a lack of insight and understanding on my own part proved to be undoing. I graduated in commerce, with zero interest in anything related to commerce. And it didn’t end there.

After graduation, I was still clueless, with no idea of what to do and where to go. I looked at my friends. Those who came from business families joined their family businesses. Some joined an MBA course while a few took up chartered accountancy. The science guys, of course, went into medicine or engineering. All I had ever done in school, and in college – three years of B.Com – was ride motorcycles and read hundreds of car and motorcycle magazines. I used to buy anything and everything I could get my hands on – Indian and foreign – and read, read and read. And fantasise about riding the superbikes and driving the supercars I saw in all those foreign magazines. I lived in a wonderland of dreams, completely disconnected from the real world. All I knew was, I wanted to do something that would be related to fast bikes and fast cars, but what exactly that would be, I had no idea.

So, with a degree in commerce that was fairly useless and future prospects that were clear as mud, I had no option but to leave Lucknow and move to Bareilly, where my father was posted at the time. There, I would hopefully be able to figure out next steps and decide what to do. I was 20 years old then, and had spent my entire life in Lucknow – the city was the only ‘home’ I’d ever known and that is where all my friends were. Leaving Lucknow and moving to Bareilly was a depressing prospect for me but it was something that had to be done nevertheless. And so, I packed my bags, bid goodbye to everyone and everything I knew and loved, and landed up in Bareilly at my father’s house.

We had a lot of relatives in Bareilly from my mother’s side of the family, and the first few days in the city went by in meeting up many of those relatives, and exploring Bareilly’s markets, especially eateries and book shops. Yeah, well, apart from bikes and cars, I guess food and books/magazines were my only other areas of interest. At a time when I should have been thinking about what to do and how to start building my career, my primary concern was finding a bookshop where I could get the latest car and motorcycle magazines. And fortunately enough, there was one bookshop in Civil Lines that kept the latest issues of all automotive magazines (the Indian ones) and every once in a while, you could also find old issues of foreign car and motorcycle magazines there – quite surprising for a small town in UP in the early-1990s. The owner of this bookshop was a nice, quiet gentleman and we used to talk whenever I went to his shop. He used to say that I was the only customer he had for those foreign bike magazines – there were no other takers. I was quite thankful for that because unlike Lucknow, where there were many bookshops where you could find these magazines, in Bareilly there was just this one shop. Unfortunately, the shop no longer exists – while writing this, I looked it up on Google Maps and it seems the bookshop has now been converted to a restaurant. Well, such is the transient nature of most things in life I suppose. Thankfully, Kipps – a shop that used to sell some of the best sweets and savouries in Bareilly – is still there. We used to buy rasbhari from there and miss the taste to this day. Made with moong daal, rasbhari is a Bareilly specialty and as far as I know, isn’t available anywhere else in the country. I loved it so much, I’d visit Bareilly for rasbhari alone.

In any case, coming back to what I’d do now that I was in Bareilly, there wasn’t really anything much at all. After I’d spent 2-3 weeks not doing anything much, my father suggested that I should at least get a post-graduate degree. He went with me to the Rohilkhand University campus, a 10-minute drive from our rented house in Sindhu Nagar colony. We were told that I was late and that sessions had already started, but my father met and spoke to some people in the University and somehow got an admission for me – I started my M.Com classes from the very next day. 

I had no friends in Bareilly and no social life to speak of. So, of course, I was incredibly happy whenever my friends from Lucknow visited me in Bareilly. This is me with my friends Sandeep and Shobhit, outside my house in Sindhu Nagar

While I’d had a very large number of friends in college, when I was studying at the Lucknow University, I did not know anyone in Bareilly and found it difficult – even impossible – to make new friend there. After a few days, I stopped going to college every day and mostly studied at home, which wasn’t too hard. I had also joined a distance learning program offered by the Hyderabad-based ICFAI, which allowed you to study from home for their CFA course – you only had to go to one of their designated examination centres to sit for their exams, which I think took place once every six months. Again, this was perhaps only because there was always the pressure to do something. Anything. Let me make this clear – I’m not blaming anyone for anything. My parents only ever had my best interests in mind when they encouraged me to take up some kind of professional studies. But it was me who failed to think things through and look for something that I’d be truly interested in, something that I’d really want to do. Commerce, accounts, finance and financial analysis – these simply weren’t for me.

Inevitably, I dropped out of CFA after a few months, though I did go on to complete my M.Com and got my post-graduate degree in mid-1995. Those two years of college were quite uneventful and, compared to the life I had in Lucknow, totally dull. I had no friends, nobody to talk to, nowhere to go and there was nothing much to do. Bareilly was a small town and occasional meetings with a cousin or with relatives was the only social life I had. I used to spend most of my time reading and playing the keyboard – a basic old Casio keyboard that I’d bought in Lucknow. And of course, I still had my trusty old Yamaha RX100 motorcycle with me (which my father had bought for me when I was in college, in Lucknow) and every now and then I used to go out on solo rides, speed being the only thing on my mind. Often, I used to go for rides on the nearby Pilibhit Bypass road, which used to be fairly empty, and I’d push the RX100 as hard as it would go – the objective was to try and hit a speed-indicated 110-115kph, which is about where the little, 100cc bike would top out. I’d read about Suzuki GSX-R1100s and Kawasaki Ninjas, Bimotas and BMWs, Yamaha FZRs and Honda CBRs in all those foreign magazines that I’d buy every month. Bikes that looked like they came from another planet. Bikes that 100-horsepower engine and top speeds of 250kph. But in the real world, all I had was my 11-horsepower Yamaha RX100 with its skinny tyres and drum brakes at both ends. But despite its limitations, I loved that bike and took very good care of it, and rode the wheels off it.

I’d become an expert at pulling long wheelies and would often show off whenever, wherever I got an opportunity. Butlar Plaza was one place in Bareilly where ‘cool’ young people often gathered, and I used to go there sometimes – there was a place that sold excellent cakes and pastries, and there was a small shop that stocked the latest music cassettes, and these were my favourite haunts in the city. While leaving, I’d often wheelie my RX100 from one end of the market to the other, leaving onlookers gasping in shock. I deeply enjoyed the shocked look on people’s faces, though now I realise most of them probably thought I was being very silly. But back then, I neither knew nor cared. All I wanted to do was ride like my heroes from 500cc motorcycle GP racing, which I used to watch on TV. Legendary racers like Freddie Spencer, Wayne Rainey, Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Gardner, Mick Doohan… going hell for leather on their fire-breathing, 500cc, two-stroke, 180bhp racebikes. Doing speeds of 280kph or more, defying death every Sunday, crashing, getting up, winning, celebrating. I wanted to be them, live their life. In the real world, I did not have either their bikes or their riding talent, but my RX100 let me live out my fantasies. Every time I snapped shut my helmet’s visor and went out on that little 100cc motorcycle, I was – in my mind’s eye at least – Wayne Rainey on his Yamaha YZR500, or Kevin Schwantz on his Suzuki RGV500.

Soon enough, it was time for me to come out of the little fantasy world that I’d built for myself. It was 1995, I had spent two years in Bareilly and had completed my M.Com. It was now time for me to find a job. But what job could one get with a master’s degree in commerce? Companies weren’t exactly lining up outside my house to hire me. The Internet hadn’t come to India yet, and there were no online portals where one could look for jobs. Job hunting was via newspaper classified ads and since there was no email, each job application had to written by hand, put in an envelope and posted by hand at one of the many letterboxes in the city. I did send out a few applications but got just one reply, which was from First Flight Couriers. But before I could send them a reply, something else happened, which took my life in an unexpected direction.

With nothing much to do in Bareilly, I sometimes spent hours playing my Casio keyboard

The story continues here