Missed the train twice today, so one hour at my disposal. Now they are saying that it may get delayed, re-routed or cancelled. So first time a blog post from public. It doesn’t feel like I came here two days back. By end of this week, I think I will feel that it had been ages. Got so much info about getting setup in UK that my friend KH might be bored to his bones answering my questions. I am getting enough exercise everyday, around 40 minute to and fro from hotel, office and railway station. Add last minute dashes to it, I got jogging also. Add 7 pounds laptop along with it, I got weight training too. By end of this year, I should be really fit.

I guess last couple of months has been really good for me. I bought a new car, a new house at Trivandrum, got couple of awards at work, got out of the project in which I already spent more than 1 and ½ years and came to UK now. It also had been some learning experience for me – did performance appraisals for some people and they gave me a good grill. I really took something from that experience on how far to go with people, setting over/under/no expectations and some others. Something made me think whether having personal relationship with people helps or being strictly work oriented gets the work done professionally. I thought maybe having a personal relationship makes you reveal more and restrain you from asking for more. You will have difficulty in being blunt. I haven’t made up my mind on this, but I have a good feeling that you can make some friends and some colleagues along the way, not all friends.

Train is getting delayed further. So some more. I planned to get out from office to catch an earlier train. Here people leave from office at sharp 5 pm. At 5.30 pm, they will be really rushing since they are late. At 6 I think the office gets locked. Today I had bit of difficulty getting out of office, so I missed a train and they have trains every half hour only. One happy thought is that this will surely improve my ‘work-life balance’. I need to get out of office by a fixed time.

I haven’t got a good grasp of things here. But it is definitely different from US. I have heard many a times now that here it is not service oriented. You get indifferent behavior if you go to a shop or bank etc. In US they make you feel important and setup good customer service standards. Sophistication is also one level down here. They have more old buildings (it is an old country after all), casual attitude (like us back in India) even though they insist on formal dressing. But at least in office, folks are much more intelligent than US.

Life has gone from a tranquil pace to a frantic frenzy within two days. It is like that F1 advertisement (or is it Toyota?) which shows a snail for half a minute and then suddenly shows a race car zooming at break-neck speed. I have to travel to UK next week and there is a mountain to move before that.

Relocating is like uprooting a plant. Back to mangalore after a long time, I almost got into the rhythm of established routines, faces and places. Sometimes I feel we are kind of gypsies, without having a permanent place to stay, moving around with bare minimum furniture to get by comfortably. It must be really getting into the nerves of our parents. They say, “but you came back only 6 months back..”. Within last 3 to 4 years, I have stayed in 6 or 7 houses ranging from 2 months and 1 year at one place.

Not that I regret going to UK. In more than one occasion, we have glanced at Thomas Cook vacation package for London. So now it gives me another occasion to see some part of the world which I have most read about. On the lighter side, now every Hindi movie is made there, so I have already seen most of it.

But this morning, I was having this kind of detached feeling about how everything goes upside down in a flash and you end up in a totally new situation. For some time my world is going to have new look, almost kind of another chapter.

Come to think of it, it was not totally unexpected also. So now it is time to move that mountain, pack up and leave.