It was an ordinary morning. I was fed-up of checking emails every five minutes. The result for assistant d’anglais was awaited. I didn’t know what to do, so I tried to distract myself with stuff. Thankfully, I still had my school job to do that for me. During weekends, I had Roobaroo, my theatre group, so it wasn’t that difficult.
Then one evening,Ariba called-up. Ariba and I had filled up the applications together. “Result is out”, she informed me in a low voice. “Oh which means, we haven’t got through”. “I did but you didn’t”, she told me. I didn’t have much to say so immediately after congratulating her I hung up. Later I was informed that my candidature was on wait-list.
It was the first week of April I suppose. This news was followed by yet another shock, my school had terminated French studies, which implied I had to start looking for another one. Disappointed with almost everything that was happening around me, I decided to plan an outstation trip with Rashmi, a close friend. In the middle of it, another travel opportunity struck me. A Singapore based company contacted me to accompany them to Ladakh for a film project and do the documentation in the form of diary entries. It was an interesting project and after a long session of ‘should I or should I not’; I took the project up and the travel was due in June.
So somehow, a month and a few weeks passed. I wrote to the embassy several times during this time, hoping for my wait-list to get converted. I had stopped thinking about it, and I wanted to have a good holiday with friends now. So on 23rd May, we left for Shimla. Shimla is a highly commercialized yet beautiful hill station in Himachal Pradesh. We had planned a week-long vacation there. On the third day, I received a call from the Embassy that nearly took my breath away. They didn’t say a word about my selection; they asked me to send them a document. I was restless because I did not have any document with me. I called up my sister and asked her to download the doc from my Google Drive (Lesson 1: Scan all your documents and upload them to Google Drive or any other cloud app. You never know when you might need it). For the first time in life, she didn’t question me and did the needful. The next day, I had to sign a contract which stated that I might have to pay a fine if I decide to opt-out of the program at this stage. I ran towards Mall Road, Shimla, looked for a cyber cafe and mailed the doc.
When I reached Delhi, I got a confirmation call that I have been selected for the program and I knew that I was going to France. (Lesson 2, the most important one: Believe, and it will happen).
