Thank You, Pune

I never wanted to leave Delhi. Every job I’d had up to that point let me stay, and I’d built a whole identity around the idea that Delhi was simply the best city to live in (it is, by the way, just not for the reasons I thought back then). So when I got laid off from my last company there, the plan in my head wasn’t “find a job,” it was “find a job in Delhi.” Life doesn’t really ask you what the plan was. A month in, the offer that came through was from a company based in Pune, and I took it, because a month without an income is a month without an income, and because I told myself this was temporary, just enough runway to move back home on my own terms.

I had enough motivation at the start to work hard purely so I could leave. That’s a strange engine to run on, wanting to be good enough at a new city fast enough to get back to the old one. A few months in, somewhere in that process, I started feeling comfortable in a city that wasn’t mine. Not loyal to it. Just comfortable. Which honestly annoyed me more than it should have, because I wasn’t trying to feel that.

The first time I had actual coworkers

This was also the first time in my career I worked somewhere with an actual office, people physically around me, a floor you could walk, desks you could lean on to bother someone mid-task. For most of my life before that I’d had a small handful of people I actually talked to, the same few I still fall back on whenever something in my life goes sideways. But eight hours a day, five days a week, sitting near the same humans, you end up making friends whether you planned to or not. I didn’t go looking for it. It just happens when “Bakchodi” is the thing you love doing most and there are finally enough people around to do it with.

I got lucky with who those people turned out to be. Avtar, a stubborn ass designer who will disagree with me on almost anything on principle, and we still haven’t resolved most of it. Sagnik, a smart ass kid who completely fried my brain on my very first day by walking me through everything the company was running on at once, something we still laugh about. Parikshit, a perfectionist product guy I genuinely found annoying for exactly that reason, except he gets the job done, and at some point that stops being annoying and starts being the only thing that matters. There were more people than these three. These are just the ones I spent the most time with, the ones who actually count.

The city was new and I was going through a rough patch underneath all of it, and the two things fed each other. I started going out more, mostly into breweries, because hard liquor in Pune is expensive enough that beer stopped being a compromise and became the actual plan. I was never a beer person before this. There’s no version of me going back to not being one now.

Somewhere in all of that, the going out, the friends, the rough patch, I lost track of how Delhi even felt. Not because I decided to let it go. I just looked up one day and it had already happened.

The Diwali flight

I still remember the exact feeling of landing back in Pune after going home for Diwali. The plane touched down and before I’d even processed it, some part of me registered: I’m home. I was not okay with that feeling. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t invite it, and I still wasn’t willing to call Pune my city. But I also wasn’t going anywhere, so I just had to sit with a feeling I hadn’t signed up for.

The job itself, through most of this, was mentally exhausting in a very specific way. Not because the work was hard. Because it wouldn’t let me do the work the way it should’ve been done, kept steering in the wrong direction over and over until I simply stopped caring about it the way I used to. You can only push against the same wall so many times before you redirect your energy somewhere it’s actually welcome.

A few months later I met someone who showed me a version of Pune I hadn’t found on my own. I’m going to keep that part to myself, not because it isn’t important, it might be the most important part of this whole story, but because it’s theirs as much as mine and this isn’t the place to spell it out. What I can say is that after that, Pune stopped feeling unsettling and just felt like it was supposed to happen this way all along. I never had Pune on my checklist. I didn’t choose it going in. But it chose right back, and in hindsight none of it feels like an accident.

The second layoff, and the goodbye I didn’t plan for

Right when I’d actually settled, when the city had stopped being something I was tolerating and started being something I belonged to, I got laid off again. This one was brutal. The severance was good enough that I turned it into an opportunity instead of a panic, a real break to go find a company that actually rewards opinions and hard work instead of butt-licking. A few days ago I signed an offer for a company in Bangalore, and underneath the excitement of a new job is this weird, unsettling undertow of having to let go of Pune.

That feeling doesn’t make sense on paper. I didn’t want to come here. I never fully agreed to make it mine. And yet I’m leaving with friends I didn’t plan to make, a person I can lean on that I wasn’t looking for, and a vibe this city gave me that I can’t point to a single reason for. Something about how my life works just doesn’t let me sit still in comfort. It keeps shoving me into places and situations I didn’t ask for, and somehow every single one of them hands me a lesson I needed, whether I wanted it or not.

So this is a thank you. To Pune, for giving me all of it anyway. For the friends I didn’t go looking for, the rough patch that turned into something good, the person who made this city feel like mine without asking my permission first, and the version of myself I became here that I didn’t know I needed to become. Looking forward now is mostly about building something that pays well enough to afford all of this on my own terms, the uncomfortable travel, the new cities, the same old people, for as long as I want, without someone else deciding when I have to leave.