My internship..#GoodLuck

It was the month of June of year 2007 , days of my internship with pune based EPC firm as a part of my MBA course. I had been assigned the task of visiting cement plants across Andrapradesh and Karnataka to carry out the market potential for captive power plants.

I never travelled outside Maharashtra before.  First couple of days of my travel were quite exciting, I spent two days at Hyderabad. Then I spent my next six days at place named Kodad where I had real tough time interacting with the folks/locals out there. There was hardly anyone who could understand Hindi or English. The cement plants being at far location I ended up travelling in Lorries, Trucks and Tempos even in the odd hours after my meetings.

I reached a place named Vinukonda on the seventh day of the travel. After overnight stay at Lodge, I picked a AP state transport bus at 9.00 am to Karimpuri to visit a cement plant. Sky was cloudy on that morning with possibility of rainfall.  At around 10.00 am, as soon as the bus reached midway of Nullah (which is usually dry till month of July), the engine of the bus stopped working. And by that time the rain started pouring like hell. The heavy spell of rain still continued till the next two hours and the water started flowing in the bus.  The water reached till the base of of seats in the bus. Everyone in the bus sat on the top of the seat. There was typical flood scene cries for help and others who can swim were diving . A fellow old passenger in broken Hindi told me that that was very unusual and such case had not happened before in that area in the near past.

I was helpless, wanted to cry but could not, wanted to have a word with my parents but could not due to range problem, wanted to capture everything but couldn’t as I was carrying cheapest Nokia model without camera. The raining completely stopped at 2.00 pm, the water level started dropping down slowly. I got stuck in the bus till 4.00 pm and by that time the water level dropped and there was still waist-deep(4 ft) water. We formed a chain by holding hands and travelled across 3 km stretch in waist-deep water to reach a somewhat dry place.

After reaching there I literally celebrated by throwing my fist in the air. None of government buses were plying in that area due to the heavy rain. Luckily one gentleman gave me a lift in his sumo till Vinukonda. I reached Vinukonda at around 9.30 pm. I called up my parents on that day and narrated them the entire incident.  My mother scolded me saying why did you opt for marketing stream(Quite Expected from a mother)

Even after that incident I travelled almost a week across Karnataka and gathered some valuable inputs for my projects.

I never expected something like that would happen in my internship, but it was a thrilling experience.

It was an incident of lifetime certainly not to cherish about but it made me realized the value of life.

 
Twitter: @vijay_kharat