Slog on weekdays, chill out on weekends, work like a horse for three months, save some money and unwind on a trip. This is the plan most of us make. But, what if you are not happy with your life? What if you wanted to become someone else but ended up being something completely different? Some like Jubanashwa Mishra refuse to be bogged down, and instead choose a path that nobody has dared to take.
To enrich his life, to fulfil his dreams, to discover his passion and to get out of the comfort zone, Jubanashwa, an Odia boy hailing from Keonjhar, packed his bags when opportunity knocked. He left his inhibitions behind and hitched a ride that took him to the 28 States of India on a fascinating task that he titled ‘One week, One job project’.
Sharing an interesting anecdote, he recalls, “In Hyderabad, my cell phone went almost dead and I went to buy a new handset. While transferring the contacts, the salesman asked me “How many contacts are there in this phone?” I replied “Around 4,000 may be”. He mocked at me. ‘Does it contain contact numbers of the whole of India?’ Then my friends told him about my journey.” And those were just his phone contacts. “If I had synced my Facebook and LinkedIn contacts, the shopkeeper would have fainted seeing the five-digit contact list,” laughs Jubanashwa.
He worked on disparate jobs — from a photographer in Haryana, market researcher in Gujarat and hotel manager in Rajasthan, to a playschool teacher in Andhra Pradesh.
He travelled a total distance of 24,929 km by train, bus, taxi, flight, tram, auto, bike, rickshaw, boat, raft and, of course, on foot. One constant he found in every nook and cranny of India was Bollywood music. While the songs of the 50s kept him company when he was passing through the beautiful Himalayan ranges, he was tuned in to songs of the 80s and 90s while taking the local transport in central India.
“There is so much to explore. Most of us are unaware of different parts of our country. We should travel far and wide to know various cultures,” he says.
But everything about the journey was not hunky-dory. He had his share of nightmares, literally in fact, he says, speaking of his trip to Varanasi. “I had dreams of dead people. It was scary. The smell of flesh didn’t go away for days after I left Benaras.”
Sharing another anecdote about the odd jobs he did, Jubanashwa says, “I was working as a field supervisor for a contraceptive rural campaign in Bihar. It is very difficult to get a betel shop owner to sell condoms. When I tried to convince him, he retorted that his father used to sit in the shop: ‘How could he sell condoms there!’”
An IT graduate from NIT, Odisha, Jubanashwa has enrolled himself for the PGD course in Communication Management and Entrepreneurship at Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad (MICA). He is pretty popular among the Indian entrepreneurship fraternity for his ventures like FetchaKucha, EZeeDictionary, EZeeDigi Communications and International Short Film Festival Bhubaneswar, which are not as famous as his job-hopping project.
Jubanashwa donated the wages earned from each of his jobs to the social work organisation Goonj.
He says the people who live their passion are the happiest people in the world — an easy guiding principle for sure success.
— niharika842@gmail.com