Jashvitha Dhagey’s city of dreams

Jashvitha Dhagey

Mumbai is neither sunny nor windy on the day we decide to meet in the garden right under her building. The humidity though, is sitting thick in the air between us and yet, Ms. Jashvitha Dhagey finds it difficult to suppress her grin. “This city is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says.

We’re both trying to dab the sweat off of our faces now and somehow, it keeps reappearing almost immediately. “I finally have that thing that I’ve always dreamed of having. The moment I realised that this is as real as it gets, all my anxieties about life suddenly vanished. I feel happier and more grateful than ever,” she goes on to say. This thing that she’s referring to is her admission into the postgraduate diploma course in Social Communications Media at Sophia Polytechnic.

“It’s been a bittersweet ride so far. I’m sure I’d have been less morose through all of the crying, begging and convincing if I knew I would end up here!” she says. Ms. Dhagey decided to set aside her parents’ second hand ambitions made of conventional choices the day she realized that she will never be happy if she continued to live in the fear of making everyone else unhappy. “I am on a mission to free myself from everything that stops me from being my true self,” she says with a smile. Taking responsibility for her life choices and their consequences was her first step towards achieving this goal.

She never had a plan and she had certainly never thought of Mumbai. “To put it very curtly, I was scared of this city but I knew I was finally home the day I stepped foot here!” says this Spanish Teacher turned Media professional (in the making) who has lived most of her life in Hyderabad.

“Here, I became a teacher, I earned money from writing which is something I didn’t think I would do, I was finally using the big words I learnt from the books I read in daily conversations, and most important of all, I realized that I have been successful in cultivating meaningful friendships that have stood the test of time! Mumbai is the city where dreams come true and that’s what happened with me too!” she exclaims.

She says she still does not have one concrete plan for the next few years but adds she has several of them. She wants to work in the Indian media industry for a few years before taking off to Spain to finish a Master’s degree in translation studies. She wants to travel the world and learn a new skill from each place that she lives in.

“I try my best to live in the moment but I can never stop thinking about how my present actions will impact my future,” she says and then a phone call interrupts our tête-à-tête and she says that she has to leave immediately.