Twenty Five
I realized a strange moving occurrence in my life as I have grown up and wanted to make some meaning of my movements. I have met people who have told me that they have lived at one place all their lives and I am completely baffled at persons like me. With traveling overseas for education, I can understand the nomadic way of life, but having my zip code changed almost every year calls for an introspection.
I was born and raised in New Delhi at 110028 (now I don't want to count my hospital zip code :). After six-seven years, my father acquired some housing loan to construct a house on a shared plot he bought with his friend. That brought me to 110012. I spent rest of my kid/teenage life here until I was almost 18 that we all decided to sell our house and move eastwards to expanding suburbs in Noida.
This was a strange time as I entered college in central India, so it was a dual displacement for me.
While I moved to Bhopal, my family was working on the move to Noida. So in a way that brought me to 201301 in Noida and 462010 in Bhopal. In my 4 years at the undergrad college, I moved to another zip code in terms of residence and college premises. We as roommates moved to 462001 and finally to 462023 and my college moved to 462022 as the management constructed a sprawling campus for the nascent institution.
Graduation brought me back to New Delhi and I spent four years in between my residence at 201301 and my office at 110020.
With dreams of higher education, I traveled to the United States to Los Angeles at zip code 90007. I spent two years in college at 90089. With a short stint of internship in Santa Monica, I spent few months at 90064 and finally headed to the midwest. In my two years near Chicago, I stayed at 60201, 60085 and worked at 60093. With the onset of 2009, I moved southwest to Texas country and stayed for an year at 78758 and 78750 while working at 78729. I had hardly finished an year in Texas that November moved me back to the midwest at Wisconsin on the shores of the Mighty Mississippi.
I spent an year at La Crosse living at 54603, 55947 and working at 54601.
2011 brought travels with it yet again and I moved to 37919 in Tennessee while working at 37831. Two years went by shuffling between these two zip codes when work made me move again to Texas country. I stayed at 77429 while working at 77070. This was a short stint and work brought me back to south east at Greater Atlanta. Currently I live at 30009 and work at 30022.
That brings my movement between twenty five zip codes! There could be many more people who have had a migratory life due to education/work but I was just curious to dig into this aspect of life.
