Have you heard of Gomia?

Gomia is a tiny place in Bihar (Now Jharkhand, district Bokaro) where I was born on the 25^th of June 1979, I have no issues sharing my year of birth :-). The company which crafted the Gomia Township into a living heaven was an explosives company ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) India, earlier it was called IEL (Indian Explosives Limited), I guess they were here since British times (not sure), as far as I can remember. IEL had laid the foundation stone for Gomia (it has again come back to IEL now).

The employees get to stay in houses built next to the factory within 2 km.  Actually the factory was in one corner and all the residential area formed the town.   Depending on the hierarchy there were different types of residential flats – starting from F to A. A, B and C used to be for the management level folks of the company. There was also a hospital for employees – Ardeer Hospital – Free for employees and their families. The entire health record of the each and every family was kept in this hospital. It had all kinds of modern facilities including more than 100 beds for patients, a Dentist, a big Pharmacy, more than 10 doctors,  a large pathology lab, separate housing for nurses.

Most of the children used to go to Pitts Modern School (I will have a separate blog post about my school life). The best part was the IEL Club where we used to hang out all the time. That time itself (1980’s) we used to have the best of Magazines from around the globe to read, the best books of all (including fiction and non-fiction), Movies on big TV screens (before cable craze came in) [My dad was a part of the campaign to get the dish antenna/cable craze to Gomia – that’s the time when I became a gadget freak/geek :-), I have some kool stories on how I handled channels on cable, yes – sometimes i was given the responsibility to change channels, kool isn’t it?], swimming all day in the big pool, cricket, table tennis, lawn tennis, attending all sorts of parties, Christmas celebrations, eat and drink anytime with the canteen open, the snacks bill used to go to parents on a monthly basisJ .

I left Gomia for further studies (Delhi) in 1997 and after that could never really return to this beautiful place (went to Bangalore in 2000 and am here since then) and I am proud to say that they were the best days of my life! 

I never felt the belongingness anywhere else, am sure each one of you would have the same feeling about your birth place. more on the ‘shaitani’, ‘badmashi’and timepass stories Coming Soon…stay tuned!