This morning after 10 am, both the parents retired. Dad had talked a lot this morning. And mom needed to take her sleeping pills. Not having much to do, I went downstairs to my sister and asked her if she wanted to go out with me. She readily agreed – which was good news for me since I needed her to drive me around 🙂

The two of us visited my friend – Satyaki Lodh’s – father who lives in an old age home about 30 minutes of drive from my parents. I met him for the first time three months back during my last trip to India.

He seemed to be pleasantly surprised to see me. I was a little surprised that he remembered me. He is 89 and has memory lapses. But he softly told me that I am the only person he knows who knowingly shaves off his head. I agreed that he had a point there.

Like last time, he was quiet most of the time. My sister, who was impressed by the old age home had a lot of questions for him. He answered them softly. But there was a common theme between him and my dad. He too, said that he has no reason to live anymore and would rather die peacefully. My dad is better this time but the lack of a purpose to live at an old age is a real challenge – at least among the few people I know in India.

It was good to see Lakshmi – his attendant again. I need to write sometime about lifestory as I had learnt it and how she has fought thru her life to raise her two sons – who happen to be of the same ages as my daughters.

And I made a new friend too – Mr. Biswas who lives there with his wife. Their only son is in Germany. He did most of the talking till we left about an hour later. He had a lot to say and after some time I was not too sure if the quiet Mr. Lodh was enjoying all this or just waiting for us to leave him at peace. He did put that doubt to rest a few minutes later.

Just as I took leave, the otherwise very quiet Mr. Lodh, told me “Abar eso porer baar. Bhalo laagey erokom du minute-er jonno-o dekha hole”. (‘Come by next time too. It feels good if you drop by even if for a few minutes’).

I sure hope he meant it. Since I do plan to drop by again.

After settling down in my seat on my flight to Kolkata from Doha, I started chatting with my new friend – the flight attendant – “DJ” is how he introduced himself. Originally, he is from France. We talked about a lot of stuff – including Brexit and sooner than later, went to the topic of wine. Turns out he is somewhat of an accomplished bartender!!

As the passengers started filing in, he got busy. But eventually, he came to take our beverage orders.

“How would you like to start the evening, once we get up in the air?”, he asked. I was quite sure, he wanted me try the French wines.

“Not the way, you were probably thinking JD”, I said.

“What is your ideal start to the evening?”

“An Old Fashioned”.

He looked at me for a second and said “I will try my best”. And then went off to the other passengers.

I had almost forgotten that exchange. After we hit 31,000 feet and leveled out, he came to me, kneeled down on one his knees and asked me “How do you like it?”. “How do I like what?”, drawing a blank. Like I said, I had forgotten about our exchange.

“Your Old Fashioned”.

“Oh! With Luxardo cherries and extra bitters. But I am not that picky”.

“Ok”, he said and scooted off.

A few minutes later, he came back with this drink. How he managed to get the ingredients, I will never know.

“That was Angostura?”, I asked.

“Indeed!”, he said.

“Why do you stock bitters in a flight. That too to Kolkata?”.

He would not answer me – just gave the corporate line “We will do anything to please our customers! Enjoy!!”.

I tried a sip of the Old Fashioned.

It was a best start possible to this evening. Even at 31,000 feet up in the air floating in an aluminum tube!!

I was getting ready to leave the Qatar lounge in Doha to head towards my plane. Before doing so, I walked up to this young guy to say Thanks for helping me show where the different amenities in the lounge were when I had walked in. In particular, I was looking for the showers and some food.

As I said “Thank you” to him, he asked me “Are you a Bengali?”.
“I indeed am. Do you speak Bengali too?”
“Yes sir.”
“How did you realize that I am a Bengali?”
“I overheard you, Sir”.

So apparently, Shahnawaz – that was his name – overheard me talking to Sharmila and then my brother in Bengali. We talked for quite some time after that. I learnt that he has been working in Qatar for the last 10 years and has been supporting his parents and his own family way back in Bangladesh (Chittagong area). I has a baby who is going to turn a year in a few more days. He gets to see his family twice a year but thinks worthwhile to work hard abroad and send the money back home for his family. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He thought he would continue working like he is doing now but perhaps get this family to live with him.

I talked about Bengalis living in US – both from India and Bangaldesh. In fact, I even showed some pictures of our Bengali runners. He was suitably impressed!!

It was getting to be time for my flight to leave. So, we grabbed a colleague of his to take a picture of us, exchanged our contacts and promised to stay in touch!!

As I was finishing up my previous post about going to India and creating intersection points, something happened that reminded me that I do not have to wait to get to India to create the first one. I was still finishing up the post when I heard a “Rajib?” from nearby! Sure enough! It was Dhil Jith!! We have worked together in the past and I have not kept up with him for some time.

It was good to meet his family and chat for some time (amazing how his daughters and mine think the same way about visiting India) and get started on this intersection thingy 🙂

This is such a mega intersection point that it will take me some time and effort to thread it thru. I will try to make it as short as I can. But no promises.

The best starting point might to that day a few decades back when in a large room Raj and I were hunched together looking over a monitor trying to debug some software to understand why it was crashing. Both of us were poring through the manuals of Informix 4GL to make sure we understood how the page locking worked when a phone rang rudely. Raj took the call and a few words later (and I paid no attention to it since I was still getting confused with page locks), he kept the phone down and looked at me and said “Viji delivered a baby girl!”. The gravity of the moment did not sink in immediately. It took me some seconds to realize that we needed to drop our manuals and go get some sweets for others.

From that moment when I became the first person that Raj shared his happiest moment in life with, I have had a special bond to his family. A few months prior to that incident – 3rd June, 1991, to be precise, I had started my job life. That is when I started my long friendship with Raj. We have worked together in three of the four jobs I have had in my life.

3rd June, 2016 (day before yesterday) was my 25th anniversary of career life. I could not think of a better person to be with on that day than Raj and his family. Not a problem. It is on that day that the same Shruthi was getting married! And the Roy family had descended upon Fredericksburg to share the third happiest moment of Raj. (Second happiest was when Karthik was born and getting married to Viji does not count since I did not know them then 🙂 ).

What a coincidence to share the same day exactly separated by 25 even years at the same spot with the same person on two life-defining moments – one for me – one for him.

Wait! That is not where it ends.

During the ceremony itself, I was milling around the crowd. Now, you know that I am not the most comfortable person in a big crowd. I am more a one on one person who likes to get to know every individual. I am a little awkward – okay okay, I am very awkward – in a group where I get to say “Hi”, “Hello” and move on after exchanging a few pleasantries. And I was going thru those perfunctory pleasantry exchanges when one such guy walked up to me and introduced himself – “Uday”. I responded “Rajib”. For a fraction of a second, we had moved on when the same thought must have struck both of us. Both of us pulled back – sized up each other again and had the same flashback. And this time we said the same words, except at a much higher decibel level. “Uday?”, I yelled. “Rajib?”, he yelled back.

You see, Uday was the guy who had hired me (along with Pradeep and Devyani from HR) – no doubt against his better judgment – for my first job! I still remember the interview questions. And my answers – hence, the point about “against better judgment” :-).

Now that was a coincidence worth living for. The guy who got me rolling in my career came back to my life exactly 25 years later!! To the day!! No more of those pleasantries! Cornered Uday for 45 minutes and caught up with his life, his family and so many of our old friends. So much so, that he remarked – “We should write a memoir some day”!

So here goes it – Uday! Thank you for taking that chance on me many moons back. Without which I would have never know Raj. Without which I would have never known Shruthi. Without which I would have never showed up for her wedding. And certainly, without which, I would have never gotten a chance to see you again!!

A few weeks back, I had called up Arthur to wish him a happy birthday and one thing led to the other and eventually, we decided to see if we could get some of our old i2 guys together in Austin. I was in charge of reaching out to everybody. Want to take a guess who did not get it done in time? Office work, Tasha’s graduation and other excuses led me to realize on my flight to Texas that I had a lot of reaching out to do.

In any case, scrambled as best as I could on Thursday and Friday. With a lot of help from other friends, we were able to put together a small lunch meeting. Most of the rest were out of town.

It was a short meeting (partly also because I was waiting at the wrong restaurant 🙂 ) but it was great to see how well some of my i2 friends have done – personally and professionally. i2 was a place I got to see some really really brilliant talent. I can honestly say that I have never had a chance to work in any other place where so many smart people came under one roof.

Not that any of thoat smartness ever rubbed off on me – but I have decided to bask in the glow of those friends, anyways!

Tom, Richard, Arthur, Harvey, Karthik, Reddy and Raghu, thanks for showing up! Carolina, thanks for gracing our get together. For the rest, sorry we missed you. Hope to see you next time. I think we will leave the organizing to a local guy next time 🙂