19 March 2017

Meeting a classmate after 26 years

The last time I saw Sunita – my MBA classmate – was in March, 1991. I think she was running for an interview, all smartly and formally dressed up – during those last days of our MBA school when all the students were singlemindedly determined to ace their on-campus interviews.

I did not go back for the convocation or for the two get togethers that had been arranged by our group. That Sunita lived in San Francisco is something I had found out only a few years back. Even that, it was her husband – Ganapati – who was my senior from Engineering school that I had traced. And then remembered that he got married to Sunita.

I had about an hour between the customer meeting ending in San Fran and meeting one of our sales person that evening. That was enough for me to walk up to Wells Fargo building and call Sunita down to go for a cup of tea!!

She has remained pretty much the same way as I remember from 26 years back. Of course, now that she has a great job, she does not dress that formally any more 🙂

It was good to see an old classmate and catch up on her life journey!!!

Category: Intersection Points | 11 Comments on Meeting a classmate after 26 years
19 March 2017

Of coding, soccer and getting even with HR!!

It was towards the end of the last century. I was in a startup company that, in spite of me, was doing extremely well. Commensurate with a small company experiencing astronomical growth, we never had enough people and work days used to be excessively long. I distinctly remember wrapping up work around 1:30 am and be home around 2 am almost every single day. If not anything, I used to hang around till every developer left. Not that I was too much of a help in writing code – which explains how I became a development manager – but at least I was there for some moral support.

I also remember that one of my practices before heading to the parking lot was to check into all the rooms in the two floor building to see if anybody from any of the other teams were still working. Invariably – and I mean without any exception – there would be one guy sitting at this desk pounding away at the keyboard. He was always in his soccer clothes – including the cleats. And always had a soccer ball next to him. He was the development manager of another team and he liked his work as much as he liked soccer and would always put in a soccer game in the evening before coming back to office. And he played at a very highly competitive level.

During my business trip last week, one evening, when I finally caught up with that gentleman – Glen Jones, I was a little surprised to see him very visibly limping. Not knowing what had happened to him during the years that I had not seen him, I was, of course, a little worried. Sure enough, there was no need to be. He still plays soccer very regularly and had a temporary hip muscle pull from previous day’s game.

Over dinner, it was very fulfilling to catch up with Glen and his life journey. In fact, we remembered the day when Mark Whipple, Sharmila, he and myself had met one late night at a bar up there in the mountains outside Denver. (I was vacationing with my family much further out – but Sharmila and I had driven down to meet Glen and Mark – both of them used to live in the Evergreen area).

Glen had a very funny story for me. In those start up days, we used to have a very strict discipline around coding. If you ever broke the build (by checking in incompatible code before doing a system wide test locally) during the automated run any night, there would be a hangman noose in front of your door to shame you. Those days, we never thought anything more of it.

Later in life, Glen worked for a very large company. And let’s just say the developers were not exactly as disciplined. And Glen brought in the practice of hanging the hangman noose. Let me remind you – this was a very large company.

Soon, corporate HR was at his door giving him some stern lectures on sensitivities and all that. He told me about how he remembered distinctly about being pulled up by the HR lady.

“What did you do?”, I asked.
“What could I do? I just kept quiet”.
“Later in life did you folks in your team ever have a laugh over it?”
“No, but I got even with the corporate HR lady”.
“You got even with the HR lady? HOW????”

I almost snorted out my bourbon when he nonchalantly said “Oh! I married her”!!

It was a memorable evening!!

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19 March 2017

From the bartender’s corner – Gin #6: Monkey 47 Schwarzwald Dry Gin

This is definitely one of the costlier gins – if not the costliest. For a bottle half the size (375ml), you pay about twice the price of normal gin bottles. It is also one of the few German gins. This also has the distinction of having the largest number of botanicals in the gin. 47, to be precise. That explains the “47” part of the name. (It has nothing to do with the ABV content of 47% – 94 proof; that is a mere coincidence).

To get to the other part of the name – “Monkey” – one has to go back to 1945. The Second World War had just come to end. An Indian born, British Royal Air Force Commander – Commander Collins was sent to divided Berlin to overlook reconstruction. At that time, he had adopted an egret monkey in the Berlin Zoo called “Max”. Commander Collins created a new gin out of the botanicals he had learnt about in India and the ones available in the Black Forest area in Germany. He called it “Schwarzwald Dry Gin”. It was not very popular outside of the guesthouse that Collins owned.

Much later – in 2006, one distiller Alexander Stein discovered about the story and reconstructed the recipe. And then the name Monkey 47 was given – in deference to Commander Collins’ affinity for Max.

This gin is made by Black Forest Distillers in South West part of Germany not too far from the French border.

The gin itself is extremely complex. Here is another unique trait of this gin. The base alcohol is made from molasses. I had it straight up today. The nose is very rich – thanks to all those botanicals. The juniper, rose and lavender is very distinct. To the palate, initially it was all mint and juniper. As time went though, you could detect some more herbals – different berries, pepper and peppermint. Of 47 botanicals, I was probably able to detect no more than six or seven. The finish was strong in citrus.

If you have tried different kinds of gins, you may want to try this. If you have not, this may not be a good buy. For one, it is too pricey for no good reason. For another, my guess is if you use it for a cocktail, you cannot find much difference between this and Nolets or even a Vivacity. Unless you have a far superior ability to detect small traces of other herbals.

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18 March 2017

My nephew – the web page builder!!

When I call my brother in the evening (for him) pretty much everyday, usually the nephews are busy studying and we never get to talk. But their exams are over now and they are headed to the next grade. When I called my brother up today, he did not even get a chance to pick his phone up. The younger one quickly answered the phone – “Jethu?” (That is what they call me). And for about twenty minutes we chatted. This is the ten year old.

He could barely contain his excitement while narrating to me that he had solved the Rubik’s cube. And then for good measure, raised his voice and let me also know that his elder brother cannot even get one layer done correctly. It turns out that after exams got over, he brought out the cube I had given him three months back when I went to visit my parents and had finally gotten the better of it. Per my brother, he is somewhat of an annoyance now – going around asking people to jumble up the cube for him!

“I timed myself. My best is 3 minutes, 25 seconds and 67 milliseconds”, he declared! Barely trying to conceal my laughter, I asked “67 milliseconds? Why the milliseconds?”. For once he was stumped. He was not too sure why the milliseconds. Finally he blurted out – “That is what the phone said”. Encouraging him to shave off the milliseconds in his next try, I asked him to give the phone to his thirteen year old brother.

That ensued some more fun. The elder nephew straightaway complained that his website still says he is nine years old and that I needed to fix it. A little background here – I have websites for all my nephews and nieces (which is basically their names dot com) and then every time I go to India, when I see something they have created – mostly drawings, paintings etc – I take pictures of them and put it up on the website. I hope someday many decades later, they can use the website to remember their early childhood, the times they spent with me and show them to their next generation.

Now, while I update their pages with their creations, frankly I never go to the “About Me” page. So, it usually stays there unedited for years. And I suspect some friend of his went to his website and pointed out that he is still nine years old. And that is what the complaint was all about.

While on the phone, I went to his website quickly – and it indeed said “Welcome to my page. I am 9 years old – so it will take me a little time to build my website. My uncle (“J2″) is helping me with this”.

Since their exams were over, I proposed that I teach him how to maintain his own page. That way he did not have to be dependent on me and he could control whatever was written there. He was thrilled at the idea but was also mighty scared that he might mess up the whole thing that I had created. I told him not to worry and that we will start small. We will start only by changing “9” to “13”.

After forty minutes of conversation with the two nephews together, I shot an email to my brother with instructions for my elder nephew on how to edit his “About Me” page.

An hour later, after dropping off Natasha at the security line at the airport (spring break is over for NYU), I was walking back to my car when out of curiosity, I checked to see if the nephew had made the change. He was genuinely scared of messing up the whole website after all.

I had to stop in my tracks and laugh my head off when I saw what he had done. It appeared that not only had he changed the number from 9 to 13, he took suitable amount of umbrage at the line that followed – which said it will take a little time to build out the site. He obviously did not want to make any large changes – he was so scared. But his self-righteousness also did not let him let the sentence lie as is. So, he made a small change to convey to the world his self-confidence in managing his website. But no larger a change than was absolutely necessary.

If you go to www.nirbanroy.com and press About Me – instead of “I am 9 years old – so it will take me a little time to build my website.”, now it says “I am 13 years old – so it will take me no time to build my website”.

I smiled the entire drive back thinking thru what must have gone thru his head and how he has absolutely overachieved his goal!!!

Decades later, I hope to show him this blog entry in my website so both of us can laugh at it together!!!

Category: Family in India | 1 Comment on My nephew – the web page builder!!
18 March 2017

Winding down with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

“Mere rashk-e-qamar tu ne pehli nazar,
Jab nazar se milaayee maza aa gaya
Bara si gir gaii kaam hi kar gaii,
Aag aisi lagaaii maza aa gaya”

Trying to translate this is not going to be easy. The first big challenge is explaining the import of a simple phrase as “maza aa gaya”. Literally it might be said it means “(I) became overjoyed”. But it really conveys a lot more. Elements of “ecstasy” is carried thru in that phrase. And elements of “unparalleled” nature of joy is conveyed thru that phrase.

The second challenge is to translate the construct of Urdu phrases. They are constructed almost the opposite of English phrases, sequentially speaking. “Rashk e qamar” is best understood as “envy of moon”. Basically, he is describing her as somebody whose beauty is the subject of envy by the moon.

Let’s see if this does any justice…

“Oh! You – who is the envy of the moon, your first glance
When it met my own eyes, it flung me into a world of ecstasy

(And in that look) Lightning struck and completely charred me
You lit such a fire that I burnt in a fire of that ecstasy.”

Category: Music/Poetry | 17 Comments on Winding down with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
17 March 2017

That was an interesting landing…

It is very unusual to get such a clear picture of the entire Atlanta airport from so up close. If you are wondering what happened – this is the answer… We were flying in from San Francisco. The plane twisted and turned about 30 miles before the airport and aligned itself to land from the West end (all the 5 active runways at Atlanta airports run East West) and then something funny happened once we hit about 7000 feet.

The pilot had made all the necessary announcements and then I realized instead of continuously losing height, the nose seemed to even out and then we banked a little more and then straightened out. Which means we were aligned with the runways but we would be missing them by a couple of miles if we are hitting the ground.

And soon, I realized that we are not landing after all. For whatever reason, we had changed our minds and instead we just flew along the runway. Seemed like a last minute change of mind. Perhaps sudden change of wind direction? Checked the wind speeds – only 13 mph. Meant nothing for a big 737-900.

We went to the other end – flying parallely to the runways on the North end and then eventually banked back and landed from the East end. After the flight landed, I asked the air hostesses – they were of no help. And the cockpit door was still closed. Could not ask the pilots and a plane full of people wanting to get off a plane they had been in for over four hours did not help 🙂

For the life of me, I could not figure out why we tried to position ourselves to one end of the runway, and then flew along the runway and then landed from the other side. On the plus side, it let me take some lateral pictures of the whole airport from barely five miles away in the air. That is a great sight for frequent fliers from Atlanta airport like me…

Category: Travelogs | 5 Comments on That was an interesting landing…
15 March 2017

Wrong sign, wrong place?

I would suggest that during an overflow, get the heck out of here. So parking – sharking…

(that is River Williamette and I was in Oregon City south of Clackamas. Not sure why I had to point out that “south of Clackamas” bit but I love saying “Clackamas” 🙂 )

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