Most of you are aware that one of my life’s missions is to keep in touch with people who have crossed my path long time back. I have been in many ways – perceptibly and imperceptibly, influenced by each one of them. Reconnecting with them – often after decades – is my way of thanking them for the opportunity I had to spend some time together in this short life. That, to me, is a reward in of itself.

Sometimes, though, there are awkward situations when a person cannot recognize me – in spite of giving vivid details. That is often frustrating and embarrassing. On the other hand, sometimes it is not only the case that I get the thrill of reconnecting with somebody from long past – but soon realize that I know somebody else that has crossed their path before and I put them together. That gives great satisfaction. One such incident happened this week. This email will always be there for me to read up every time I get frustrated following dead ends looking for my friends from the past…(names redacted to respect privacy; I will leave it up to them to identify themselves if they want to)

From: XXXX
To: YYYY; Rajib Roy <roy_rajib@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2013 7:59 PM
Subject: RE: Re-introductions

Hey YYYY
Great to hear from you … wow what a small world! Smaller when you note that most of my school friends now know Rajib 🙂
Yes we should catch up – send me your phone # and will chat over the weekend.

Rajib,
Thanks for all the connects bhai. Suddenly feel I am part a long lost group that I was just unaware of.
Hi to Sharmila and bachcha log, and do look ZZZZ up when you are in DC next.
Cheers,
XXXX

It would appear that some of my FB friends are actually paying attention to my posts. So, I am forced to put in the right picture thus time 🙂 As they say “Details… Details…. Details”

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Saw Vanita after a long long time. We were classmates in our MBA school. Last time I saw her was around 1992!!! So much has changed and yet so little has changed. She is still the truly genuine human being that I knew!!! It was absolutely great to hear her perspective on life. When asked what words of advise she had for me from the last twenty years, her thoughtful answers were “Academic success counts to nothing. We have to be successful as human beings” and “Family as a priority should trump all priorities”.
Those were indeed great thoughtful insights!!!

I certainly hope to run into her again very soon! Also found out that we have some common friends from Calcutta who now live in Atlanta!!

Saw Vanita after a long long time. We were classmates in our MBA school. Last time I saw her was around 1992!!! So much has changed and yet so little has changed. She is still the truly genuine human being that I knew!!! It was absolutely great to hear her perspective on life. When asked what words of advise she had for me from the last twenty years, her thoughtful answers were “Academic success counts to nothing. We have to be successful as human beings” and “Family as a priority should trump all priorities”.
Those were indeed great thoughtful insights!!!

I certainly hope to run into her again very soon! Also found out that we have some common friends from Calcutta who now live in Atlanta!!!

Most people will tell you that the biggest factor of people staying or not staying in their current job is their relationship with their immediate boss. I also believe that how one does in one’s career is often deeply influenced by the very first boss one has.

I certainly count myself as one of the luckiest guys who was blessed with a perfect first boss – Nitin Chandekar. He was my friend, he was my philosopher, he was my guide. He showered more credit to me and our team mates than was perhaps due and was always there for us when we got stuck.

Today, I was able to visit J.P.Morgan Chase in New York where he has become a big guy and spend an hour with him over coffee.

One by one, we caught up with over 30 ex team mates of ours, our families and then ourselves. I certainly hope to be as successful as him some day. We also found out that we have two kids each exactly of the same age!!!

I was thrilled to see that his gentlemanliness, grace, terrific sense of humor and errrr… mustache has remained intact!!!

One of our defining moments of relationship:
Q4 1991: About 70 of us were working on a project called CPC. We had one HP 9000 machine which I swear had less computing power than the ipad I am writing this on. We had 40 programmers hitting it with Informix 4GL code. It used to run at the speed of a turtle on Prozac.

Our days used to be a never ending cycle of write a few lines of code, submit it for compiling, go have a few rounds of coffee, come back and wait some more and then the machine would helpfully let us know that we have syntax errors! Two of those cycles in a day and it was time to go home.

The analytical (and easy-to-frustrate) guy that I was, I painstakingly gathered statistics and then drew on paper and pen a pie chart with three sectors named “editing” (this was a thin sliver), “waiting for machine time” (big part of the pie) and “computing time” (very thin). There was no PowerPoint those days. But to make my point, I colored the sectors with color pencils. I was careful enough to color the waiting time in red. Then I showed it to Nitin.

He immediately took me to his boss Raja and his boss Aruna. They had a high level management discussion that high level managers were prone to do while I sat there merely admiring my coloring capabilities.

That evening Aruna announced that we will be all working in 8 hour shifts with 2 hour overlaps!!!

You can only imagine how popular I became with my teammates overnight. NOT 😉