Chiringa has been our “go to” place for a few years. It is not the food or the drinks (although they have their bright spots)… you come here for the people and how they treat you. Every single person here – (Charlotte, Susan,Emily, Emory, Kylie, Logan, Rebekah… ) will make you feel like family. But the best of them all is Lauren – the manager and uber-all here. The way she treats her employees and customers is a lesson many retailers can learn from. I know. I have watched her for the better part of four years now.

Today was a great example of that.

After a long day of hospice service, motorbike ride, boat ride, I finally settled down with Jay Jay in Chiringa for a drink and some food. (it is a six minute walk for me). Jay Jay met Jocelyn.

Jocelyn is the young daughter of the couple who cleans up the place. I have met them before. Jocelyn has quickly become a big fan of Jay Jay.

Speaking of Jocelyn, I saw Lauren sitting with her and doing something. I took
a picture. Apologize for the completely out of focus picture. Not sure what happened.

“What are you guys doing?” I enquired.

Turns out Lauren – (get this – the manager) – helps Jocelyn (the daughter of the cleaner) with her homework and actually gives her more homework!!

That is incredible!

Lauren is one of the most hard working person I know. She is on her laptop trying to keep the business going every time i see her. On top of that, she does this??

Can’t think of a better person. Can’t think of a better place.

“So, you are doing homework with her?”

“Oh yes! Jocelyn is very smart. I know her from her birth”.

You see that blurry guy in the blurry picture? That is Jocelyn’s dad. He came forward to show me the picture of Lauren holding Jocelyn when she was born,

I was stunned!!

How many retail business managers do you know who would visit the hospital to ring in the baby of the cleaner in the restaurant?

You know – I don’t care about the menu anymore. I just want to be here. And if this world has any sense of fairness, I want these kind of human beings to succeed in life.

Originally, I was scheduled to be home tomorrow morning. But my dinner meeting today was canceled. So, I switched to an evening flight back home. Like the meeting with Amy yesterday, this change too was blessed by fate with an undeniable upside.

The Skyclub was crowded. But I had a Zoom call to take. So, I settled in a nook away from the main area of the club and got on to the video call. Mid way thru the call, i heard my name being called out. Here too, my ear problem came in handy. Since the right ear is completely swollen (we still do not know why), I had my AirPods on only in my left ear. Which is why I could hear my name being called out.

I looked up and saw this lady smiling at me. Clearly she was on a call too on her phone but she was obviously addressing me. And in one of those rare occasions, my facial recognition algorithm failed me. Fortunately, she realized that and offered “Monica”. Aah! Ms. Moore!! Immediately, memories flashed back from that day – Gosh, some 10-12 years back? – when I was introduced to her on a stage under spotlights. We were panelists in a forum discussion together.

I asked my Zoom call folks to hold on and quickly chatted with her. Found out that she is on my flight too and that both our calls were ending at half past. And when the calls did end, I met up with her and caught up on the time since we had met.

“Do you remember where that panel discussion was?”, I asked.
“I do not”.
“Me neither”
“It was called Money 2020”
“Wow! You certainly have a better memory than i do’

After that panel discussion that day, I had befriended her on Facebook and Linkedin. Of course, the birthday calls started. But also I used to get updates on her from my close friend Sanjib (Monica was his customer and friend) and Sreerupa.

It was interesting to find out her background in Venezuela and her husband’s in UK. But the most touching event she narrated to me was how both she and her son were told on the same day early last year that they had cancer (of course, different cancers). The best part of it is that they are both in remission now.

I loved the way she put it – “Listen, Rajib, if I had been told that I will have cancer and that my child will have cancer too, the one thing I would have asked is that I go thru it together with him”.

Panelist, successful executive aside, a mother is always a mother. Supreme human being. And Monica is one of a kind!!

Something was up in Chicago this week. I had meetings in downtown on Tuesday and Wednesday morning and then meetings in office west of the airport thru Thursday night. Every hotel in downtown was $800+ per night. The hotel next to my office – which I normally pay between $120-$160 per night was listed for $1500 for Tuesday night! And there was not a single rental car available with any company in any location.

I had finally settled for a hotel near the airport for Tuesday night. It was double the normal rate but at least it was under $400. This also meant, I had to use the train to go from meeting to meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday.

But life, I guess, has a way of giving back. If not for all this inconveniences, I would not have met an old friend of mine.

I had finished my breakfast with Tyler in the city and had come back to the hotel to pack up and check out. I was going to an Urgent Care for an ear related issue that has gone out of control. I had hailed an Uber and then instead of standing outside, waited inside the doors. (Was trying not to expose the ears to the cold outside).

As I was peeking thru the doors to see if my ride had arrived, I noticed somebody walking down the corridor of the hotel. She looked at me and then looked away. I looked at her and wondered if it was who I thought it was. She looked at me a second time but still did not recognize me. She probably had realized that I had been looking at her all this time that she was walking by.

She looked at me the third time. This time, I took a chance. “Amy?” I asked. She must have recognized my voice or face by then. “Rajib Roy?”

Turns out Amy and I used to work together some 17 years back in a Boston based company. I had left that job by 2006. Amy had moved away to New York. Many moons later, in December 2013, I did meet her in New York and we put in a run together in Central Park.

She was in the hotel for an event for that day! What is the chance of that?

Unfortunately, my ride had arrived and I had to leave. But not before we promised to make time to meet in the evening. We both had meetings scheduled till late. I was done only around 8:15PM. But Amy was kind enough to come over to my hotel to meet me. Deval from my current company was also there and we had a great time together. Most of it was about the old times together but some of it was about what Sharmila refers to as “crop circles”.

I will let you ask her what they are all about!

I have worked in industries ranging from banks to supply chains to identity fraud solutions to geospatial. But the current one – education – is probably the most mission oriented. I can see every day how we make a difference to kids.

And that gives rise to some interesting intersection points on the road. Take today for example. I had flown into Chicago, taken the train to downtown and started individual meetings. Coffee with Demetre, drinks with Nurzhan and then dinner with Lela.

Lela was already at the dinner table when I showed up a bit late. For all that patience she had shown, the first thing I did was made her get up from the table and move to the bar area. For some reason, when it comes to drinks or dinner, I prefer the high chairs.

I am so glad I did it though. We had barely settled down when one of the restaurant employees – a young lady – came up to us excitedly and looking at Lela, exclaimed “Miss Day?” Lela immediately recognized her.

As a background, Lela was with TFA (Teach For America) before she joined us. TFA teachers tend to work with inner city schools frequently in the poorest and most violent parts of the city offering lessons to kids who often tend to be troubled . Lela worked in such a school in Chicago before joining us. She was very clear that she was not going to take me there after sunset – it gets so unsafe.

Well, as it turns out, the young lady – Keisha – went to the same school. In fact, her younger sister was in Lela’s class. They recognized each other immediately.

I was totally intrigued by their conversations. Keisha was talking about her troubled childhood.

“How old are you?”, I asked her
“23”
“Oh! I have a daughter one year elder to you. I heard your conversation. Were you really troubled?”
“Oh! yes. I used to throw books at my teachers!”
“How about now?”, I teased her
“Well, I have settled down now. It is a little late now but now I understand how teachers like Miss Day made all the difference to kids like me.”

Keisha told me part of her life story. Puerto Rican by descent, she grew up like many other inner city kids with access to very little. She had her first baby when she was 19 and second one when she was 21. But she has a steady income now from the restaurant and is rebuilding her life.

To my usual “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?”, she felt she needed a little more time to think that thru.

She thanked Lela again and left us to our dinner. I could not help wonder what kind of environment Lela and other TFA teachers have to teach in. And my respect for them redoubled for doing what they do. And making a real difference in the world. To the young kids that need it the most.

Nayan and Deepma were in town to drop Niharika at Emory. Sharmila and I had an outstanding evening with them. After seeing Niharika, I went back to the photo database to locate her in the archives.

The small kid in blue top? Yep, it is the same Niharika – this is back in 2004. (The other girl with her is our own Natasha !) We missed Avichal this time around!!

Sometime last year, my friend from engineering college days – G. Balakrishnan – who we simply referred to as “GB” (engineering students of four decades back were well ahead of their times in recognizing the uselessness of multiple syllables or even the need to spell out everything – which, I am glad to see, the current generation and social media is finally getting around to embracing 🙂 ) had sent a rather strange request from India.

His request was to give some time over the phone to a friend of his who lives in the Bay area. I assumed the gentleman – Shriram Narayanan being his name – would want to discuss career move related topics. The request was strange because what his friend wanted to discuss had nothing to with work at all. It was about my blog! Apparently, he had a lot of questions.

I finally got to call him up on Oct 27th. I was driving from one meeting to another and took the call from my car. A scheduled half an hour meeting went over an hour. I still remember discussing finiteness of time, how do we recognize in ourselves what we are good at and such absorbing topics. Regrettably, I had to end the call since I had to go to a meeting.

This trip to SFO, I actually caught up with him face to face. Over a cup of coffee, we continued with where we had left last October. The discussions were refreshing and invigorating. Truth be told, I have not come across too many people with whom I can have this kind of in depth discussions on very different topics. (Magesh Ranganathan pops up as an immediate exception to my mind)

“Learning” was a big topic of discussion this time around. Why we learn and how we learn. And why we stop learning. How we learn from experience but that in itself is a tricky process since that assumes accurate recollections from memory – which is an absolute myth. (this does not include certain other kind of learnings – like skill learning – biking, swimming – where the brain somehow involuntarily commits to some parts of memory that it has no problem recovering on demand even after five decades!)

Hope to have more sessions with Shriram in the future.

I thought I knew a thing or two about fountain pens and nibs and all that. But at the end of the evening, I realized how little I knew about what makes those pens and nibs come to life. All because I got to have dinner with a pen pal of mine from the other end of the world.

Let’s back up a little. About twenty years back, I had a colleague at work – Madhuri. She was fifteen years younger than me and we worked in two different ends of the world – Dallas and Bangalore – but of course, we knew each other since we were in the same team.

It was much later – and by that time, she had moved to Singapore with her husband Rupesh – that we realized we shared a common fascination for writing with fountain pens. It was a post on Facebook that she had put up that had triggered my attention.

And that started a long series of writing letters to each other – between Atlanta and Singapore. The topics invariably were about life, travel, parents in India, old friends and so on.

In one of those letters earlier this year, she let me know that they were moving from Singapore to San Francisco. Even after they moved, the letter writing continued. In fact, just last week, something happened when I was setting up my small workspace in the new house. I was carefully putting her last few letters in my letter organizer when Nikita happened to stroll by. I showed her some of the letters and she justifiably marveled at the beautiful handwriting.

Well, guess what? I met up with Madhuri and Rupesh for dinner this evening. The board meeting scheduled in San Francisco offered this opportunity.

I never quite told you what makes fountain pens come to life, did I? Well, that is where Madhuri’s expertise comes in. Paper and ink. I am always frustrated by the quality of paper in the USA. Got some great tips on how to choose paper and some good brands from Japan from her.

You all think I am nuts that I have over 100 fountain pens? Get this – she has 65 different colors of ink!! I have only 8) I learnt a lot about the chemistry and quality of inks from her. I even picked up some new terms like “sheening” and “pooling”. She had brought a few different varieties of paper to demonstrate her points to me.

Incredible evening for me!