Great dinner and drinks with two old compatriots from the yesteryears of start up days – Ashok Vasan and Ari Sengupta! Hiten had chosen a great spot in the island of Sentosa!

We were busy in the private room in a restaurant in Durgapur – all the St. Xavier’s friends and their wives – when somebody came in to tell me that there was a visitor who wanted to see me. Somewhat curious, I stepped out to the most pleasant surprise of the day! Turned out it was Amit Konar!

Amit used to be in Food and Beverage in the Durgapur hotel I normally stay in. Over the years, we had become great friends. In fact, almost always, he used to take care of the reservations for me. There was a time when I had brought my parents back to visit Durgapur and stayed in the hotel for a couple of days. Amit had taken great care of them – especially their food. Even today, if I tell dad that I am going to stay in Peerless Inn, his first question would be “Sei chheleta aachhey?” (Is that guy still there?)

Eventually, Amit branched off on his own and I had not seen him since then. Somehow he got word that I was in town and in that particular restaurant that evening – so he came by to say Hi!

Of course, we said more than Hi! I was very encouraged to hear that his business is doing very well. He always struck me as a hard working and sincere person. Add to that his smartness, he is bound to do well. We talked about his young daughter and his future expansion plans.

It was good to catch up with this gentleman again!

Thank you Amit for taking the pains to come over to see me!

… has been ever accused of having passed up on a perfectly good excuse to have a party. And this time there were two – both Subrata and I happened to be in Durgapur on that day. Met up with quite a few old friends – Jyotiswar, Gautam, Santanu, Prodipto and Kunal!

When I vociferously protested about it becoming an Indian party (I always complain in any party where the women/wives sit on one side and men/husbands sit on the other about it becoming an Indian party), the womenfolk gently reminded me that I was in India and it WAS an Indian party! 🙂

We were regaled by Sharmistha and Gopa’s songs, some blended scotch and a lot of childish banter!!

Ah! The good times!!

Unlike the chance meeting with Tapas at that grocery store, meeting Indranil was a far more deliberate one. After leaving school, I was in touch with him only sporadically. Recently, he helped me put two long lost friends together – a friend of mine in Atlanta and somebody Indranil knew in the neighborhood where he used to live before.

One fine day a couple of months back, I was peppered by him with a lot of questions on Big Data. I had sent him one of my favorite books on this topic so he could read it up. I had also told him that one of these days, I will show up in his office in his college and we can talk about it…

In that sweltering heat of Durgapur, last Friday, I did show up in his office! But first, I was stopped by the security guy for trying to enter the building in shorts! Indranil had to come to my rescue!! We talked about a lot of things – and one of his twin sisters came by to say Hi too (she was very small when Indranil and I went to middle school together) – but we never talked about Big Data!

Perhaps that deserves a return trip!

The other day, while in Durgapur, I was leaving one of my relatives’ house and as I looked at the small street side shop about 30 yards away, I thought I recognized one of the customers buying some stuff there. On a hunch I walked up to him with that – by now common – refrain – “Chintey paarchhis?”

Amazingly, he had no doubt who I was. I guess he has seen me in Facebook.

Last time I had seen Tapas was when I had visited him in a new business he had started. That was at least two decades back. Later, I had heard that his dad was not doing well and had made an attempt to visit him unsuccessfully. We had gone to school together for a few years but finished up from different schools.

Fortunately, Tapas told me that his dad is doing better. I wish I had another 30 minutes in hand – so I could go and see him. It was a little odd time of the day and I had to hurry to get back to my parents in Kalyani!

Next time, for sure Tapas!

What a great case of being in the right time at the right place!!

The car finally left the asphalt and hit dirt road. We kept bouncing off the potholes and gave right of the road to the occasional goat, hen, duck, cow and even a pig at one time. Every half a kilometer we would ask somebody if they knew the house of a Uttam Dhara. He repairs motorcycles, we would add in case they struggled to place Uttam.

It was like playing pool. We would get bounced off the walls every half a kilometer till we stopped the car and walked down a very narrow lane and came to a house with a small kid standing in front.

“Uttam Dhara-r baari chinis?”
He quickly motioned to signal that we had reached the right house.
A lady came out from inside the house.
I could barely – just barely – recognize the face.

“Arati-di?”, I asked.
“Chintey paarchho?”, she asked if I recognized her.
I do not even remember what I gave for an answer as I was overcome with a surge of joy.

This had been a long wait. Even by my standards, this is was a tough search. The problem is I knew only her first name. I knew she was from some village near where my grandmother lived. And only God knew where she had moved after she got married. Trying to find such a person is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

Arati-di was a domestic help we had at our home in Durgapur in the mid seventies. Both my parents used to work leaving the three of us often unattended at home. My grandmother used to find poor people near her village and ask them if they would go to Durgapur to be a domestic help. This would give them food and shelter and also some money for their families.

First, we had Pratima-di. Then we had Maya-di and finally Arati-di. I have made very little progress on the first two. But I had a breakthru on Arati-di when I had gone to meet Jagannath-da (if you remember, he was the farmer who used to put me on his shoulder to pluck mangoes) a few months back. I had asked a few villagers then about all the three ladies.

One of those villagers had said that he had heard Arati-di’s son repairs motorcycles but he had no phone numbers or anything. That, surprisingly, was a strong clue. After coming back to US, I called up my uncle who still lives in the old village and asked for the local guy who fixes motorcycle. You can only imagine my uncle’s surprise at his nephew from US asking for the guy in the village who fixes motorcycles!!

The idea was to rely on the network of motorcycle repairmen. I was hoping that somehow they would know each other between villages to exchange spare parts and all that. Believe it or not, after bouncing around a few of those motorcycle repairmen with the same question “Do you know somebody in your trade whose mother’s name in Arati? His mother would be in mid fifties. So son should be around mid thirties” – as the network grew further and further out – one day, I hit pay dirt. Actually it was late night. The family was at a party and I was sitting by the pool late night making phone calls to the villages.

One guy said his name was Uttam. And his mother’s name was Arati.
I explained that I was calling from US.
“Keno? Ki chai?”, he was a little frightened and demanded to know what was going on. Perhaps he was being protective of his mom.
I explained the whole context that his mom helped me grow up when I was a kid.
He was incredulous.

“Apni ki Debipur-er?” (Are you from Debipur?)
I told him that I was from Durgapur but I was born in Debipur and that is where my grandmother lived and my father grew up.
“Teen bhai bon?” (You folks are three siblings?)
Yes, Yes! I had yelled.

He let me know that Arati-di had talked about us a couple of times when he himself was growing up. He told me to call back in the evening when he would be home back from his shop.

Which I did and then talked to Arati-di and noted down her village name.

And promised to see her again.

Which I did.

As I was saying, it brought unbelievable joy to see Arati-di again. I could barely recognize her face and she could not have picked me out in a crowd, of course. But I was carrying a few old pictures from those days which I showed her.

We talked for a long time. She kept telling stories from those days how she used to take us out for walks. I remembered that she used to help us with our meals when we came back from school. I even remember she had taught me all the words of “Ikiri mikiri…. “ (it is a silly game young kids play to a rhyme).

As she and I talked, numerous – very curious – villagers dropped by. There were kids a few years old to very elderly people who were no doubt amused by this clean shaven head – shorts wearing – shoes without socks – profusely sweating guy who had descended upon them.

I met Arati-di’s entire family. Her husband, his brother and their side family, Arati-di’s son and daughter and their families, Arati-di’s three grand kids. And the three cows, a bunch of ducks and the sole rooster that is part of the family!!

She lives in a hut just like the one I was born in. Walls made of dirt, thatched roof made of straw. No running water, but there was electricity.

Eventually, it was time to go back.
“Eto dur thekey aastey onek kosto hoy. Abar aastey boltey bhoy hoy. Kintu phone koro chheler phone-e”. She said she was scared of asking me to come again given all the hardships she thought I had to endure. But she would look forward to phone calls on her son’s phone, she added.

Bouncing back again on the dirt road, we eventually got back to asphalt and the car sped off.

I was completely lost in my thoughts of how people like Arati-di was part of me growing up. Me growing up to be eventually what I am today. Whatever it is that I am today. And how strange life is. Two human beings came under the same roof for a few years and then our paths diverged completely. The paths could not have been any more different if they wanted to.

Nearly four and a half decades later, somehow, we were again under the same roof. This time, her roof!!

Who would have guessed?

Well, I certainly felt good that I have not yet forgotten who all brought me to the dance to begin with.

For a person like me who has been researching about gin production and collecting gins from different countries and experimenting with cocktails with them, very few things can beat the prospect of finding a Gin-only-bar called “Tonic” in the hotel I was staying in!

Except, of course having a gin and tonic there with a classmate of mine that I have always admired (albeit from far) – Joydeep Sengupta! When I had called him up last time to wish him a happy birthday, I had also made a promise to see him if I ever were to land in Singapore. Unfortunately, when I told him that I would be in Singapore, I realized that he would be out of the country. Joy heads up Asia for the largest and most revered Firm in management consulting in the whole world. That is a game played at a very different league. I completely understood that travel had to be crazy at that level.

What I did not expect is a message from him on my last day in Singapore that he will be coming back to Hanoi in time enough to meet me for an hour before I headed out for the airport. I am so glad that he took the effort.

I saw Joy for the first time after 1991. There were so many things we caught up on. One hour was far too less for that. One of the topics we talked a lot about is the complexity of building “trusting” organizations. We were comparing notes of how very successful organizations like McKinsey runs with virtually very little financial goal setting and my experience at a Ritz where I learnt that every employee is given a thousand dollars to spend on guests in case they see a situation unfold that might lead to customer dissatisfaction… and we realized that “trust” is something that is very difficult to democratize and certainly very difficult to build culture around in an organization unless it is done from the very top and from the very beginning.

I had great interest in his second child who has special needs and I spent a lot of time understanding how, as parents, Joy and his wife had to learn a lot of new things in life. One of the most memorable moments was when he said – and I paraphrase him – “your expectations are lesser and therefore you enjoy the smaller things more”!! We talked endlessly about what we – the able-bodied ones – have done for the ones who need special help and how much is still left to do.

I promised to see his second son next time I was anywhere nearby.

I kept the promise I made to him on his birthday. I hope I can keep this one too!

Saw my MBA school friend after nearly a decade and a half. Jyotsna, T Srini, myself and our dear-departed Srimathi were very close during our MBA days.

Saw Srimathi last a few hours before we lost her to cancer almost two decades back.

Saw T after a long time just a month back.

And this meeting in Singapore completes the group!!!

Finally managed to beard the lion in his own den!! Flew from Kolkata to Singapore to spend a day with my erstwhile boss – Hiten Varia! Of all the managers I have had – and I certainly have been blessed with some of the best ones that I learnt a lot from (and still do), Hiten was the one I grew closest to personally. When we were both in Dallas, our kids and the wives – Shernaz and Sharmila became friends too. In fact, Hiten and I have taken our families for vacations together in some great parts of the world together.

And that is the upside when you are building a small startup. You spend so much time together, you go thru such tough times together that the lines of professional and personal relationships tend to blur. It takes a village to raise a startup and the successful startups build some great families.

The thing that made our relationship back in the ‘90s so special was that while we were very tied on core values – especially treating customers and employees, we would often be very very different in our approaches to business. There are some hilarious stories from the past with him on these things.

Sitting in the pub at the Singapore American Club, we went thru some of those moments and what we have learnt thru them. It was 1996. We were under tremendous pressure to deliver to our biggest customer. We just could not keep up with the speed of customers’ requirements and the speed of delivering solid quality, well architected code. Hiten sat me down and explained his belief on how we needed to rejig the org structure and create a new one to solve for some of this impedance mismatch. I fought tooth and nail for two weeks against that idea.

As a reward, I was asked to run the new org!

Till this date, reflecting back, almost everyone agrees that was a brilliant move. Yeah! I came around to seeing that too eventually. So much so, we used a variation of that structure in two of my next jobs!!

As I explained to Hiten last afternoon, thru those intense debates that we used to have at India Palace every late night after work, a few things have emerged in my mind that I have noted down as what I have learnt from him.

(*) The relentless focus on the customer – I truly have never seen anybody who has the customer so ingrained in his DNA. When you realize that you are a successful start up and that you are winning in the field, you can be amazed at how full of oneself one can get with one’s own ideas. While sales and development would start believing that we were better than customers and it was our job to lead the customer from darkness, this guy used to be one of the rare ones walking the corridors clarifying to us who is the cart and who is the horse. This is one learning that has deeply influenced me as a professional in future years.

(*) The ability to hold two opposing thoughts – I do not believe I am that good at it still. Faced with two opposing views, two opposing thoughts – the engineer in me will immediately try to apply logic (or perhaps rationalize) to decide what is “right”? But those days, I used to marvel – may be even get frustrated – that he would hear opposing points of views from me and my teammates or peers and after analyzing them deeply, would just leave it at that. He felt no pressure to align himself with any one view. It was like he would go “Those are pretty persuasive arguments. Each case makes a lot of sense. Good. What is the next topic?”. And I would be like “What? Can we decide first who is right? Actually, can we decide that I am right?” 🙂 You can guess what an idiot I was.

(*) Empathy – This is the single most trait of Hiten that everybody who knows him will say is his hallmark. And the one thing I will admit that I will never ever be able to copy. I have given up and concluded that I just am never going to be empathetic at this level. There are some very funny stories here too. He and I were in a meeting with a customer – ready to face the music – we were terribly behind in delivering. The customer – and this was a lady running procurement with a budget of multiple billion dollars in one of the largest multinationals in US – did not exactly beat around the bush. Hiten, then started talking. The more he talked, the more I was like “What are you doing? We need to give some logical arguments and build a case on our side”. Once he was done, I was pretty sure the customer was going to take us to the cleaners. I had not made head or tail out of what he said. And yet, the lady, looked at him and said “That is all I needed to hear from you Mr. Varia today. Please see to it that your team does its best to support my team”. And then she left after exchanging a few more pleasantries.

I was left stunned in the room, trying to make logical sense of what had just happened. Today, I realize that I was trying to use the wrong tool – logic from my cortical part of the brain – to understand empathy which comes from the limbic part of the brain.

I do remember on the flight back, sitting next to him, I tried multiple times asking “How do you do that?” and had stopped. I was starting to understand that these folks operate at a very different level.

Once in a while though, I can get them to my level – especially if I can grab them over a couple of martinis at a bar in Singapore!!