“You flunked in math?”, I asked her incredulously. In case you were wondering what is so incredulous about flunking in math, wait till you hear the end of the story.

“Yes. I am not very proud of it”, she said
“So, let me get this straight. You flunked in math and got kicked out of your college?”
“Yes. Again I am not very proud of it today”
“How much did you have to score?”
“20 out of 100 to stay in college”.
“And you did not score 20 marks out of 100?”
“No”

“Well, then how the heck did you get to where you have gotten to today?”

That question unveiled the incredible tapestry of life Urmi had woven for herself over the last three decades or so. She used to live in my neighborhood. She was my sister’s classmate till fifth grade, I think. I was not very close to her – but her elder brother – Rupak (Samudra) used to play with us. Therefore, I knew him better. The last time I saw her was probably 1983 when I left Durgapur. 35 years later, I found myself at a bar inside the PORT Authority Bus Station in Time Square area with that same girl. Duly equipped with a red wine for me and a spicy margarita for herself.

“Start from 1983. What happened?”, I asked

“I hated being told what to do. I rebelled against my parents, my teachers… everybody. I was a tomboy. I never studied. I did not do well in my exams. I was sent to a college (btw, my sister was in that college too) but I flunked out and went to another college”

“Did you have a purpose in life? Did what your parents/elders wanted you to do run counter to it? Is that why you rebelled?
“No. I do not think I was mature enough to have goals. I just did not want to be told what I should do. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. When I wanted to do. Where I wanted to do”.

“Well, then what happened?”

“Then I married the guy I wanted to. He came to US for higher studies. Eventually I joined him. And then…..”, her voice seemed to fade away as she was reliving her early days in a foreign country.

“And?”

“And,” she said getting her voice back, “something clicked in my mind. Suddenly, I felt I had all the independence in my life. To do whatever I wanted to do. In a foreign land where nobody knew me other than my husband. I felt a great sense of freedom.”

I waited as she again seemed to get lost in her thoughts. Finally she looked at me and haltingly, said “Then I got scared”

“You got scared of all the freedom?”

“No. Once I had all the freedom, I came to the next realization that I had not made much of myself in all my life. I was too busy NOT doing stuff to do any stuff”.

“So, what did you do?”

“I wanted to revisit that flunking out of college for not scoring 20 in math. My husband was a graduate student. We did not have much money. But we were able to scrounge up enough for me to get to school. I started studying math!”

“One second. We are still talking about math – the subject you flunked in?”

“Yes. I loved math always. I just did not like the teachers and the rigidity of the system”.

Well, turns out this rebel of a girl got a bachelors’ degree in math with flying colors.
Then she proceeded to get her masters degree.
Undaunted by her new born child and all the first time mothers’ duties, she kept pushing on her love for math ad then got a Ph.D!! While raising her young child!!!
Then she became a professor of math in a New York college – and eventually earned tenureship!

And that is what she does as a profession today!

Now you see why I was totally flummoxed when a tenured math professor in a college in New York told me that she had flunked out of college because of math!!!

What an inspiring story.

I see parents complaining about their wards during school years – more common in India than in US – that they are not getting focused and studying and all that. I have this belief that every kid eventually pivots. There comes a day in their life when they wake up and want to do something with their life. At that point they are wiling to put in all the hard work that comes with that territory.

That is the day they need all our help and support to push them thru that phase. Starting late does not make the journey easier but the self-drive makes success that much more achievable.

Going back to Urmi, there were some great subsequent discussions on happiness, mortality, supporting parents in India during their old ages and so on. Unfortunately for me, she needed to grab a bus back home and we had to end our meeting.

As an aside, later that evening, I was telling Sharmila about the meeting and she had an intriguing question – “So, what does she do when her children or students won’t listen to her and do their studies?” 🙂

I need to remember to ask her that when I see her next!!!

It was great seeing you Urmi after so many years!!!

Because every time they get together, the “PJs” (“Poor Jokes” – what would be called Groaners in USA) start flowing.

“Do you remember what is a complex PJ?”
“No”
“P+iJ”

Ha ha ha. (This is a math joke, by the way).

Completely meaningless mirth, I admit. But that was what engineering life for me was with guys like these in the picture. Great fun without necessarily any purpose to it.

Thanks to Krishna, who along with his beautiful wife Lalita graciously hosted me at their house for dinner a couple of days back, I was able to get together with three of my hostel (dorm) mates from 1985-1989.

T Srinivas – we called him “T” – is the big time economist today. After engineering, we did MBA together. I used to visit his house in Kolkata those days and remember the culture of intense bridge playing in his house. His parents as well as he had represented India in bridge at various times.

Krishna – we called him Kittu – is the successful investor among us. One of my lasting memories is going to his house in Chennai to meet his parents. I distinctly remember his mother and his brother. Unfortunately, I also found out that I am not going to be able to see his mom any more.

Finally, Abir – we just called him Abir 🙂 – also did Computer Science with me and I remember his impeccable hand writing from those days. And that he was always fanatic about being neat and clean all the time (which for us college kids was a rarity).

Our discussions were decidedly esoteric – when not exchanging “pjs”, that is. Got to hear some great perspectives from the three of them on concepts like “biases”, “irrational behavior” and why we do not follow our own forecasts and predictions. That was a fascinating hour for me over dinner hearing three really really smart guys talk about topics that fascinate me (although I cannot claim to have the level of their IQs to fully understand what they were saying).

We certainly landed up overstaying our welcome and kept the host and hostess up past midnight. That said, it was way too much fun. And I will shamelessly do it again, given a chance. It was that good!!!

It was almost three decades that I had been fruitlessly trying to track this guy down. We went to school together from fifth to tenth grade. Then during our engineering days, I had visited him and his roommate Pratik once. Way later, when I was working in Bombay, he had come and stayed with me for a couple of days. And then for 26 years, it has been radio silence. I had come close to tracking him down many times and shot emails or left voicemails at what I was given to understand might be his email and phone number. No responses, whatsoever!!!

About five months back, Mrs. Godura gave me a tip that Amit was going to be at her daughter’s place and gave me her daughter’s contacts. And that was how the elusive person was finally nailed. I remember having a very long conversation that day catching with him as he drove down the highway to his home city. Amit readily admitted that he had become a recluse and was trying to get out of that.

This morning, I was able to see him finally! After so many years! Actually after too many years! What was to be an hour or hour and a half meeting was going strong even after three and a half hours. We could have easily gone for another three and half an hours if I did not have to go and meet my daughters!

Sitting at that coffee shop, we went thru an endless cycle of :

Step 1: Amit: “Do you remember so-and-so?”. It would be a friend from our class or a teacher.
Step 2: Rajib… rambling on some updates of the person and appearing distracted doing something on this phone. Finally he hands the phone to Amit saying “Here is a picture. I visited him/her a couple of years back”
Step 3: Amit, completely silent, zooms the picture and recognizing another friend or teacher after so many years is totally overcome by emotion. The emotion of remembering some of the moments of the past was easily discernible in his voice and eyes.

And we we would repeat the above steps over and over again…

It was hilarious for me to hear how Amit remembered some of his early childhood days. Especially how he would skip a bus stop so that he had a chance of seeing the girls (we were in a all boys school and there was a parallel all girls school) from Carmel school who would be walking home. But what he feared most was if any would try talking to him. Apparently, he was totally scared of talking to any of girls!!!

Thank you Amit for making time on a Saturday morning – driving up to the city to see me and spend so much of your time with me. It was a marvelous throwback to the years where we would sit in benches next to each other in our grey shorts and white shirts with that “Like Gold in a Furnace” emblem emblazoned across our pockets… 1977, as i recollect, we did it for the first time… we were clueless then… and if today’s discussion on pursuit of happiness four decades later is any indicator… we were clueless now too.

But blissful, all the same.

And that counts.

One of the very few guys that I can claim to have had as a classmate during my engineering days as well as in my MBA days is this gentleman – Devinder Kumar! In fact, we were in the same branch (Computer Science) and same hostel during our engineering days.

Two things I always remember Devinder by – the quietness in his demeanor and that constant smile. Met him today after 27 long years! He was busy with his work day – but was able to come out for half an hour to have a coffee with me.

Caught up with his life after we parted ways in 1991. The crazy part is that he has just not changed in his looks – in spite of all these years!!! Even crazier is that his son studies in Georgia Tech in Atlanta where I live and I had no idea!!!

That was four of my colleagues from mid ’90s under one roof! Just like in the ’90s, I did my level best to bring down the average IQ at that table. What if you had overheard what we were discussing? In the ’90s, that table would have been passionately arguing about constrained anchored optimization and supply chain and all that. In the ’00s, we would be probably talking about our new jobs (most of us went our own ways).

Last night, in an indication of how old we have gotten, the topic de jure was meditation versus mindfulness. Don’t ask me how we got into that. But one thing has remained the same over the years. The passion in our articulation!! Although, I think we have become more thoughtful listeners now.

The best quote of the evening came from Magesh: “You can text the text. Now can you talk the talk?”

Thank you Anand, Madhav, Karthik and Magesh for a great throwback to the yesteryears!! I could not have grown up to be whatever it is that I am today without being surrounded by smart folks like you!

Growing up, one of the things I have been blessed with is some brilliant people I could call classmates. If I add up all the incredibly successful people that I can actually count as being my classmate during the various stages of my life, it will make anybody wonder how come not much of it ever rubbed off on me.

Rahul Guha – met him for the first time on Sunday, July the 10th 1983 around 4 PM when his parents had come by to drop him to start his 11th grade. It was a residential school and he and I (along with another incredibly successful classmate – Pratik Pal) were destined to be room mates.

Over the years, I have sometimes lost touch and then regained the same with this guy. Last week, he was in Atlanta and could squeeze enough time from his busy schedule to have dinner with me. While we talked about a lot of things – including my trips to his house in Kolkata during the early ’80s and a trip we had made together to Dip’s house in New Chumta Tea Estate – most of our discussions were around education. After all, it was education that has brought us together.

Driving back home later, I realized why guys like Rahul get to where they are today. It is not just the intelligence level – which is of course sky high – and it is also not the hard work – that is beyond reproach. The edge people like him have is their ability to reflect. That ability helps them achieve higher learning cycles than most mere mortals like us can.

Some of the reflections he shared with me absolutely hit the mark for me. We were talking about college education. His first point was how in India in those days, we entered college believing the toughest part was over. We had passed Joint Entrance Exam and then we were in college. If we went thru the motions, in about four years, we would get a degree and a job unless we really really messed it up. And yet, that is the time when our brain was the sharpest. From around that time, the brain would go on a steady decline. That was the time to learn completely new things. Things we might never ever use in our lives. But that was the one time our brains could absorb a lot of stuff. And for all you know, we might have discovered who we really were.

This somewhat aligned with my discussions with Madhav a couple of weeks back in Virginia Tech. He was talking about how it was “cool” in engineering colleges in our times to not study and ace the exams. Madhav reminded me how I was one of the so-called “intelligent” ones who never studied and yet aced the exams. But looking back, that was the stupidest thing. I should have been pushing my brain to learn new stuff then instead of not learning and simply letting a letter grade that suggested it was “okay” in life not to learn.

The second thing Rahul got me thinking on was the lack of training we got in how to ask questions. Instead, we were always expected to accept the prevailing norms and ways of doing things. And yet, college was the time we should have been pushed to keep asking questions – even if there were no answers. As he pointed out, sooner or later you will realize that the first step to getting a Nobel Prize is asking questions. Fearlessly. Regardless of whether there is any answer.

Finally, he felt that we should be taught how to communicate with people that we do not agree with. It is a skill that is getting rarer and rarer (we certainly both felt that the echo chambers created by social media has contributed to this problem) and yet no meaningful success can be ever reached without truly understanding the opposite point of view. Groupthink is a dangerous thing, as he pointed out.

Not all of our discussions were this serious. We slipped in and out of some hilarious incidents from school. Somehow, we both got onto the topic of statistics. Rahul and I studied statistics whereas our other room mate Pratik had studied biology. I was explaining the fundamental challenge I have with the concept of probability. The definition is based on a circular premise. Which, rigorous mathematics be spoken, should render it null and void. Rahul went on to explain that anomaly in Bayesian terms and made a hilarious statement. It was hilarious not just because it was true – but also the way he put it. I had to excuse myself and fish out my phone to write it down lest I forgot it later… in his words… “Probability, at some level, is a philosophical question”! Amen to that!!

My own greatest contribution to Rahul was waking him up every morning during our 11th and 12th grades. I was the sleep-very-little guy and he trusted me that I was the only one who could wake him up. It might have something to do with how I used to twist his legs and turn him over to wake him up.

A few minutes of early morning yelling and cursing later, he would calm down and thank me profusely for waking him up.

Oh! What would I not give up to get another one of those days again!!!

Many an engineering college day for me started with a “Babumoshai!” shout from this gentleman. That or “Oy! Bangali Babu!!”. Invariably, the previous night I would have scribbled “Wake me up at 7 AM” or something like that (yes, those days we used to punch on computer cards!) and stuck it on my door. The ever vigilant Madhav would see that card and come around to my room from the other side of the hostel to wake me up.

In those four years, I had become very close to Madhav and another common friend called Rangarajan. Since Madhav and I were both in Computer Science, we became even closer as we took similar courses and used to exchange notes. In a melee of college kids’ unbridled enthusiasm (and some of that admittedly misdirected), Madhav was the voice of sanity and reason. I remember him distinctly for his integrity and his incredible patience!

Both of which made him a very popular person in the hostel. Many an evening, I would swing by his room to realize that he was sitting at his desk by the window with that table lamp he had on – trying to study. “Trying” is the operative word here because invariably there were three or four more random guys in his room sitting in his cot and yelling away to glory!!! Rarely did I ever see Madhav kick them away!

Madhav (and Rangarajan) had visited me in Durgapur – way back in December 1986. My folks back home became great fans of both of them. In fact, my mom and sister even to this day will ask about “Rongorajon” and “Madhob” and their whereabouts. (that is how Bengalis would pronounce their names 🙂 ).

Somewhere in our third year or so, our interests in computer science started diverging. Madhav veered towards research and he was very talented at those things (you know those books with a lot of Greek letters in them). He had the rare distinction in those days of having published a couple of papers while still doing his undergraduate degree. Thanks to a summer job I had done a few years back, I grew more attracted towards actual application of computer science in the business / corporate world. Madhav came to the US and continued in his path of research. I stayed back in India and joined a company to write applications for financial institutions.

As luck would have it, eventually, the same company moved me to US. The next time I saw Madhav was in Dallas when he had come over to our place in the context of some professional pursuit. My wife Sharmila’s everlasting memory of Madhav was how thrilled he was with all the features and gizmos of a new mini van he had. (I think it was a rental but I am not sure).

Over the last two decades, he went on to become a very successful professor in the field of Computer Science and eventually became (and still is) the Director of a prestigious Lab in Virginia Tech. And I went on to become, well, regrettably, me !!!

Taking advantage of the time off, I drove thru a few states and up to Blacksburg last week to spend some quality time with this great buddy of mine from over three decades back. We had four hours just to ourselves before his beautiful wife Achla and then his daughter Malvika joined us along with some other VT folks.

You can see us in the top picture what we did in those four hours. Some intense reflections. I was mesmerized to hear Madhav’s take on what he learnt and did not learn from the IIT system (our engineering college) in India and how that contrasts with the American system – especially in the area of research. There were some intense discussions on what happiness meant. Now that we are old enough not to get swayed by the stuff we were force fed – “get big jobs”, “earn more money” etc etc, we parsed what eventually made us (and our classmates) happy and how that vastly varied from what we were pushed to do in earlier stages of life.

I was struck by Madhav’s capability to introspect and independently come to conclusions. Maybe that is what do research makes you good at?

I am just glad that I can still count a guy like him as my friend!!! See! it does not take me much to be happy 🙂

Last week I was in Virginia Tech to meet an old classmate of mine – Madhav. More on him later. The second highlight of that trip was meeting these three guys you see in the picture. I had never met them before but we had one common thread – we all went to the same high school (Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission). All in very different years but the same school, nonetheless.

Rounak, the youngest of the four of us, is yet to reach the half way mark to my age!! He was not even born when I left India for US!! Arindam – the one who insists that not shaving is lower maintenance than shaving everything off like me – is the avid runner in the group. Srijan – the professor – is an outstanding person. His ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time and argue both sides of the case is something I have to learn some day.

Like I said, other than the fact at very different points of time, each one of us studied within the same four walls of a particular classroom, we had little in common, at the surface. But somehow, we managed to find ourselves in the same latitude and longitude at the exact same time last week – thanks to some help from Madhav.

The discussions that I had with these youngsters were of varied themes. And I realized how rich the diversity in their thoughts were on a wide range of topics – from social media to statistics to politics. One thing for sure – their thought processes are far more evolved, their perspectives in life far more mature than mine were at that age.

That is why, while many are given to believe that things are getting worse by the day, I continue to conclude that the world is actually getting better and better with every generation. And so much so, the better for it!!

My final stop in Knoxville was to visit the Bhaduris at their house. Lots of memories from the past when the three families – theirs, ours and the Mukherjees used to get together and the kids were young. Now, two of those are in college already and one more threatening to do so in a few months!!

Too many hilarious moments from the past to out together in one post. It was great to see that Budhendra’s legendary sense of humor is still intact! I am sure Anusuya and Amitesh will remember the “chhipi” moment!! We also reminisced how the three wives – Arpita, Sharmila and Anusuya had settled on a 5K race training plan way back in Dec 2010. Out of curiosity, I had checked their chosen training regime to find that the very first day said “Take Rest” 🙂 :- ) I kid you not!!

Budhendra is absolutely the kids’ favorite uncle. Both of mine had learnt fishing and boogie boarding from him and they are hooked on to it now!!

It was great to see Budhendra, Arpita and the twin brothers!!

For the ones who are surprised to see us drinking coffee – that surprise is understandable. Actually, last evening we chatted so much over quite a bit of wine that I forgot to take the picture. I had to make amends this morning!!