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!!
I met Christina for the first time with the CEO of her company in a meeting room in Atlanta way back when her company and my business unit was building a joint solution for the market. We became friends from there on. Eventually I left the company but I had kept up with her – especially in that one trusted way of mine – calling on birthdays!
Couple of weeks back, I finally got a chance to meet her again at a bar in New York. I am glad I did. I learnt so much about her, her husband and her family.
“So, if I recollect correctly, you quit your job, right?”, I asked
“Yes. For some time.” she said
“Where did you join?”
“Well, I work in the same company. As a consultant now.”
“You were not interested in working anywhere else?”
“No, I needed the flexibility of working hours”
“Got it. You said you had taken some time off from work, right?”
“Indeed”
“How did you use your time off?” (I was so ready to talk to her about how excited I am with motorcycles, mixology, hospice etc… but I wanted to hear her story first).
“I took the time off to raise my family”
“Oh! Congratulations! How many kids?”
“Three”
Frankly, I was like – “Wow! that was quick”. But what I asked was “How old are they?”
“My eldest son is sixteen years…” she went on.
But I had stopped listening to her. My cortical part of the brain had completely taken over. 16? But I had met her around 2010. How could she have taken time off after I left the company – which was itself 3 years after I met had her for the first time and have kids 16 year old. My mind was swirling in all sort of confusion.
As she kept talking, I could hear a few words through that cloud of confusion that started stabbing me back into consciousness….
“Wait! Wait! Roll that back for me. Did you say you adopted from Ethiopia?”
Second time around, I got the story straight. She and her husband had determined not to have their own kid – and instead change the lives of a few. They adopted a son from Ethiopia. Then found out that the child had a sibling (also given up at an orphanage). They adopted him too. Not content with the good that they had already done, they went back and adopted yet another – this time a girl from Ethiopia.
Again, life stories like this overwhelm me. This level of magnanimity and grace boggles my mind. I have mentioned this before about my time spent with an organization in Dallas where we rescued battered women and kids from physically abusive houses. I saw up close and personal how there are more kids than caring parents in this world.
People who can subtract one from that problem are just incredible human beings. I have no words for people who go back and do that multiple times.
I remembered my other friends from Wisconsin – Bob and Audrey (http://www.rajibroy.com/?p=7681) – who have adopted multiple times from Ethiopia and China and told their story to Christina.
This week, I ran into Girish in Cancun (http://www.rajibroy.com/?p=16292) – and found out that he and his wife have adopted two kids from Guatemala.
Amidst all this, the one thing I feel great about myself is that somehow I have been lucky in life enough to call people like these as my friends. For, these guys play the game of life at a very different level than I am able to comprehend.
It was magical to see you again, Christina! And may your tribe increase!
Circa 1986. Early evening. A few of us were in the hostel (dorm) grounds. Some of us were playing volleyball on one side of the ground. A few more were waiting for their turn and then some more – both on the ground and from the corridors of the three story building were lazily watching us play.
At some point, the game had reached a feverish pitch with the ball having switched sides multiple times without hitting the ground. In one of those heated moments when excitement had reached a peak, the ball came to Girish. He was a first year student – one year junior to me then.
At that moment, he shuffled his feet with eyes firmly on the ball and got himself in the trajectory of the ball with the arms locked to return the ball. As the rest of us fixated our sights on Girish, he calmly got ready for the ball and at the very last moment he called out “Out ball” and stepped away from his position without touching the ball. His eyes though followed the ball all the way to the ground and he was absolutely right on his call. The ball did fall about half a foot outside the chalk line.
As Girish triumphantly looked back, he was hit with a scenario he could not have been prepared for – even if he had tried to. Everybody – the players, the spectators and the folks on the corridors of the different floors were all rolling on the floor. It was like a wave of boisterous laughter had suddenly hit the hostel. You could see a few more of the students coming out of their rooms and peeking curiously – trying to figure out what the whole commotion was all about.
Of all the people who did not know what the commotion was all about, Girish was one! He kept alternating between looking at the spot where the ball fell (which was clearly out) and looking at the others on the ground laughing – his finger on his chin with that quizzical look all this time.
Till one of the players sobered up, got up, dusted his pants off all the dirt and went up to Girish – “Idiot, that was a pass from your own team mate!! What the heck are you calling Out ball for?”. I am sure that was an young engineer’s first lesson in the difference between being right and being successful.
Girish was a few doors away from me. There are way too many funny stories about him and wing cricket and table tennis to narrate in one day. Or even a month.
I last saw him in 1989 when I left my college.
29 years later, a little birdie told me (no, I do not follow Donald Trump’s tweets) that he would be in Cancun when I would be there too! This morning, after having a coffee with Sharmila by the beach, I put on my running shoes and went running for about 5 miles (8Kish) to his hotel to meet him.
Girish has not changed at all. Looks the same. Very funny still. Got that somewhat-lost-professor look around him. But razor sharp in his intellect. And his sense of humor!!
I also learnt about how he and Sandhya are proud parents of two siblings they have adopted from Guatemala.
Running another near 5 miles back to my hotel, I could only think of one sentiment towards this gentleman… “You are a good man, Muckai Girish, you are a good man. They don’t make them like you no more!!”
“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!!!
