The last time I saw Sunita – my MBA classmate – was in March, 1991. I think she was running for an interview, all smartly and formally dressed up – during those last days of our MBA school when all the students were singlemindedly determined to ace their on-campus interviews.

I did not go back for the convocation or for the two get togethers that had been arranged by our group. That Sunita lived in San Francisco is something I had found out only a few years back. Even that, it was her husband – Ganapati – who was my senior from Engineering school that I had traced. And then remembered that he got married to Sunita.

I had about an hour between the customer meeting ending in San Fran and meeting one of our sales person that evening. That was enough for me to walk up to Wells Fargo building and call Sunita down to go for a cup of tea!!

She has remained pretty much the same way as I remember from 26 years back. Of course, now that she has a great job, she does not dress that formally any more 🙂

It was good to see an old classmate and catch up on her life journey!!!

It was towards the end of the last century. I was in a startup company that, in spite of me, was doing extremely well. Commensurate with a small company experiencing astronomical growth, we never had enough people and work days used to be excessively long. I distinctly remember wrapping up work around 1:30 am and be home around 2 am almost every single day. If not anything, I used to hang around till every developer left. Not that I was too much of a help in writing code – which explains how I became a development manager – but at least I was there for some moral support.

I also remember that one of my practices before heading to the parking lot was to check into all the rooms in the two floor building to see if anybody from any of the other teams were still working. Invariably – and I mean without any exception – there would be one guy sitting at this desk pounding away at the keyboard. He was always in his soccer clothes – including the cleats. And always had a soccer ball next to him. He was the development manager of another team and he liked his work as much as he liked soccer and would always put in a soccer game in the evening before coming back to office. And he played at a very highly competitive level.

During my business trip last week, one evening, when I finally caught up with that gentleman – Glen Jones, I was a little surprised to see him very visibly limping. Not knowing what had happened to him during the years that I had not seen him, I was, of course, a little worried. Sure enough, there was no need to be. He still plays soccer very regularly and had a temporary hip muscle pull from previous day’s game.

Over dinner, it was very fulfilling to catch up with Glen and his life journey. In fact, we remembered the day when Mark Whipple, Sharmila, he and myself had met one late night at a bar up there in the mountains outside Denver. (I was vacationing with my family much further out – but Sharmila and I had driven down to meet Glen and Mark – both of them used to live in the Evergreen area).

Glen had a very funny story for me. In those start up days, we used to have a very strict discipline around coding. If you ever broke the build (by checking in incompatible code before doing a system wide test locally) during the automated run any night, there would be a hangman noose in front of your door to shame you. Those days, we never thought anything more of it.

Later in life, Glen worked for a very large company. And let’s just say the developers were not exactly as disciplined. And Glen brought in the practice of hanging the hangman noose. Let me remind you – this was a very large company.

Soon, corporate HR was at his door giving him some stern lectures on sensitivities and all that. He told me about how he remembered distinctly about being pulled up by the HR lady.

“What did you do?”, I asked.
“What could I do? I just kept quiet”.
“Later in life did you folks in your team ever have a laugh over it?”
“No, but I got even with the corporate HR lady”.
“You got even with the HR lady? HOW????”

I almost snorted out my bourbon when he nonchalantly said “Oh! I married her”!!

It was a memorable evening!!

Back in my ninth grade, our class had five rows and four columns of desks. Each desk accommodated two students. I still distinctly remember where I sat. And more importantly, the guy who sat exactly three seats behind me. A fair guy – Uday Mukherjee being his name – he was very good in certain sports like ping pong (that was a big thing for us in school) and was very meritorious too.

But here is the thing. Somehow, he evaded my search for all our classmates for years. Very few people could give me pointers about his whereabouts. All we knew was that he had become a doctor. Many even suggested that he was in the US. That was the last thing possible. Usually, it is not difficult to find somebody in the US if you tried hard. And I would like to believe that I tried hard.

And yet, after 11 years of searching for him, I found out that he has been living in California all this time! The biggest irony is that in a previous job, I used to drive by his house all the time for our office visits!!

After having seen him last in March, 1983 – 34 years later, almost to the day, late at night last Wednesday, I showed up in front of his door!!!

That was a memorable meeting!! I thought I hit it off very well with his twins. Although, I have a nagging feeling that they are going to remember me as “that weird uncle” 🙂 Listening to Uday and I talking, you would not have believed how many years had gone by before we got to meet again. The big regret though is that I learnt I will not be able to see either of this parents any more. That is such a shame. Such nice people they were!

All in all, it was fantastic catching up with the 98th member of our 103-strong class. Three are no more. I still have to find out 2 more!! Maybe Uday can help me. He already got me connected to a friend from my twelfth grade!!

The good news was that she is a very early riser. And I was three hours behind Atlanta – so, I was going to be up at a God forsaken hour anyways. But that allowed me to catch up with Liz very early in the morning before our work day started.

Originally, I got to know Liz as a customer of ours. We had common interests in running, studying how the human mind works and all that. So, we kept up with each other even after we both left our respective jobs. Funny part is that the last time I met her was also in the very early hours of a winter morning – it was in Dallas though. I was there for some work. We both ran in a park in pretty dark conditions and then caught up over coffee. Both of us were experimenting with the Vibram (no support) shoes that time.

While it was a little over an hour that we got a chance to meet, I got a lot of life lessons from her. The biggest gain was to get some pointers about advanced mindfulness and yoga – specifically the connection of somatic fascia and yoga. I am still a neophyte in these areas – and she conducts camps in Italy every year. So, it was a little bit of drinking-out-of-the-fire-hose situation for me. But I did get some good recommendations on literature and I now need to read them up.

There were some candid discussions around Facebook itself – especially the role social media has started playing in to the concept of “ego”. She is certainly far more disciplined than me in terms of how she spends her time – and a lot more intentional in how she prioritizes her life. But the remarkable part is how she has kept herself well balanced. She avoids the extremes – none of the “no more of this”, “no more of that” and all that. She just moderates everything.

Which is a good thing. Because when the lady at the breakfast place came to take her orders, Liz started ordering all the healthy stuff.

“Oh! Come on! We are meeting after such a long time. You can let your hair down today”, I said as I proceeded to order my eggs, bread and hash browns!!

After a few seconds, she relented. “Ok, then”, she said and then looking at the waitress, she added “I will have mine with grits”.

Two decades of being in San Francisco but the Louisiana girl in her still comes out once in a while!!

Dropping by San Francisco for a few hours of customer meetings tends to be tricky for me when it comes to my personal time. First, I have way too many old colleagues, teammates and college friends in the Bay Area. I am always worried of upsetting somebody as I try to go thru my list of folks to meet with when I get time. Second, I am usually three hours ahead due to the time difference. When office meetings end, it is almost 9PM for me by Atlanta time and if there is a business dinner involved, I am pretty much toast by 8PM San Francisco time – which is 11 PM for me.

My flight was going to land at around 7:30PM. Strictly speaking, that was 30 minutes past my bed time. And this was after being cooped up in a plane for six hours going from Washington DC to San Fran. Ninety nine percent of me wanted to get to the hotel quickly and sleep. One percent, though, reminded me how I had promised Rajat-da that I will come and meet him sometime for sure.

Not quite sure if he would be free, I contacted him from the plane and asked how far his home was from the airport. His immediate answer was not to worry about such things and he would drive down to meet me. And that is how Rajat-da and I got together in a bar in Mountain View to catch up on our lost time over a drink and a quick dinner. The last time I had seen him was in 1987 – so there was three decades to catch up on.

We recollected our old times on the soccer field. Rajat-da was one of our ace players in the team. I was not so. I was the goal keeper of the team and my skills in goal keeping would make a neophyte to the game conclude that the goal keeper’s job was to escort the ball all the way into the net 🙂 But I did make it to the team and in fact Rajat-da and I had gone for a few out-of-college tournaments together too. In fact, we recollected how he had scored the solitary goal that put us past our arch rival in an Inter-IIT meet in Kharagpur on our captain Hasan’s birthday! If I remember correctly, I think Rajat-da also represented our college in table tennis (ping pong).

But that is not how I had met Raja-da to begin with. My first meeting with him was in his hostel room where I had gone to introduce myself – he was my assigned Student Counsellor. I remember he gathering the other three students he was assigned the Counsellor role of and took all of us to Taramani village outside the college campus wall (or as we called it then – Tarams for some “cutting chai” )

Spent quite some time getting to know Rajat-da’s family in India and US and his journey in his professional life. Living where he lives, no surprises that he has spent a lot of time with start ups. The differences in perspectives were great learning points for me on the work front.

And on the personal front, deciding to stay up and meet him – was the best call ever!!

Thanks to Joe (and I am going to tag his wife Pam on this since I know he stalks her FB account and reads my posts there 🙂 ), I was able to meet the very bright and young CTO of Amtrak – Sovan last evening. On the business front, we work with railway companies and I wanted to see how we might be able to help. But let’s not get into business here.

I got to know of Sovan’s journey from India straight to Minnesota and then how he settled here and recently has moved to DC area with his two very young kids. It was great to get the perspective of a CTO’s vision of challenges for a unique company like Amtrak. Since I knew Joe before Sovan knew him, I could highlight some of my past memories with Joe to him.

Joe and I worked in a previous job and he actually led all the Government sales in our business that time. We have both moved on ever since. But not before we spent a lot of time together on the road. And therefore, I got to know the personal life and the very funny side of Joe. And I made him repeat some of those stories last evening.

The most inspiring one I remember was his upbringing. His dad was – what he refers to as a “blue collar” worker living right outside Baltimore city. (Joe still lives there). But the story was how one of his elder brothers got into Duke and the first time he came home, talked about how Duke would take care of all expenses for financially disadvantaged families for the good students. From that day on, the fourth grader in Joe (I think he was in fourth grade) was maniacally focused on getting into Duke. As he told us, everything he did from that day on was totally about getting into Duke with full ride.

And he did get into Duke.
“How much was the cost those days?”, I asked
“All in, $20,000 per year”.
“And how much was your dad earning?”
“He retired with peak W-2 earnings of $19,500”.

WOW!!

He even talked about how they could not afford long distance phone calls those days and in his entire four year stay in Duke, he got exactly one call from his parents!!!

Little surprise then that Joe has been so successful in life. Under the gentle, funny self of Joe, there is some sheer Grit !! Speaking of which, we talked a lot on the topic of Grit.

I also told Sovan the story of Joe marrying somebody off. I think it was in the last year that we worked together. Joe went to online courses and became an ordained pastor. Yes! Apparently, you can do that. Of course, that Joe would be an ordained pastor – that too thanks to the internet was very funny to me. But I did ask him – “Okay. You are a pastor. But to marry somebody off, you need stuff – you know certificates, seals and so on”.

“Oh! They send you a starter kit”, he had said.

“Starter kit????” I remember taking a few minutes getting myself off the floor. I guess they sent two certificates and all that to give a kickstart to his new career. Seriously though, he has married off four couples. I believe he is headed to Europe to marry off the next one.

Another marvelous thing about Joe is his ten year volunteering in prisons to wean people off recidivism and violence thru faith based teachings.

Again, these kind of meetings always seem short. But there was somebody else from my office waiting for me at the bar in the same restaurant to work on some financial matters.

So, I had to say bye. But I can’t wait to get back with Joe and Sovan again!!!

Nikita was in Savannah for some school program and she was not going to be back till the next day. After finishing up my work around 8PM, Sharmila wanted to know what we wanted to do. Of course, the road warrior that I am, I always vote for staying home. And since she is stuck with the daughter’s stuff during the weekdays, she always votes to go out. And like in every tried and tested marriage, during a one-one vote gridlock, the wife wins. I think there is some kind of electoral college system that defines a marriage.

Sooner or later, we found ourselves at a bar that Arup and Sanjib had introduced me to a few weeks back. This was my second time there. I had settled down but for a few seconds – when a familiar voice behind the bar piped up – “Uh! Oh! There is trouble again!!” It was good old Kay!! She was our bartender the previous time. And her comments were squarely directed towards me.

Sharmila had that “What did you do now?” look at me and I let Kay explain as we placed our drinks. It was a slow middle-of-the-week night. So both of us spent a lot of time talking to Kay. Apparently, the previous time when I was there, I had way too many of my cheesy jokes at her expense! In any case, I was glad it was a slow night since both Sharmila and I got to know her life story and her aspirations in life.

An hour and a half later, it was time to start wrapping up. But, of course, it was also time to take a picture and document in my blog to remember these moments much later in life. As Kay came over to our side, a gentleman who was sitting on the other end all this time and reading something saw us and volunteered to take the picture for us.

Which he proceeded to take. And that is where things could have ended. Not when I am around though. I, of course, had to get to know the gentleman – Rich was his name – a little more. Found out quickly that he was the head of after sales parts and services for Bentley. Since he is a road warrior himself, the bonding was very quick. We talked a lot about life on the road and all that. But most of the time was spent in myself learning about Bentleys.

I was aware of the British roots of the company and the current ownership by Volkswagen but what I was not aware of is how many of these high end and very premium priced cars are sold every year. Apparently only 12,500 or so. About 3,000 of them in US. To put that in perspective, somewhere between 15 to 18 million vehicles are sold in US in a year. I was able to guess the regions of the world that buys most of the Bentleys fairly accurately, though. Learnt a lot from Rich on how to maintain customer identity and customer satisfaction for such very niche markets.

And one more half an hour rolled thru just like that while talking to Rich!! We exchanged our business cards and then of course, came the mandatory picture!! And the hope that we will run into each other on the road again sometime!!

It was going to be a late dinner for me but it was worth the wait. Pavan was going to be in town for business and the only time I had to meet her was that evening after 8. Eventually, she showed up after ploughing thru Atlanta traffic in the rains – and not a moment too soon! I was so hungry that I had already made a clean plate of chicken wings and some Old Fashioned.

We got to see each other after a long time. I think I had seen her once in California. But most of our memories are from the startup that we had worked over 20 years back (she was a consultant, I was an employee). Caught up with each other about our old friends, some of the Nusrat songs we used to listen to in those days and all the drama we used to have in office! And we talked about our old friend Al Blake a lot – not sure why – but I hope Al you are reading this. We also talked about the bar a few of us from our “SDG” team (that was the name of our team) used to visit after work late nights. I still remember that in those days, I would only drink Kendall Jackson’s Chardonnay in that bar called Humperdinks. (The bar, much later, I found out had burnt down and was replaced with something else).

We went next door from the hotel she was staying in to a restaurant called Bricktops to have dinner. We decided to sit at the bar and finish off dinner in an informal setting. At some point she went to take a bio-break. And I started chatting with the gentleman behind the bar. Come to find out that Tony Moody was his name. By the time Pavan was back, I had already learnt the history of Tony’s life; that he was a single dad and his 23 year old son is abroad and would soon be posted in Alaska. Even after Pavan came back, I continued chatting with him. And guess what? Found out that he used to work at the Four Seasons right behind where Sharmila and I used to live during the period when I worked with Pavan. Even crazier coincidence – his favorite spot to go for a drink with his friends was – Humperdinks!! We checked the years and turns out all three of us used to go to the same bar during the same time period!! For all you know that was not the first time we saw each other.

And I thought I was done for the evening. Came back to the hotel to drop Pavan and head back home. Pavan was actually meeting up somebody else after our dinner. She insisted that I said Hi to her friend before leaving. I thought it was going to be a quick introduction and off I would go. Nothing like that. I, of course, have to find some connection points with any new person I meet. Once I got to know a little about Jaideep Majumdar’s background – I asked “So, you know Ashok and Crissy Vasan?”. Sure enough, they were classmates!! Ashok and I were colleagues from the past and I remember visiting him and Crissy in their Singapore house around 2003 or so. And there was something else I knew about Ashok – India’s film superstar Shah Rukh Khan was his classmate. “So, you were Shah Rukh Khan’s classmate too?”. It took Jaideep a few seconds to figure out how I knew about it. As if that was not enough, we found out more connections at two other companies!!

That night, very late, I came back just trying to put the whole thing together. That was a lot of coincidences for one evening!!!

This is why I like to reconnect with anybody who has ever crossed my path before – birthday day calls, dinners during business trips, going to villages in India to extract somebody I knew half a century back… And make some new connections on the way too… Because you never know if you will ever meet them again…

It was hardly a year back – in fact, March 2016 – that I found out that this gentleman – father of somebody I know in Atlanta – was in an old age home not too far away from where my parents live. Last May, I went in unannounced. He did not know me. But that was okay. It did not take me too much time to make friends with him… or the many other old folks who came by to talk to me (their moment of pride? – “my son/daughter is also in America like you” – the irony of they pushing their next generation to a better life in America while they get relegated to a distant old age home with total strangers weighed very heavy that afternoon on my drive back). [“The Gift of Time”] (top two pictures)

During my next trip last year – and that would be June 2016, I brought my sister with me – who is a far more compassionate person than I am – and we spent about three hours with the gentleman and more people of his age group at that old age home that time. I remember he mentioning that it would be great for him if I could drop by for two minutes every time I came to visit my parents. [Revisiting an old age home”] (bottom left picture)

In my next trip (last year end/this year beginning), I was running very short of time. On my way to the airport, I took one more detour – after some debate on whether I will miss my flight – to see him for about fifteen to twenty minutes. His last words? “Ok. Go now. But come back again. It feels good to talk like this”. An overwhelming sense of guilt had gnawed into me on the trip back – Why was I even thinking whether I had time to meet him? If I did not have time for old folks like him who have made folks like me stand up in life, aren’t all my priorities all messed up? [“One last unscheduled stop”] (bottom right picture)

What I did not know is the following – that meeting on Jan 4 was to be the last. A friendship of 10 months has come to an end. Mr. Lodh is no more. I will go past that old age home to visit my parents every year. And I will just be staring at the home as my brother speeds past it. That one human being I got to know a little is no more…

And I will be wishing that I had gotten to know him earlier… that I had visited him a few more times…. that I had stayed for a few more minutes….

He was, above all, … a human being!!! A kind and considerate one at that too!!