If I have mentioned this once, I have mentioned this many times that twenty three years of travel has taken its own toll on me but the unique experiences I have gained on the road has made it totally worthwhile. Of all those experiences, the ones that I absolutely love are those that involve meeting complete strangers on the road.

Each and one of them has had a story to tell. Each of them has had a very interesting journey in life and after every meeting, I have left with a great sense of satisfaction that my path in life intersected with theirs. Today, I met another such unique person.

I was in Milwaukee on my perhaps-last-business-travel for the year. I needed to meet my colleague Mark – who is also our CFO and COO – and get a lot of things knocked off before the holiday season started. Mark, being a very organized person, was there in the hotel at 7:30 sharp and one by one we kept finishing up the long list of things he had for us to discuss and decide.

Towards the end, we had moved near the bar of the hotel and were getting things done at a great pace. But I was also getting tired. That is when I decided to completely frustrate Mark and get distracted by talking to this lady who had been sitting at the bar for about an half hour or so by then.

“So, where are you visiting from?”, I started in my traditional way.
“Key West”
“Key West? I used to live in Coral Springs”
“I know that place”
“Did you fly out of Miami?”
“No, I drove here.”
“YOU DROVE HERE???”, I asked somewhat incredulously. “That is what – seventeen hours?”
“Ummm.. more like twenty six hours”, she said making short shrift of my knowledge of Geography

I figured that it must have been an interesting drive. As a background, Sharmila, Natasha and Nikita are driving to Dallas during the holidays without me and I have been trying to find out hotels on the way where they can stop over. That would be an eleven hour drive.

“Where all did you stop over?”, I asked remembering the above.
“Oh! I came straight up.”
“You came straight up? You have not slept for over a day?”
“Yes. I sleep less”
“How old are you?”
“62”

For a moment, I was dumbfounded. 62 and she drove 26 hours straight out flat.

“Don’t you feel lonely on the drives after some time?”, I had to ask.

Then I got to know Claudia a lot more deeply. Having suffered an alcoholic father during her formative ages, she fled home at the age of 16. Got married at the age of 17. Got divorced at the age of 22. And then fought her way back in life.

Remember Mark? Well, by now, even he had forgotten about our office work. At some point, the sheer energy of the discussion had sucked him in. And good thing too. For, eventually, we found out that Claudia had worked in GE for some and was the personal admin for the same person that became Mark’s boss in GE (much later though). Speak of intersections!!!

We had a great time learning how she, one day decided that she had had enough of the local cold weather and and thirty four inches of snow and went off to Florida. And she comes back to meet her family in this area….

Eventually, Mark and I had to get back to the last parts of our work.

Such people and such stories have always been great inspirations for me as I have crisscrossed the world for work. Fighting adversity and living life in your own terms – that is what it is all about. We are all given a different deck of cards. We do not get to control that. What we do get to control is what we do with those cards. It is all about playing them with class and vigor…

So, if anyone of you see a BMW X3 driving down southbound I-75 in a few more days with the lady in the picture driving it, do not forget to give her two thumbs up.

And I hope you now understand, why I cannot wait for the new year to come around – I need to foxtrot to the airport in the hope of meeting a few more great human beings and learn from…

I had just finished my evening stretches and was glancing thru my FB status updates when a particular one stopped me right in my tracks. It was an update from my best friend from school days – Avijit Bose. He had posted a picture of his dad who left us three years to the day. There was a heartfelt message Avijit had written that moved me no end.

Avijit being my best friend, many a morning, afternoon and evening was spent in each other’s houses. As two young kids, we could not be any more different. Be it in sports, popularity with boys and girls of that age or general street smartness, he was head and heels above me. I was the nerd of the two of us but I held my ground on the basis of my school grades. Or so I would like to believe.

And that is an important point because Mr. Bose used to always highlight my grades and ask me to encourage my friend to study. I used to be like – “Are you kidding me, kaku? He is doing fine. Now, can you ask him to teach me how he makes everybody laugh?”. Avijit was and still is one of the funniest guys around. I was and still am awkward as hell. But I was and still am inspired by his sense of humor.

I was treated as nothing short of their own son by Mr. and Mrs. Bose. They took me to their relatives’ places when they used to visit them during vacation times. I got to know Avijit’s extended family and wherever it was, Mr. Bose would check on me ever so often to make sure I was feeling at home.

Now, as awkward as I was, there was one thing that attracted me from a very early age and that was Indian music. Specially classical. Mr. Bose was an accomplished flute player. I could sit endlessly listening to him play the flute. Avijit – who was a great tabla player – would sometimes play with him. There was this incident where both of them were invited artists to a program and got onto the stage to play. Uncle saw me sitting in the crowd and I am not sure what overtook him, but he called me to the stage over the public address system and asked me sit next to him and play an instrument. Now, that instrument did not need much playing – I simply had to hold on to a couple of notes. But I felt very proud of myself that was on the stage for a public performance.

Much later did I truly understand how great it was of him to realize what such a gesture would mean to me. For the record, that instrument could also be put in a auto play mode!!

There are many many such small incidents of he always being very nice to me. Above all, he treated me as a family member. There were many things Avijit was not allowed to do… except when I was going to be with him too! He put an incredibly blind faith in me.

Mr. Bose was also a chain smoker. The constant flute playing and the smoking finally did him in. Three years to this day.

When I saw my friend’s post, an immediate pang of realization shot through me … and that is of all those missed chances to say Thank you to Mr. Bose. Of late, I have made it my life’s mission to meet as many of those elderly gentlemen and ladies in India who touched my life in so many ways. For all that I still realize a harsh reality for myself…. So much is owed. So little gratitude has been shown…

Mr. Bose, thank you for being a part of my life. In many ways, today, I am who I am because of how you influenced me. I just want you to know that in so many ways you influenced me that I believe you still live thru me…

It was indeed 31 years back on a March afternoon in 1985 that I had last seen this guy. And then suddenly I got to know a few months back that we live in the same country!!! I was awaiting a chance to meet him in Scottsdale and before I could do that, he moved to the DC area. That actually increased the chances of my meeting him since I travel to DC every month.

Today, I was able to make enough time after meetings and so could he to finally see each other over three decades later!! Over the last few years, it has become religion for me to dig up people that I have had the fortune of crossing paths in my past and find out what they are up to and meet them once face to face. That is my way of saying Thanks to them for influencing my life.

And every time, I am delighted by how many different ways my friends have grown up and succeeded with very different twists and turns in life. This evening, Chiranjib and I connected over not only our parents, our kids and our immigrant journey but some mundane coincidences like how he and I have a deep fascination for a particular dish (“watta-kozhumbu”) that is made in Tamil Nadu. Not too many folks from India will know this dish (unless you are from Tamil Nadu). (He is married to a girl from that state and I spent four years there for studies).

What I admired most about Chiranjib is how much he has succeeded in corporate life in India and in the USA. He has gone from one pillar of success to the next post of success in some of the largest corporate entities in the USA ranging from healthcare to financial services to banks. Thru all that, it is remarkable how he has retained his modesty and kept his feet firmly to the ground.

A lot I need to learn from him on that front. For that, I need to meet him more regularly than once every 31 years!!

Kang and I worked together for a couple of years and had last seen each other over 18 years back. No surprise to any one of you – I had kept up with him – if not anything else, thru that once in a year birthday call. Then, in 2008, he learnt that he had Stage 2 cancer. That same week, his mom was diagnosed with cancer too. I kept up with him thru Facebook updates on his health and stories of not giving up biking thru everything and used to send him encouraging words of support on fighting the good fight.

And then this September, after many many rounds of chemo and radio therapy and seven long years of perseverant “it ain’t over till it is over”, he was declared in remission. For the last few years, I have been wanting to spend some quality one on one time with Kang to get his perspective of life as he went thru clearly a life-altering phase.

Today was my day. I had set up a one on one dinner with him and I had a few simple questions for him. The evening was a great life lesson for me. I am going to write it up as a short interview style writeup here.

The opening was enough to tell me that I am going to learn a lot this evening.
Rajib: “I am sorry you had to go thru this tough phase in life.”
Kang: “No, no. I am glad I did. If I had the power to change anything in my past life, this is not something I am touching. I would go thru it again, if I had to.”

Discussing death.
RR: “Really? You were not afraid that you were going to die?”
KL: “Rajib, we are all going to die. I just found out that day a possible way that I might die. If I did not wake up every day worried that I would die some day and I could not change it, why should the knowledge of one possible way I might die worry me any more?”
RR: “Good point. But death denotes some kind of finality, does it not?”
KL: “Well, it is all in how think about it. Are you the same Rajib when I met you 18 years back? Are you the same Rajib when you were ten years old? As a person, your values, your likings, your passion – in fact, every body cell of yours has changed. Does that mean you have died? Rather, does it not mean that the Rajib of forty years back is dead. All of you have is a small subset of disjointed memories. See, every morning, we wake up with a small part of us having died and replaced by a new part. Physical death is nothing but a culmination of that process. It is a passage of life. You cannot accept life if you cannot accept death as a natural part of it”.

Appreciating life.
RR: “Does that not then lead to a nihilistic view of life – how much does it matter if it is going to end in death anyways?”.
KL: “ Quite to the contrary, it makes you appreciate life a lot more. You get a very different perspective towards why you live…”
RR: “I have always thought that acceptance of mortality is the best setter of priority”.
KL: ”… exactly. In my case things like job promotion and such – as an example – have become far more meaningless. It is more important for me to spend time in the ways I want to spend time. When you go thru these kind of phases in life, you get some sense knocked into you. One of them is how fruitless your life’s day to day aspirations have become.”
RR: ”Because you let others drive your priorities?”
KL: “Indeed”.
RR: “It is true that as human beings, we are more focused on what we don’t have than what we have.”

It is not really your life.
RR: “I get that. But here is a dilemma I have. I can see how you took a long view of the road and decided to take cancer in a proper perspective and obviously your mental strength helped you get over your physical challenges. But you did not know you will win the battle. More importantly, your family did not know that. For all the great talk of perspectives in life, the fact has to be that your wife was suddenly staring at the prospect of raising two kids who were yet to be five years old all by herself. The kids – and I do not know how much they understood this – was looking at the real possibility of losing dad for ever. How did they deal with it?”
KL: “And don’t forget my mom. She survived her own cancer. And then she was looking at possibly losing her son. It is a sense of helplessness only we as parents can truly understand.”
RR: “Yes. So all this self-realization – how does that help them?”
KL: “I am not sure I have a good answer for you. You can only control your own life. But I will tell you that my wife took this in her stride and dealt with the whole thing with a whole lot level of self assuredness than my mom did. But I did realize something else.”
RR: “What?”
KL: “This life of yours that you think is yours is not just yours. There are other people who have a say in it and need to have a say in it. You have to also decide your priorities thinking about them.”
RR: “You do understand the inherent conflict that can often create?”
KL: “Deeply so.”

Dealing with Pain:
RR: “So, talk to me about all the pain you had to endure. Chemotherapy and radio therapy is not fun for anybody”.
KL: “Radio therapy is much worse”
RR: “How so?”
KL: “In chemo, you are getting controlled poison. Your body violently reacts and you feel it and the body will try to sleep it thru because of the tiredness and lack of energy. In radio therapy, you will completely drained and wasted but you are really not tired. So, you cannot sleep. You just stay awake going thru that painful feeling.”
RR: “So, what lessons do you have for me as you dealt with that pain?”
KL: “First, that pain is a forward indicator. It merely indicates that there might be a breakdown coming. But usually it is a long time coming. And with evolution of human beings, we are feeling pain much earlier than we used to. Because we pay attention to the smallest pain – the faintest early indicator. And when you go thru cancer, you realize that the actual break point is way way far out. In fact, I biked thru all the time that I was ailing and my body still did not break down – meaning I did not die, did I?”
RR: “So, you think it is all in the mind.”
KL: “A big part. Sure.”

Small things in life.
RR: “I have to ask you something. For all this mental fortitude – and I commend you for that – the chores of having to go to hospital everyday, do this, do that … – all that was a change, right? Mentally, did you not feel that this is different? Others do not have to do this. Did that not make you feel down?”
KL: “Well, let me ask you. Do you think brushing your teeth every morning is a chore? You do not question that. Do you? You get up, brush teeth, take shower etc etc. You may have a car – so you drive to work. Somebody else does not – they walk up to the the bus station or train. Is that a chore for them? Do they feel down? It is all in accepting that this is a standard activity for you.”
RR: “The new normal, so to speak?”
KL: “The new normal”
RR: “But that means that is a change”
KL: “Well, your normal today is not what was normal forty years back. Do you complain about it today? You just have accepted that it is normal for you.”

Lest you think we talked just about cancer and the long view of the road, we also talked about China, India, parental responsibilities – especially how to deal with the fact that two kids can be very very different and also the twenty odd colleagues we had in our Canada office.

In fact, we left on the note that next time we get together, we should get all those colleagues together.

You know. Just to appreciate life.

It took me almost 33 years to trace this guy. I had last seen him in March, 1983. Running off to his dad who was waiting in his scooter after the last ICSE test. Turned out he had also moved to the USA like me – albeit a few states away. I found that out a few months back. Meeting him face to face did not take that long once we knew where we were. K Venkatesh was in Florida vacationing and dropped by Atlanta to visit some relatives. And that is how I picked him up from his relative’s house early this morning and went to the nearest Starbucks!

It was one of those amazing feelings you get when you meet somebody that you sat in the same room with (a few desks apart) day after day after day and then completely lost touch for over three decades. In fact, most of the time we tried to recollect those days that we were together – the common friends, the teachers, the school building. Unfortunately for me, I learnt that uncle (his dad) is no more – which means I will not get a chance to see him when I am in India. But I hope to see his mom who has now moved to Trivandrum (Thiruvanthapuram).

The most exciting part of this morning was finding out how he met his wife. That involved scaling some walls, getting caught by authorities and thrown out of campus hostels (dorms). I will let him tell the story to all of you some time!!

It was absolutely worth the wait to see this classmate of mine from middle school days after so many years…

It is not often that I get a reminder from a very successful ex-CEO in Corporate America that I had promised to have a drink with him whenever I was in his town. Our relationship goes back quite a few years to my previous job. He was a customer then. We have had career changes from there.

But, thanks to that reminder, I did get a chance to have dinner with Paul Uhrig. My life has been nothing if not spending a few quality hours with some of the best human beings in this world. Paul is right up there on that list.

Sitting in a very nice Old Town Alexandria restaurant by the Potomac river, we caught up on our families, our old friends, the just concluded elections, our respective industries and much more. The most engaging part of our evening probably was exchanging notes on our professional journeys. Our journeys have been very very different – and that is what made our stories so engaging to each other.

I hope to see more of this guy down the road…

Close on the heels of Olivia producing a faux million dollar bill a few weeks back, I had another great experience. Last evening I had gotten together with my colleague from a previous life and a personal friend now – Shari – for a drink at Ray’s on the River to catch up on a few professional and personal things. Somewhere, in between those sips of white wine and an Old Fashioned, as we were discussing a work related item, Ashleah who was working the bar, popped up with her “Can I get you something else question”.

As deep as I was in our discussions, I have never been known to pass up on an opportunity to repeat an old joke. Before I knew it, I had already rolled out my “A million dollars would help!” answer. It had the usual reaction of laughter all around and that was that as Shari and I went back to our discussions.

Now get this – when I asked for the check and it duly arrived, I signed off on those two pieces of paper (my copy and the store copy) and I thought there was one more piece of paper below that. Half curiously and half mechanically, I removed the top two pieces of paper. And there it was – the best surprise of the evening.

Apparently, not to be outdone by my smart Alec comments, Ashleah had gotten hold of a white piece of paper roughly the size of a bill and drawn all over it to look like a million dollar bill! With a picture of a girl – I assume herself – and the $1,000,000 clearly marked out!

Both Shari and myself realized what had happened and laughed out loudly. We then had Ashleah come over to where we were sitting and take a picture with the bill and myself. We were still laughing as we walked out of the bar.

Okay, Ashleah, we will give you this one. For that quick thinking, sense of humor and the effort taken, we will admit that you are a million!! 🙂

After last week’s coast to coast meetings, this week has been a repeat. Today was a very long day again. Those six hour long partnership negotiations don’t get any easier. And then I had to endure the two hour long Los Angeles infamous traffic on 101 and 405. Finally, when I sat down in the Delta Sky Club, I realized it was already 10 PM by my time and I was terribly hungry.

Came out of the Skyclub and sat at a bar in a nearby restaurant. After starting the evening with an Old Fashioned, I settled for chicken wings for dinner. The wings absolutely stayed true to their name – Five Flame. Just as I was gorging thru my dinner, a couple came up and attempted to settle down in the two chairs next to me.

I moved a little to make space for them. The guy looked at me and asked “Five Flames”? I can only imagine what he must have seen. I had shaved my head in the morning and on those days, having spicy wings undoubtedly meant that I was sweating bullets thru my pate. In any case, we got started talking…

“So, where are you headed to?”, I asked.
“Tahiti and Bora Bora. We are going on our honeymoon.”
“Congratulations. Where are you coming from?”
“Atlanta. She grew up in Atlanta. Her parents live there.”.

I looked at her and was incredulous. What is the chance that I would be sitting next to somebody from my town?

“Where in Atlanta?”, I asked.
“Alpharetta”.

Well, this was getting spooky.

“Where in Alpharetta”?
At this point, she had no idea who I was or where I was from. I am sure she thought I was weird (well, she was not the first one to think so), but she persisted – “Barnwell Road”.

“On the Old Alabama side or the Holcomb Bridge side?”. That pretty much did it. We had started laughing out hard by now.

It turns out, Maria moved to Atlanta before her high school and her parents still live there. And where they live is on my way from home to office everyday (when I am in Atlanta that is). Both she and her husband Ryan are in social media marketing. He grew up in the midwest and has lived in Indiana and Chicago. She spent some time in New York. We talked a lot about the Washington Square Park area where she used to live and as does Natasha now. In a total coincidence, Maria had targeted NYU and USC as her top two colleges. As did Natasha!!

Here is another coincidence… after their food came, the first thing Maria did was started picking up food from Ryan’a plate. That is exactly what Sharmila does (not from Ryan’s plate; I mean from my plate). I warned Ryan that twenty five years of marriage later, he should not expect anything different.

After having a lot of fun at the end of a rather stressful day, I had to say goodbye to the young just married couple. I did promise to check up on Maria’s octogenarian parents some time. Wait till they get the shock of their life – when a weird clean shaven Indian drops by for coffee!!

I want to see if her mom picks up food from her dad’s plate. Maybe I have some hope twenty five more years later that I can have my whole plate to myself!! 🙂

I had been waiting for this day for a few months. You never want to impose yourself on somebody who has been told that he has a few more days to live. But I was hoping that somehow he will figure out a way out of it and make time for me to meet him. Today was the day.

Over a cup of coffee, I caught up with Cuyler on the good fight he is fighting.

I got to know Cuyler about a year back and soon he joined our team at office. And then he relocated his family – wife and very young kids – to the West Coast to stay close to one part of our business there. After a run in the evening one day in June, he started getting into a lot of pain. A couple of days of medical tests later, he got the shocking news – he had a very advanced stage of liver cancer.

It was bad enough that he had to go for immediate chemotherapy. And that is where it got worse. The liver refused to respond to treatment. At that point, the doctors let him know that they had run out of all options.

They immediately moved back to their home town in Texas and soon he had to be admitted to a hospice. As he explained to me, at this point of time, he was in immense pain and just had no energy left. He had lost a lot of weight, his body looked like it was painted with a highlighter (jaundice from a non functioning liver) and his urine had the color of coffee (no filtering happening).

The pivotal moment was his so called “good bye lunch” when all his friends and family had gathered in the hospice. And he slowly waded thru them in his walker. As he recollected for me, it was as the guests were leaving, he was taken over by a compelling determination to fight back. “I am going to fight the good fight, no matter what”, as he put it.

Next day, he got up and refused to take the walker. Just walked a few steps and came back. And that was the start of things starting to look better. A lot of different advise from different doctors, trying out alternate medicine, different food regimen (he talked a lot about alkaline water) and every single day, he felt he was getting a little better.

A visit to the doctor showed that the liver had shown some sign of life. He believes that the chemo had a delayed reaction and did manage to kill a few bad cells. Or perhaps, it is one of those cases where your mind can prevail over the body. As he said, at that point of time, he was running on sheer will to live and determination to fight.

Over the next couple of months, he kept at it. The doctors were willing to give chemo another shot. Chemotherapy, as many of you know, is really putting controlled poison in your system. It tries to kill the bad cells but it also kills good cells. Your body and the different systems take an immense beating. But he said that after the first few days of being completely beat, one fine day, he thought he was feeling much better. In fact the best in a long time. Checks showed that the procedure did yield some results.

He is nowhere close to be outside the danger zone yet. Has gone thru four rounds already and has beat most of the tumors back to less than half their original sizes. He probably has another four rounds to go before any serious long term solution (e.g. surgery, transplant) can be contemplated.

It was pretty funny how he explained his chemo. He will go for a treatment on a Monday, on Tuesday he will be fine, Wednesday he will start feeling terrible (I guess the good cells and the bad cells are getting killed) and then be wiped out and sleep from Thursday to Sunday. Next week he will feel bad but then he will have a week when he feels much better. And then he will have to go in for another treatment.

This is one of those good weeks. He brought his family to Atlanta to visit their old friends. I was glad he could make time early in the morning to have a coffee with me before any of the families woke up. You know what else he does on those good weeks? He attends our office meetings (video) and starts working on office stuff. Every time I see an email from him or his face pops up on the video calls, I shake my head in disbelief and tell him “You are crazy”.

Talking to him today, I recognized that when doctors tell you that you are going to die in a few days and you tell them “No, I am not”, there is a level of craziness that is absolutely called for. Thank you for fighting the good fight, Cuyler Duncan.

As we got up and hugged each other before we left, between his words of heart felt gratitude for all the personal and professional support he has received from us and my sense of awe and inspiration from his life story, I am not sure who was fighting harder to hold back the tears.

That too, was a good fight, this morning.