3 December 2013

The perfect gentleman!!

Most people will tell you that the biggest factor of people staying or not staying in their current job is their relationship with their immediate boss. I also believe that how one does in one’s career is often deeply influenced by the very first boss one has.

I certainly count myself as one of the luckiest guys who was blessed with a perfect first boss – Nitin Chandekar. He was my friend, he was my philosopher, he was my guide. He showered more credit to me and our team mates than was perhaps due and was always there for us when we got stuck.

Today, I was able to visit J.P.Morgan Chase in New York where he has become a big guy and spend an hour with him over coffee.

One by one, we caught up with over 30 ex team mates of ours, our families and then ourselves. I certainly hope to be as successful as him some day. We also found out that we have two kids each exactly of the same age!!!

I was thrilled to see that his gentlemanliness, grace, terrific sense of humor and errrr… mustache has remained intact!!!

One of our defining moments of relationship:
Q4 1991: About 70 of us were working on a project called CPC. We had one HP 9000 machine which I swear had less computing power than the ipad I am writing this on. We had 40 programmers hitting it with Informix 4GL code. It used to run at the speed of a turtle on Prozac.

Our days used to be a never ending cycle of write a few lines of code, submit it for compiling, go have a few rounds of coffee, come back and wait some more and then the machine would helpfully let us know that we have syntax errors! Two of those cycles in a day and it was time to go home.

The analytical (and easy-to-frustrate) guy that I was, I painstakingly gathered statistics and then drew on paper and pen a pie chart with three sectors named “editing” (this was a thin sliver), “waiting for machine time” (big part of the pie) and “computing time” (very thin). There was no PowerPoint those days. But to make my point, I colored the sectors with color pencils. I was careful enough to color the waiting time in red. Then I showed it to Nitin.

He immediately took me to his boss Raja and his boss Aruna. They had a high level management discussion that high level managers were prone to do while I sat there merely admiring my coloring capabilities.

That evening Aruna announced that we will be all working in 8 hour shifts with 2 hour overlaps!!!

You can only imagine how popular I became with my teammates overnight. NOT 😉

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2 December 2013

Amrith!!!

Met Amrith last night after a long time! In fact, the last time I saw him was Apr end, 1993!! We studied in the same MBA school, did summer training in the same company (COSL), stayed at the same place while doing our training (Wilson college in Mumbai), took up our first jobs in the same company and even lived in the same apartment for a few months in Mumbai!

Then I lost touch. He was gracious enough to pick me up from the airport and dropped me at the hotel after dinner.

Amrith, among all my friends, is probably the one with the highest number of patents against his name. Here is an interesting tidbit about him – while in Indonesia, he had once hacked into an internal system thru a security hole in the OS of Stratus hardware. When Stratus found it out, they promptly offered him a job to take him off the market!!! Cool!

It was great catching up on a lot of our old friends!!

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29 November 2013

“See you down the road”

An indelible moment of an “intersection point”. At Tamarindo, a few days back, the girls were busy buying knickknacks from the street vendors and I was generally hanging out watching all the people.

Struck up a conversation with this lady who was waiting to cross the road. She was probably in her late fifties to early sixties by my reckoning. Found out that she was from Vancouver Island. I told her how my eldest daughter fondly remembers the sea plane ride to her island. “Yep”, she said, “both my sons work as sea plane pilots”!!

The girls were still busy haggling. My new friend – Marlene was her name – was in no particular hurry. I learnt that she had lost her husband a few years ago and had once visited Costa Rica with her ex-husband when he was on a project in Panama. Evidently, her husband always wanted to settle in Costa Rica.

She is now applying for residency in Costa Rica. (I further learnt that you can stay for 90 days only on a tourist visa). She wants to teach English for free in Costa Rica. I asked her how she was getting along with her Spanish. She let me know that she was staying with a Costa Rican family nearby to do a 30 day immersion into the language!!

By this time, everybody was in the tourist van again and were calling for me. I asked her if it would be okay for me to take a picture of her for my travelogues. She gladly obliged and I got the street vendor to take a picture of us. As she turned away, she said something that stuck in my mind for the rest of the day – “See you down the road”…

As I climbed back up in the van, I kept shaking my head thinking about her. Here is somebody at least ten years older to me – completely unafraid of change… after losing her husband, instead of staying closer to her sons, decided to move to an entirely new country… learn a whole new language… dedicate herself to a new profession. What courage!! What zest to live her life!!! What determination to travel the road less traveled! And how much I need to learn from her example.

I was so absorbed in her willingness to seize her life that I completely forgot to get her contacts. Now I am kicking myself. I am hoping her words “See you down the road” turns out to be very prophetic.

We certainly are all nomads in this long road called life. Sometimes, we do turn around a corner and run into somebody we had seen before…
As some poet had famously put it…

“Sitaron ko aankhon me mehsoos rakh lo
Bahut door talak raat hi raat hogi
Musafir hai hum bhi, musafir ho tum bhi
Isi mod par, phir mulakat hogi”

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6 November 2013

Bhoju !!!

Nailed him! Although for a very hurried 45 minutes lunch at his cafeteria. I have too many meetings and he needed to go too.
All the same, 45 minutes after years and years is better than nothing at all! Also found out that when I met him that first day as I described in my previous post, he was all of 3 years and 2 months old!!
Now back to meetings. But feeling elated.

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6 November 2013

The net is closing in…

Dec 3, 1979 : We had just moved homes that day. I was recovering from typhoid. I was a rising eighth trader. Was extremely weak of constitution as the recovery process had just set in. Came out of our new home to enjoy the winter sun. I was too dazed to remember most of the things. But I do remember a bunch of kids (later got to know them as my neighbors) playing our street version of cricket. And the eldest kid – Somu – came and introduced himself and he brought everybody to introduce themselves. I remember thinking that I am going to like these guys. One very young kid – could not have been more than a first or second grader – hung out with me the longest. Before he left, he told me that he lived in the house bang opposite mine.
As I became stronger and stronger, I joined in the street cricket games. Presently, got to know that I was the oldest in the crowd. There was an expectation from everybody that I would lead them in a lot of activities – not because I was an athletic player – but because I was the eldest. India, at least then, used to be very structured in social set ups.
That young kid – I was fascinated by how hard he was willing to work. Everybody wanted to be a batsman. Very few would want to be bowlers. Absolutely nobody wanted to be a fielder – unless they got to be the wicketkeeper. But this kid would never complain and cheerfully go In the middle of bushes (invariably the least popular spot) and wait there to stop any boundaries – should the ball come by.
Or in soccer – everybody wanted to be “forward”. Nobody wanted to play in defense. And goalkeeping was a no-no. But this kid would stand there the whole evening between two bricks (which were our imaginary goal posts) sometimes getting a chance to touch a ball.
I remember telling my mom once that he was one of the most likable kids in our neighborhood. What I did not appreciate then, was his willingness to put in the hard work in seemingly unpopular spots.
Three years later, I left home. (I have studied in residential schools since I was 16). I used to meet him during my subsequent trips home but they became rarer and rarer as he moved out of home and then my parents moved homes again!
I have tried multiple times to catch him – in Durgapur, Calcutta and even Chicago (which he visited for a few weeks) but he always managed to give me the slip. By the dint of the same hard work that he was willing to put in as a child, he managed to build an amazing career path – far more than his academic results in school would have predicted. As a result, he seemed to be always somewhere else for work when I tried to corner him.
I am closing in on him, though!
I had heard that he had moved to London recently. This morning, I called up my dear friend Antara in Durham (who also works in Cognizant) and got her to help me pinpoint his office in London from their office database. (Thank you Antara!).
For the really curious, I got to know Antara because her family moved into our home when my parents moved out of this home! And no! Durgapur is not a very small place 🙂
I will be in London for exactly 12 hours tomorrow. But I have carefully kept an hour and half of lunch time free of meetings.
My dream scenario: Grab a cab, show up at his office during lunch, surprise the heck out of him, grab him by the collar and yell “Bhoju!! You owe me a cambis ball”!! You see, one of those days, he did get a chance to bat and I was bowling with my new ball that dad had just bought me the previous night. And Bhoju had unceremoniously hit the ball hard into another neighbor’s backyard and we never recovered the ball.
Short of that, I will make him pay for lunch.
Wish me luck! Wish me luck!

29 October 2013

Babe Ruth

I come to DC fairly regularly but mostly stay in the Reston area where my office is. It used to be the case that the office was in Arlington and because of business reasons, I had to come every week. 143 nights in 2011, I slept at the Marriott Keybridge.

After nearly two years, I spent last night at the same hotel since I had a customer meeting in Alexandria.

After finishing the early morning run by the Potomac river (it is one of my most favorite running trail), took a quick shower and was almost stepping out of the hotel (I was running late) when I started to wonder if Ruth was still working there. Turned around, went to the Concierge Lounge on the 12th floor – and sure enough she was there!! Age has started to take its toll but her spirits were high still!

Every single day, this grandmother would greet me and make me fresh pot of coffee. She did the same today! I pushed my office meeting and decided to spend ten minutes with her to catch up on her life.

She has completed 35 years with Marriott!! 20 years at the same hotel!!! Born in Danville (near here) she has spent most of her life here. She has heard a lot of stories about other places from the hotel guests but never has traveled anywhere!

She makes friends with transient guests like me (or even employees) who come regularly for some time and then go away for ever. She had amazing memories of a lot of her guests that she has not seen for aeons and aeons. Just like we form relationships in our life. Except her movie of life always runs on fast forward.

After ten minutes of coffee together, we got a guest to take a picture of us and I promised to see her at least one more time before she decided to call it quits.

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29 October 2013

Singapore!!!

It was past 9 pm. I had just wrapped up a customer dinner meeting in Alexandria in Virginia. Common sense would dictate that I drive back to the hotel and hit the sack at my usual 10 pm.
But then I would have missed the chance to meet this unusually nice couple!! So I drove to Maryland to catch up with my one year junior and hostel mate from Engineering days – Singapore and his wife Soumya – who I knew independently thru other friends before they got married!
Sundararajan Thyagarajan is his name. Within a few minutes of he showing up at our hostel, the outstanding thing about him we found out was that he lived in Singapore with his parents forsome time. And that is all it took us to give him the nickname “Singapore “. For 25 years, I had forgotten his real name till he reminded me tonight.
Soumya and I got to know each other thru our dear friend Srimathi who we lost to cancer (she fought the first one off and lost a leg but succumbed to the second one) nearly 15 years back!
Words can’t possibly do justice to the joys of seeing them again and recreating some “intersection points” !!

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10 October 2013

Is this a biker gang?

Mr. Al Blake!!! We worked together nearly two decades back and the best we could remember we saw each other 16 years back.
I had some great discussions of life in general with him – the concept of being happy, the overinflated importance of a job, family, financial security….
We remembered some of the best people we had the chance to work with from our past…
I could have gone for another four hours just getting his incredibly balanced perspective . There is a lot I could learn from him…

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9 October 2013

Willie Weichi Weng (the other www :-) )

Willie Weng!! Or as we Bengalis are prone to pronounce it – Billie Beng!!! (and to the veterans of that character building exercise called Toshiba project from i2 days – simply Wiilie-san!!)
A pleasanter person I have never met in my life!
Since my first meeting with him in 1995, he has been the example of personal humility that I have fruitlessly toiled to emulate…

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9 October 2013

Reconnecting!!!

Business trips to Dallas always means opportunities to quickly reconnect.
Ran (barely managed to keep up is a better way of putting it) 5 miles with Subrata. I had met him way back in 2001 – and they promptly left for China! (Yeah! I kind of have that effect on people 🙂 ) Our original connection was that my sister and his wife were elementary school classmates.
Next time I met him was in 2010 – Jan 1st when a bunch of us Bengalis went out for a run in Dallas to welcome the New Year.
Today, after the run, we sat down at the Starbucks to get to know each other a little more. Like me, he was born in a very small village! Unlike me, his rest of his growing up was in the same village. (That village got electricity after he moved to US).
Now get this. There is another small village nearby from there. Both our sisters are married to two guys from that other small village!! Same age group! We are trying to find out if they knew each other!! His brother-in-law’s dad was the headmaster of the school that my brother-in-law went to!!!
Go figure!!
Remember my point about intersection points!!! 🙂

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