Saw Vanita after a long long time. We were classmates in our MBA school. Last time I saw her was around 1992!!! So much has changed and yet so little has changed. She is still the truly genuine human being that I knew!!! It was absolutely great to hear her perspective on life. When asked what words of advise she had for me from the last twenty years, her thoughtful answers were “Academic success counts to nothing. We have to be successful as human beings” and “Family as a priority should trump all priorities”.
Those were indeed great thoughtful insights!!!

I certainly hope to run into her again very soon! Also found out that we have some common friends from Calcutta who now live in Atlanta!!!

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 😉

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!!

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.

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!

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.

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” !!

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…

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…