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!!!

Many an engineering college day for me started with a “Babumoshai!” shout from this gentleman. That or “Oy! Bangali Babu!!”. Invariably, the previous night I would have scribbled “Wake me up at 7 AM” or something like that (yes, those days we used to punch on computer cards!) and stuck it on my door. The ever vigilant Madhav would see that card and come around to my room from the other side of the hostel to wake me up.

In those four years, I had become very close to Madhav and another common friend called Rangarajan. Since Madhav and I were both in Computer Science, we became even closer as we took similar courses and used to exchange notes. In a melee of college kids’ unbridled enthusiasm (and some of that admittedly misdirected), Madhav was the voice of sanity and reason. I remember him distinctly for his integrity and his incredible patience!

Both of which made him a very popular person in the hostel. Many an evening, I would swing by his room to realize that he was sitting at his desk by the window with that table lamp he had on – trying to study. “Trying” is the operative word here because invariably there were three or four more random guys in his room sitting in his cot and yelling away to glory!!! Rarely did I ever see Madhav kick them away!

Madhav (and Rangarajan) had visited me in Durgapur – way back in December 1986. My folks back home became great fans of both of them. In fact, my mom and sister even to this day will ask about “Rongorajon” and “Madhob” and their whereabouts. (that is how Bengalis would pronounce their names 🙂 ).

Somewhere in our third year or so, our interests in computer science started diverging. Madhav veered towards research and he was very talented at those things (you know those books with a lot of Greek letters in them). He had the rare distinction in those days of having published a couple of papers while still doing his undergraduate degree. Thanks to a summer job I had done a few years back, I grew more attracted towards actual application of computer science in the business / corporate world. Madhav came to the US and continued in his path of research. I stayed back in India and joined a company to write applications for financial institutions.

As luck would have it, eventually, the same company moved me to US. The next time I saw Madhav was in Dallas when he had come over to our place in the context of some professional pursuit. My wife Sharmila’s everlasting memory of Madhav was how thrilled he was with all the features and gizmos of a new mini van he had. (I think it was a rental but I am not sure).

Over the last two decades, he went on to become a very successful professor in the field of Computer Science and eventually became (and still is) the Director of a prestigious Lab in Virginia Tech. And I went on to become, well, regrettably, me !!!

Taking advantage of the time off, I drove thru a few states and up to Blacksburg last week to spend some quality time with this great buddy of mine from over three decades back. We had four hours just to ourselves before his beautiful wife Achla and then his daughter Malvika joined us along with some other VT folks.

You can see us in the top picture what we did in those four hours. Some intense reflections. I was mesmerized to hear Madhav’s take on what he learnt and did not learn from the IIT system (our engineering college) in India and how that contrasts with the American system – especially in the area of research. There were some intense discussions on what happiness meant. Now that we are old enough not to get swayed by the stuff we were force fed – “get big jobs”, “earn more money” etc etc, we parsed what eventually made us (and our classmates) happy and how that vastly varied from what we were pushed to do in earlier stages of life.

I was struck by Madhav’s capability to introspect and independently come to conclusions. Maybe that is what do research makes you good at?

I am just glad that I can still count a guy like him as my friend!!! See! it does not take me much to be happy 🙂