I have to give Preetha credit for creating this intersection! She found out from FB that I had come to Providence to drop Tasha at Brown. She took a chance and contacted me to see if I was going to fly out of Boston. As luck would have it, although I flew into Providence, I was indeed flying out of Boston!

And then she and Ram were kind enough to take a train and a shuttle to Terminal A in Logan Airport to meet me! I had some time at hand and we simply walked over to the Hilton Hotel next door and settled down at the bar.

The last time I had seen them was in 2007 when Ram and I worked in the same team in Optiant. Speaking of crazy connections, Ram and his family were connected to a teammate of mine (Sujatha) in my post-Optiant job in Equifax who in her turn was connected (relative thru marriage) with another teammate of mine (Nari) in my pre-Optiant job in i2!! At this point of time, you can be completely excused for thinking 1.2 billion Indians are a very small well-knit tribe 🙂

In any case, it was great seeing the husband wife duo and we spent a lot of time remembering our old friends and then also talked a lot about ailing parents and the issues that their kids go thru who are not in India.

One side story on Ram. We used to have this contest every year in Optiant – we would put random number of jelly beans in a jar and you would have to guess the number of jelly beans in it. The closest person won. Ram won it every single year. He would run the most sophisticated analytical models and come very close. Every year. Till one year, one really smart lady completely trumped his algorithm. She would just add 1 to his number. She was sure he would be the closest. She took a half and half chance that he would underestimate versus overestimate!!! Now, that was smart!!!

This week started with a bang. Got to see a friend Lata Jayaraman – from 1986. We were introduced to each other by an ex girl-friend of mine. Ever since, our lives have gone in very different ways but once in every half a dozen years or so, luck would put us very close to each other and we would catch up on our past – the friends that we had those days (admittedly, I am the one who keeps giving the updates 🙂 ), her uncle who was my Physics professor in college, her cousins who were my next door neighbors in college dorm and so on.

Last Monday, I was able to see her for a couple of hours again. She was in town for some American Cancer Society convention. My friend is nothing if not a whole bundle of energy. I am the one who is relatively quiet when I meet her. So, you can do the math. In under two minutes of meeting her, she was talking about some medical terms that they had been evidently discussing during dinner. I was struggling to understand the relevance of the topic when she paused and explained in lay man’s terms. Evidently, all this time she was referring to bald heads 🙂

As always, one evening is way too short to catch up with all of Lata’s energies, but what the heck, I gave it a crack!!! At the end, I was so engrossed that I completely forgot to take her picture to capture in my “History of my Future. The First Draft” blog. I had to call her back from her room and get the valet guy to take a picture of us!!!

It was a long day in Chicago… In fact too long. But it is always well that ends well!! After literally 10 hours of straight meetings, I was done for the day dog tired. But there was always time to call up a old friend from the past. Plus I had to have dinner and I hate eating by myself.

And that is how Prasad Sista and I found ourselves together 12 years after our last meeting when he came to pick me up from the hotel to go for dinner. We were in the same college back in India (although I suspect when I went to college, he had barely learnt how to spell “college”). And then we worked together for a few years in the same company.

That was a evening of a lot of laughter. Of the “Kadi” jokes of IIT Chennai and the really really funny incidents from i2 days. I have always thought that I have been blessed to work side by side with some great people. But the fact that they still remember me and actually want to meet me makes me feel very special. Especially when that person is as great a guy as Prasad Sista!!!

If there is anything as exciting as meeting old friends while traveling on the road, it is probably making new friends in this exciting journey on the road we choose to call “life”.

Here is a new friend I made this week while catching up with my old friend – Reno. (See previous blogpost). And his name is Alejandro from Mexico. He was intrigued enough by my interest in making drinks that he gave me a couple of tips from his trade. The most valuable was the art of making layered drinks without getting the layers mixed up.

And here you can see him showing us how to make three drinks simultaneously!!! That was cool how he served three customers at the same time!! I need to go back some time to learn how to juggle bottles in the air while making cocktails!