Last saw Ravi Ballamudi in Mar 1989. When I took up this new job, I found out that he lived couple of hours away from the airport I was going to visit often. This Tuesday evening, therefore, I headed straight towards his direction after landing instead of going to the hotel.

Ravi was kind enough to drive half way through and we met at this diner in the middle of nowhere right next to the highway by the side of a big truck stop and an outlet mall. Turned out to be a great place though.

We picked up from exactly where we had left over twenty five years back. It was like we never left the hostel to begin with!! As you can see from the pictures, we kicked our shoes, put up our feet and talked for hours. We almost went room by room in our hostel to see if we knew where all our old friends landed up! All that was missing was some Tarams tea. Fortunately, there was a bar nearby!!

Again, from the pics you can see how much fun we were having! It was great to see good old Ravi!!

No trip to SFO is ever complete without barging into Aditi’s house around dinner time completely unannounced 🙂 I have been lucky enough to see her, Eric (her husband) and her kids couple of times a year for a long time! We have been friends since May 1983!!

It was absolutely splendid to see the whole family and pick up some tips from Eric on brewing beer and barbecuing in the Green Egg!!

Together with a couple of pictures from last evening, I have attached a grainy picture of her and Masi (her mom) from around the time we became friends!!!!

It was a tough day. Good customer meetings in SFO but some tough internal stuff I had to deal with. It did not help that I was three hours behind after a coast to coast flight.

Okay, now rollback five months. I was coasting towards my planned year off starting from Memorial Day. And then on my birthday, I get a call from a executive recruiter and I politely pointed out I am getting ready to take a year off. I was so enthusiastic about my year off that I described in great detail about what I will do. The executive recruiter seemed suitably impressed – almost carried away by my energy. But let me tell you how good these guys are. I thought he might take a year off following me. Instead I was on a plane for an interview in two weeks time!!!

Throughout this process that went over three months, there was this quiet, behind the scenes lady from a different office (SFO) who took care of all the difficult stuff – my travel, my schedule, my expense report. (Yeah! Working in a big company, I have no recollection on how to do those things). One of the most helpful ladies, I have come across. In fact, during one of those Thank You phone calls, I promised her that I will come and see her next time I am in SFO.

And today was that day. In between meetings, I had enough time to punch her office address in Google Maps in my iPhone, walk for ten minutes and surprised the heck out of her as she was busy watching the USA soccer game with the rest of the office folks.

You can only imagine how surprised (hopefully for the positive) Kristin Fresquez was. I had only 15 minutes. That was enough to catch up on her background, her stays in New York, San Fran… enough for me to say I got to know a new human being today.

And that is what I want my life to be. I will always work hard to make myself something in my job. But getting to know human beings is what I want to live for. One life is too short not to make a difference to as many people as I can.

Completely funny aside: Want to guess what her first words were when she saw me? “Is this one of your intersection points?”

Yes. And a doggone good one too!!!

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!!!