2 July 2014

Kept my word!!

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!!!

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Category: Intersection Points | 3 Comments on Kept my word!!
1 July 2014

First time in my life!!!

First time in my life I read a full Supreme Court judgement. In its entirety! All 95 pages!! Twice!!

There were enough emotions being poured out in Facebook among my friends about the recent Supreme Court and the Hobby Lobby case (ACA, access to contraception by women etc) – mostly against the Supreme Court decision – and a lot of them by women – that I had to ask myself – “What kind of insensitive men are running our Court these days?”. Just to get a first hand impression, I downloaded the whole judgment and started reading up in the long coast to coast flight.

First, I read Justice Alito’s writeup of Opinion of the Court (making a case for the final decision of the Court). Impressive arguments. It made total sense to me. Followed up with Justice Kennedy’s Concurrence.

I was not sure there was a case against. So, then read up Justice Ginsburg’s writeup “Dissent”. Splendid arguments. Great alternate ways to look at the same situation. That made total sense to me too. Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan’s Dissents were one paragraph only – mostly concurring with Justice Ginsburg.

So, I was even more confused then. I asked myself “Which way would I vote”? Not knowing anything better, I went ahead and read up the whole 95 pages again.

And this is the conclusion I came to… I am really really glad that some really really smart people investigate these really really intricate and controversial questions in so many different ways and then lay down the rule of the land. I am certainly not up to it. That, above all, was the most comforting feeling I had.

And the decorum they have of laying down their bitter opposition while simultaneously showing great respect to folks with opposite points of view is something I can always learn from.

BTW, some of the facts I learnt while reading – that I never learnt from any of the FB posts:

1. The case was not about all contraceptives. In fact, ACA, does not even cover the more effective forms of contraceptives. Only the 20 specified ones by FDA. Of them, 16 was never in question – they all prevented fertilization of eggs. The debated and contested ones were 4 of them – that prevented a fertilized egg to continue growing by attaching itself to the uterus. (I think certain religious beliefs believe life starts when the egg gets fertilized).

2. The case was not about whether women can have access to those 4. It was about if certain kind of for-profit organizations could be forced to pay for them when their religious beliefs is that it is a sin to do so. In case of religious non-profits, the law today already requires that the insurance carrier will have to pay for those 4 drugs without asking the non-profit or the employee to pay. And no insurance carrier has ever objected because the costs of going thru with an unwanted pregnancy is apparently much higher than the cost of those 4 drugs.

Both sides agree to the above.

In any case, I am not sure I will ever use any of these information. But sure taught me that I should get to the facts before I evaluate…

Category: Musings | 23 Comments on First time in my life!!!
30 June 2014

Fighting fire with fire!

I remember I had once called Tasha almost a year back on her cellphone. She promptly sent a text message “What?”. “Why are you calling me?”. Evidently, for her and kids her age these days, a phone is for texting, not making calls. Oh! how I wish Graham Bell had seen what we have done with his instrument to talk to each other!!

In any case, sitting in my plane today, before taking off, I figured I should check on Tasha since I had not talked to her the whole time after leaving her at Brown. I was careful not to make a phone call. I simply texted “Everything ok?”. No response! I texted ten minutes later enquiring if she was enjoying everything. No response still.

So, I was wondering what did I need to do to get her to respond. I was like “Rajib, think. Think hard”. So, I came up with an alternate idea. I know these kids do not Facebook – but they Snapchat all the time. So I wrote the above message on my iPad, and then using my iPhone took a picture and Snapchatted it to her.

Under ten seconds, I got a text message “I am fine”.

Dad’s old technology plus wily ways: 1
Daughter with new technology: 0

🙂

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29 June 2014

Another Intersection Point! “How many jelly beans in that jar?”

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!!!

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29 June 2014

Intersection Point: Lata Jayaraman!!

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!!!

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