SJ and JS : Thanks for shaping my thoughts!! RIP

This is my first weekend in Mumbai after I started my internship in Citibank.

Pune, to me is a lot of good food, cozy home , lovely wife and sweet long drives. I missed it this time majorly for the sake of a deteriorated health which warranted travel. I didn’t just miss Pune this time but consciously avoided any other busy-ness.

It’s been long since I had a word with myself. The weather outside , the soothing sound of the rain , the lovely  breeze caressing my disheveled hair locks , the quietness of the floor and no pressing work calls for a perfect date with myself.

Well , I can talk about a lot of things , my work  - which I officially hate , my weight loss programme – which is yet to start , the future aspirations – that I am still confused about  or  the state of the MBA and engineering jobs being offered – a wholesale mandi these days.

However, I think I shall talk to myself about 2 important people in my life and about my favorite topic – my dreams.

Recently, there was sad demise of two important persons who had deeply touched my life and coincidentally their initials share the same letters: SJ and JS , i.e Steve Jobs and Jagjit Singh.The reasons though very different, their work in life has formed the pillars of my being and action.

I first got to know JS at the age of 14 , when most of the kids were lost in the cricketing fancies of Sachin. Thanks to the pathetic electricity at my hometown , I was bereft of many of those marvelous innings. However , the walkman that I had was an excellent company along with the then 60 Rs cassette of Sony Crescendo – Marasim.

I was a very thoughtful kid who had always wanted to understand and explore human emotions and JS voice and the lyrics of his ghazals were something I could relate to. My personal life was a collection of many subtle experiences, of which I had used to ponder endlessly.

With every  passing year, the  correlation between my life and the ghazals of JS became closer to the perfect  one.  Infact my first proposal to a girl in Class XIth was a result of one of the Ghazals “ yun mere khat ka jawab aaya”. Although not of JS, one can easily see the influence of Ghazals in my day to day life.

I was never a good student. However, the recipe to study which helped me work it out just fine for my IIT entrance examination was a closed room , with an airy window , a table lamp , black in colour , neatly arranged table  on which in one corner was the Philips tape recorder with JS’ s voice soothing my nerves. It was hours for which I could solve the numerical while listening to his masterpieces.

Thanks to You! The recipe worked and I could clear IITJEE.

Even then the tryst with JS continued while my life resembled a roller coaster. While it was sometimes about love , sometimes sadness , sometimes it was just for the peace of my mind. Yeah , somehow they had found me a way to be at peace.

SJ , too has affected my mind considerably and probably for the rest of my life. SJ for me is an epitome of imagination turned into reality. He is one of those original thinkers who can envision future. The  meaning of the word exciting for me is close to the bitten apple and his thoughts on how to connect the dots or how to stay hungry and foolish.

While at Infosys Services, I was selected as a research scientist in ISRO which I denied to work for Infosys R&D with the inspiration of creating something for the future, very much inspired by the Roark of my real life , SJ.

I kept following Apple closely and the protagonist SJ and his speech in Stanford about living each day was for a long time very close to my heart.

Today I am someone who wants to work on the products/services of the future, help create those, popularize them and make them reach the masses. I am an engineer from the heart , MBA from the mind and a philosopher from the soul, and I thank you both for leading me become what I am today.

Although I always thought there will be a day I could meet you, I think it shall have to wait till I give back to the world from the mind , heart and soul just as you both did !!! RIP...

Kamino!! I am missing u

Long time , more than thousand days gone… when I did see all of your faces together, some at canteen and others at library and yet others on the lanes of heaven on earth .. ruby hostel. Yes ruby hostel to me was a secret and sacred place to me,  with beauty and brains residing at the same place (though not in the same bodies eventually). But yes , most in the hell(read boys hostel) did consider it as a magical place , some even querying the ex-mess workers of ruby. Not difficult to guess why the fired/replaced/resigned employees of ruby hostel had guaranteed openings in guys hostels . In fact  they were quite popular with the chamatkari(can do an 3idiots inspired Cntrl H) souls of the hell.

I still remember when I met a timid soul who went on to be my roommate and one of the best buddies in the queue for Admission and then of med-check. A south Indian look, rimmed specs and the disciplined trudging to the admission room made him a serious candidate for fully faltu awards(read gold medal, best outgoing stud etc). I am glad that my , in fact our company made him graduate into a smart and cool stud , not to mention without the load of any faltu award. He realized the eternal gyaan of chillaxing even while the world awaits an apocalypse. We did help him in realizing that he is way sharper than others when he could get above average marks with less than average efforts. In other words we shaped his life …. Oh ok .. no thanks required here… that’s what we are good at .

Those were not the days of cheap mobile phones and of course 99 % of the best students are from poorest/most logical of the families in India, none of us were in the elite 1% group. We used to queue up for calling our sweet dens thousands of miles away and to try to fake the hell we were in saying “Aal izz well”, while thinking of doing the murga rounds in the morning. And it was just perfect if there are 10 people in the 10*10 room with one phone where you are cooing to the tunes of “ haan Maa” and “sab badiya” and the rest 9 doing a copy paste in turns. In this agreeable scene, comes the protagonist, talking sheepishly  “Nahi hum sultanpur wapas aa rahe hain, yahan nahi padhenge, yeh bahut kharab college hai , phir se IIT kka taiyaari karenge”. This was the opener of Comp Science branch in ISM in 2002, a born genius who had made the 200% of whatever little life had given him. But now when his dreams were just within his reach, he said “ I QUIT”. Nonetheless, with chums like us and 4 years with inmates of heaven and  hell, he never did quit but turned out to be a super programmer who was just little aimless.

Room no 166 was the devil’s zone with the nawab of faizabad and the ghulam of B.C( read bekar ki chamari if u don’t yet know full form) dwelling together. The nawab’s extra mild concentration and the ghulam’s never ending punches made this place the best place in hell. Here you could learn the art of procrastinating at its best and what more, never regret an ounce about the same. Here you could learn the art of silent eloquence, how to piss off someone by speaking once in a million years. Here you could learn the laws of nature …... you could try changing destiny but why take the risk of making it worse J. Here you could squeeze in 10 people on one bed and enjoy the blissful sun through the window in the winter and spread yourself on the floor, besides the not so smelly shoes and fall in love with the cold floor. Here you could learn to live without doing anything meaningful in life and yet die laughing.

Can a dacoit’s name be Mr good ? Why not …. We had a murderer amongst us whom we called the doc. He looked like a doctor, and we were fooled by his looks. Don’t believe me, you should have tried studying with him in the examination days. The lightning speed with which he cruises the photocopied notes would kill your years of reading aptitude. The exuberance with which he had everything by rote would make you feel you are ghajni(memory loss patient). Ten minutes into the examination hall, when you are contemplating the answers to the abstruse questions , the doc would shout at the top of his voice “ Sir Sheet” and there will be collective “Oh Shit!” chant in the minds of rest 288 folks including you. And yes , he would finally kill you when the results are out and his scores would be soaring high on the list and on asking how .. the engineer would reply “ jyada sochega tho yahi hoga … rat liya kar na”. I urge the doctors to apply for the possession of his brain and eyes, I am sure it’s not human.

Well I did come across many heinous creatures like me in the hell but I don’t know why an angel was there too. Later I came to know he was not an angel , but a love beast, who was going to do nothing in the next 4 years other than love a girl and love her beastly. His love would make him throw coffee mugs at others (of course with the coffee in it, still hot), try to strangulate an elephant sized kid and run marathons to try to rip apart any inmate of the hell who would speak of his seemingly failed love… here was our own love monster who was otherwise calm and tender except for the utterance about his love.

Humanoids is future but the living Database engine came into the world long back in the 1980’s. Somehow his DBMS systems coupled with the beautiful lanes of Kanpur had made him to reach hell where beauty was a sparse matrix, and the matrix downloaded and stored for infinity in this mean machine. The query processing time is also close to that of the best super computers of the world and the feature description was statistically and emotionally excellent. Lesser humans, who apply for Doc’s brain , please seek his too. He is so good at heart that he might give it to you for free…..(to be continued..)

Please leave your comments if you find the above worthy of it .. It shall motivate me to post more of my aimless ramblings