Wednesday, March 04, 2015

Moment of reckoning

I had come back from office at around 6:00 PM and it had been a rainy day. Office work was very hectic and often schedule used to be very irregular, like going to office post lunch and returning back early next day. This had been the norm for almost 2 months. We were working on a peer to peer file sharing system and which rivaled Napster. Work was very interesting and involved lots of learning

Santosh had been heading Knoxware and he came across as a very astute businessman. His communication and articulation style were very impressive. He was a very practical person and knew very well on how to get the things done

It was my first encounter with enterprise level product development. Technologies used were C++ and wxWindows. This was Linux equivalent of MFC but provided cross platform compatibility. There was no machine generated code, but we had to write the framework code as well. For a person who was used to MFC, this provided a platform to write all the code and learn in great depth on how the framework behaves

Project had been in a very critical phase and there was immense pressure on the team members to deliver faster than expected

I received a call on that rainy day from Santosh right after I reached home. I had not been well and hence had come home early. But circumstances were such that I had to get back to office at the earliest and told Santosh I’ll be there in some time. Right after that I received calls from the PJM and the Tech lead and they were telling me not to come. But I decided against it. It was raining heavily so I had to stop mid-way near Richmond circle. I called up Santosh and told him that it would take some more time for me to come

I reached office at around 9:00 PM and fully drenched. I could see a sense of gratitude and relief in the eyes of Santosh. I could not step into the office lest the floor would get wet. He immediately took me to his house and gave a pair of fresh clothes. We came back to office and started the marathon work session. Every person would have a moment of reckoning and I think this was mine. I’m not sure till date whether he valued me so much, but I believe this moment turned it around

 I went back to my parent organization after the completion of my tenure at Knoxware. We met again after a month or so during the house warming ceremony of Harsha. This was in 2002. Since then we have not met in person. Whenever I go to US I make it a point to call him or when he is India, we speak over phone. Our friendship has grown over the years and we remain good friends till date even though it has been more than 13 years since we have met

posted by Vikram Attiganal @ 9:48 PM

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