Happy hour

Ankan (Saha), a very favourite old boy, came visiting yesterday. His classmate and one-time batchmate Raunak Chandak the budding businessman and car aficionado who never forgets to let me drive the latest acquisition of his accompanied him. We had a fun three hours chatting.

Ankan was a whiz kid all through. He sailed through school, studied at IIT Kanpur on scholarship, flew off to the US, got a PhD in computer science from the U. of Chicago, is currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area and commuting to work at Mountain View, working on research at Linkedin. By Indian middle-class standards, he is, of course, top of the heap. Thinking of a startup: who knows but sometime soon he might be another zillionaire. But that is not why I have always had a soft corner for him…

First, despite rough patches and long gaps, he has always been fond of me (I think) and kept in touch. Second, it was he who got me into blogging: this thing owes its existence to him. Third, the poor boy lost his dad too early, and the coping has been hard, but he seems to have done well. Fourth, though unlike his batchmate Nishant (Kamath), we talk much less often, it is always good when we do. Three hours passed by in a flash: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, Ankan and Raunak. We talked of – let me see – science, math, computers, economics, big business, history, movies, marriage, culture or the lack of it where we respectively live, books we have read recently, exercise, travelling, batchmates of theirs whom I know and how much they have changed or not, fun aspects of social psychology... I forget the rest. It set me wondering what it is about female ex students that they rarely visit, and hardly have anything interesting to talk about!

Thank you for coming, Ankan. And thanks for City of Djinns (Nishant, if you are reading this, we collectively remembered how good the Colorado whisky was! So thank you, too). Take care. May life shower its choicest blessings on you all. And keep a little more closely in touch…