Hardly, I wrote anything in English on my own, unless there is a compulsion, whether it is a professional, semi-professional or personal one. I always considered it as a tough assignment and being scared of my clumsiness in handling the situation, usually I try to avoid putting myself in such an embarrassment. This time also when I was requested by one of my students to write something on the occasion of the silver-jubilee meet of our batch of 1985, I got nervous. Strangely enough I committed myself to this something and as usual till the deadline is in the horizon, kept myself oblivious of my commitment. This is a bad show professor! I hope my friends and readers (if any) will excuse my poor response to this wake up call.
I am very proud of my friends. Many of them have become successful engineers, corporate leaders, academicians, administrators, etc. etc. I heard some of them are in the exclusive club of millionaires and a few even are billionaires. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not on their millions and billions my pride is only rested. Think about the year 1985! How many of us could think then that all these crazy boys (and a few girls!) would turn themselves into a fortune runner and have their own companies riding over the technological revolution of the last decade of the twentieth century! Some of my friends have proved their brilliance in academics and obtained national and international recognition in their area of research and development. Personally, I am quite lazy enough to thrive over this network of friendship. But whenever there was an opportunity, I can assure you that there was no lack of warmth in our meet or tele-conversation. I could have recounted many such happy reunions. But to your relief, I would make myself brief and single out one such occasional meet with my friend B.. Guess, who he is! I can assure my batch-mates, it’s not at all a tough proposition!
My friend B dreams of a different world. It is not the world of millionaires and billionaires. It is the world of liberty, equality and fraternity. In our student days at IIT, he inspired me for pursuing these dreams. However, unlike him, I was not bold enough to join this adventure and chose the safe life of an academician. It was after quite some years I went to meet him at his residence. At that point of time, he was running a cooperative of semi-skilled youths, mostly from the family of workers, who lost their jobs due to the closure of factories. He was training them for their employment in IT related industries. He was also heading a few worker unions and, at the same time, working as a technical consultant of a software company of one of our batch-mates. He had to personally earn enough to finance his cooperative. I have mentioned all these to show the multitude of his personality and the capacity with which he can move along.
On my entrance, I found him in his informal attire sitting on a large barren cot and deeply involved with the laptop literally on his lap. On his right side, there was a teen-aged boy learning coordinate geometry from him. On his left, a thin and lean young man was keenly looking at the laptop kneeling down at the edge of the cot. As I came to know, he was satisfying his queries on some features of network programming in JAVA. In front of him, a well dressed young beautiful lady was seated on a chair with some expectation. She was an insurance agent and usually received help from B through his contacts. There was also another middle aged person formally dressed with suit and tie. He was looking for investment related advice from B. As soon as I entered, without moving his head or eye, B gave me a warm welcome, “Ay! Ay! Bose! (Welcome! Take a seat.). Let me submit my assignment to my client! It’s almost over.” He did it within a minute over the wireless internet from his laptop and turned towards me with a big bearded smile! It is very difficult not to be proud of such a person in this crazy world!
12/06/09
