1997, An Era Has Passed, Part 1

In times like these who do you turn to but friends who’d understand and empathize with you.

Sitaram and Karthik

Sitaram and Karthik were right there for me, and I for them. Regrettably, I was the first to make an exit out of Segorsoft (name changed, not the real name) after having just put in a year of service there.

Unfortunately, I had no other option, I had to move on. Perhaps, I could’ve stayed back and clocked a couple more years, at least for the sake of my beloved colleagues-turned-friends Sitaram and Karthik, and yet they, I knew, would never have approved of such a thing. Maybe, one must do what one thinks is best, but it was damn hard to arrive at a decision of sorts that will take me away from my well-beloved friends.

On the contrary, they’d entreat me to move on if there’s a better opportunity available for me elsewhere. Decisions taken based on emotional attachment(s) could go wrong; they’d simply say that to put some energized confidence in me. Besides, just another look at that good-for-nothing scumbag of a project leader called TP Cheddi would have anybody scampering off the job place for good!

The day when I resigned Sitaram was visibly hurt and upset even. Surely we would miss writing software codes day in and day out on the same computer we worked on huddled together. Now those days are all going to be over.

Delphi and Visual Basic software tools became a part of our daily staple on which we lived and persevered throughout our tenure at Segorsoft. What's more, it was actually Delphi that we enjoyed using more than VB and was more compatible with InterBase – a back-end database handler. VB was good enough, but Delphi took our breath away. There was something special about it that we never could do away with entirely. Both Sitaram and I eventually had to learn Visual Basic on the job and the fact that it was most similar to our favourite tool Delphi in its usage we automatically became experts in just over a month. Therefore in that sense, it was hardly a big deal.

Our Mutual Friends

Sitaram looked as if he was deeply wounded and displeased at the same time when I first told him about the new job prospect that was coming up and that I was seriously thinking about it.

I knew he and Karthik would vehemently disapprove of my looking out for a new job. Because it was tantamount to no less than a ‘betrayal’ when someone from your friends' group is actually trying to get out for some good job offers, I did not have the useless courage to get cheesy and tell the very people who mattered to me the most during my one year spell at the company upfront of the new job prospect that I was considering.

The point of the matter is that a year at Segorsoft had been enough, especially for three of us guys to make pledges of friendship to last a lifetime, and beyond so to speak. So why should there be at all any question of breaking away from the deep bond we shared at the workplace? Bonding with them was the most profound part of my life at Segorsoft (other than that it was work though, for obvious reasons). Work anyway had to be done but at Segarsoft its share of space and time always had to come first before our precious friendship could matter a bit more at the workplace. Work was in a way worship for us threesome friends. Having said that, it really doesn’t mean that work had to go through some kind of delay or it suffered due to the profound solidarity of our friendship that almost always had us in a great spell of camaraderie.

After I came away and joined the now-defunct Satyam Computers and completed about a year there, I got a phone call from the charming Sitaram saying that Karthik too gave up his job at Segarsoft to join a software company dealing in online learning and software development concerning e-commerce and stuff. Just then I knew that in all probability he too was harbouring dreams of his own to make it to the US. I was mighty pleased for Karthik knowing that he had finally left Segorsoft for good even as a couple of other colleagues of his too had begun giving prior notices one after the other. This is not to undermine Segorsoft as a software development company, what with all its extant learning opportunities and project work it could provide us, but let the truth be told: what it did not, however, offer us young guns was a learning ambiance and cheerful project leaders who had a great sense of humour and would readily pilot the team without being bossy and channelize the team's latent energies into becoming competent professionals. The one project leader we knew at Segorsoft was the project leader we despised.

It was not at all hard to expect good companionship from individuals (such as the one described above) in charge there. True professionalism was something unheard of. Apart from that fact all else was going well for this upstart software development company.

Yet, my heart ached for Sitaram: one of the rising stars on the IT firmament, who, once upon a time, had decidedly taken his own sweet time before he thought it fit to call it quits from Segorsoft.

Sitaram, a Kumar Sanu look-alike, was ostensibly looking for the bigger picture! He wanted out surely, but the US of A was also his ‘ultimate ransom’ he had an eagle eye out for to be able to seize his chance. Good for him. In the late 1990s, that was every budding software engineer’s dream destination. I too had dreamed of going to the US and so did the adorable Karthik, an Adrian Brody look-alike. It was a big-time necessity for us, young software engineers, to be able to fetch the ‘hindering’ H1-B visa stamped on our passports and then, as they used to say, “Push off to the US” for good.

Some youngsters went to the US on account of parental pressure or some kind of societal show-off exercise, or even the kind you get to see most often – making hay while the sun shines! Of course, like always, there were exceptions; at least Sitaram and Karthik come from the group of associates who think of ‘professional sustenance’ rather than bide time to push off to the US while it still is possible for them to do so. I can vouch for the fact they were not the types who would bask in the reflected glory of others or believe in easy pickings. Like the people who believed in themselves, they too worked hard just like a conscientious person who prefers taking no ‘shortcuts’ but learns it the hard way to attain his goals.

Such “Pushing off to the US” kind of people who wrote software codes is no surprise really if you ask me because in those days it was perfectly normal to dream to go there, it is okay even now. But it came so out of the blue from Sitaram B. that I and Karthik Krishna had to take a bow and gladly give an echoing round of applause for him. Sitaram was not known for harbouring such what he called ‘colourful ambitions’ but he did after all and we realized that, eventually, to our much relief. At the end of the day, he did exactly what he thought was capable of. He had earned his jackpot after he got married and left for the US and never returned. And that’s another story for another day.

Thankfully all those years of life’s centrifugal forces and the push and pull of one’s own personal ambition towards achieving career fulfillment – as today Arindam is enabling himself to see, loud and clear – have been summarized into one big synopsis, unedited yet manageable for posterity’s sake. A gravitational pull so hard and binding to the land of his origin that flying off to the US for work like his friends Sitaram and Karthik had done never came to him as an opportunity. This statement probably sounds self-importantly sky-scraping in its feel, if you’d know what I mean, but still, what Arindam got in the milieu of his own life’s bargain is not what he always sought to have even as he had later found out to his utter amazement the reason for his not making it to where every software engineer worth his salt went.

The ‘software engineer’ tag that had fastened a proverbial noose around his neck during his heydays and that which, as a matter of fact, was supposed to be a big ticket to IT glory, was never easy for him to have plucked out or gotten rid of just like that. Never mind the sticker of ‘consolation prize’ he thought he would never really come to such a pass to deserve, and the prize stuck, overpoweringly or naturally, to his long professional work history like a parasitical leech that never let go.

At least Sitaram is doing fine and constantly winning his life’s battles in the US of A, but alas! Karthik, our sweet little adorable Karthik is no more. Karthik departed this life; he came back to India not like someone so full of life and verve but as someone who spoke not a word or two… He said he would come back and then we all would celebrate his coming. A good year and a half passed by and there was no sign of him, even an occasional email or two from him had stopped completely, and it kept me wondering why the emails I sent out were never replied to. What’s taking Karthik so long to reply?

Just like last time when he made news by quitting Segorsoft, it was Sitaram who happen to visit my Satyam office to share news about his ‘American’ whereabouts. He was an ever-alert buddy. This time too it was Sitaram again who broke news about Karthik’s sudden death in a car crash in the US in the year 1999/2000.

END OF PART 1 of '1997, AN ERA HAS PASSED.'

By Arindam Moulick

- Written between Sept. 2013 - Apr. 2014.

- This essay is warmly dedicated to my long-lost friends Sitaram and Late Karthik.

- A slightly different version of this article under the same title has been published on EzineArticles.com. Click here to read the article: http://ezinearticles.com/?1997,-An-Era-Has-Passed,-Part-1&id=8964347