A Precious Heartache

Our Satyam Days, part XXXII

All the years we spent working together as a team, despite GG's haranguing presence hovering like a hefty-person ghostly spectre in the aural atmosphere of our workstation, have faded into a labyrinth of memories, warts and all, that perhaps few wish to revisit as they remain unremembered in the depths of forgetfulness, edified by the thrill of constantly moving on in the name of progressing in life, with no desire to glance back at the olden world we left behind, not even once.

Those Satyam memories have lost their sway over us. At least for some of us, it did. On second thought, it did—not that it didn't. However, we departed from Satyam a long time ago, so I realize it is much too far gone in the past to even consider writing about it as a memoir on my blog, a second (and last) memoir at that. However, I could recount a few stories from our time at Satyam that truly warmed my heart, and I still live by them today.

Taking a little journey down this memory lane has been quite an experience, reminding me just how valuable our memories can be! That's why I’ve intended to confess—without making it sound too dramatic—that Satyam's memories still occupy my mind like the smell of old-world charm, the sound of the Nescafe coffee machine that lounged in the vestibular corridor between our 5th-floor East Wing and the West Wing, sunlight falling on the glass-fronted bluey windows insulating the veneer of the technological wizardry inside from the externals of the steel-grey lake and beyond — the old sweet ache of that past timeframe of our life, a lifetime ago. This blog, however, is the last but one passage about a time that is not too far off in the past, but is close to my heart.

After I complete writing this, I will lay my pen to rest, even as all those Satyam days flash before my eyes, for without us, nothing would exist. Time and tide wait for no one. Sometimes, this nostalgic dream feels too big to chase.

The real reason I wrote these chapter-by-chapter presentations is that I've been feeling a deep sense of, how shall I put it, cultural nostalgia in my heart aching for weeks, months, and years, in the form of writing that I had done for the last few months, starting from Memory Crossing, the first part (among thirty-one others) of my second Satyam memoir. Slowly taking into account narrative portrayals of everything that once existed as beautiful moments between this late present and that old past, that is how all my memories of that era are resurfacing as I write, emerging into my nostalgic consciousness from the depths of my memory.

(I haven’t forgotten; there are still many decks of stories that I haven't covered. I could write more compelling narratives to fuel at least thirty more blog pieces, but thirty is a good number: plenty of stories here, and I won't be continuing past this last and final Satyam memoir.)

Those Satyam days, for some of us friends, I think, may have been misinterpreted as 'nostalgic sentimentality,' ultimately becoming undesired antiques like some archaic software or hardware that has outlived its efficacy, and no one seems to favour them anymore. Can't blame them. After all, who likes to squander time needlessly dwelling upon bygones? Let the past remain the past, existing solely in our memories, remembered only in our thoughts.

Don't look back because you're moving forward, not backward: That might have been the general feeling among most of us friends. Some of us may not have been able to feel awe-inspiring nostalgia for our Satyam days. Considering this, Revathy and Rafi have neatly written off our brief but significant Satyam affiliation as unnecessary and redundant while appreciatively carving out their niche in different time zones of independent countries, leading a well-deserved life that is both fulfilling and joyful.

But I see nostalgia differently: through a personally profound prism that deepens its significance and cannot be overlooked.

Good old times have moved down the road of time, conveniently forgetting that the past was best, as nostalgia for them served no purpose. Too bad they are already gone. Everybody has moved on. Too bad that I have moved on… he he…, but memories remain and will remain as long as I have them, and that is for life. All that has happened since then is that a lot of water has passed under the bridge, and workplace friendships waned as time went on with its forward-marching determination… to reach where? Eternity? That’s so tame if you ask me. If nostalgic memories were roads to our past days, then they, sadly, were the roads less travelled by the unforgettable Satyam folks I have been chattering about here. I promise that this will be the last chance to convey my thoughts, which is why I am writing to evoke that memorable feeling of nostalgia for our Satyam days that refuses to die down.

(Unfortunately, Satyam was destroyed in the late 2000s, 2009 precisely. Due to deliberate financial mismanagement and corporate fraud, its owner fell bankrupt by committing the largest business scandal in India, from which neither he, his company, nor his management cohorts ever recovered. You reap what you sow, damn fools).

None of us stayed, I presume, for that long at Satyam. (When I left, Suresh, Devi, Renju, and possibly even Gnana, all of whom I've slowly lost touch with, were still working at that company, albeit in different office branches in HYD. As things stood, Mandeep bonded with GG soon after, only to secure an appointment at his newly incorporated friend's company. Shiv and Shahnawaz were among the earliest to depart. Kavitha had left long ago, long before almost all of us. A few years later, however, and before the end of 2001, we said our quiet goodbyes to the extraordinary realm of Satyam, a place we had loved and admired from the day we joined it in 1998. Those days are now a precious heartache.)

Until 2009, none of us had remained at Satyam for so long. Before Satyam became entangled in a financial scandal and ultimately ceased operations in 2009, we had already anticipated the future, drawing on our collective IT experience and the strong influence of our Satyam origins in our thoughts. By 2004/5, I believe most of us had moved on from the company to pursue other endeavours in search of more promising possibilities in the realm of information technology. Regrettably, human greed has done in the technology titan of a company like Satyam.

Satyam was an excellent workplace, and I often reminisce about the time spent there, particularly in our cosy, spacious cubicle with three workstations, three Panasonic landlines, and a built-in wardrobe with shelves stacked with blank CDRs, mobile roaming manuals, and other paraphernalia on the 5th floor of the East Wing at TSR Towers on Raj Bhavan Road.

And yet, those days will never return, and I harbour no illusions that they will. Of course, they will not. We have lost those days. Sigh.

By Arindam Moulick

The Bittersweet Reality

Our Satyam Days, part XXXI

Long after leaving Satyam and having been in IT professionally since 1998 at that fine home-grown technology enterprise, actually a year before that, but that is another thing called professional practice, Mandeep, our fellow associate whose sense of humour could kill a cow, finally planned to switch his career track, wanting to call it quits (discontinuation, to be sure) on his IT profession altogether.

To do something like that was brave; it takes more than just guts to take such a wilful step. More than that, let's say that when it comes to altering one's career track, an astute degree of action intelligence, a sharp sense of judgment, and a deft sense of humour were never in short supply, as was supposed to have been acted upon.

While his determination to act as he did was commendable, it was not reckless. If he had found himself entangled in a situation of his own devising, it could have been. Being capable of making bold decisions when necessary was his natural forte — his inherent ability to invent compelling humour, laugh, empathize, and have an alacritous view of the world around him allowed him to make audacious choices when needed: that was his style. In the face of any indecisiveness, he somehow seemed to excel: that much one knew he was a seasoned connoisseur who knew how to steer life in an orderly fashion, of placing it on an even keel that worked wonders for him as others could observe and learn from this cultivated, comedic, be-turbaned gentleman, who proudly hailed from the boulder hills of Banjara.

Because Mandeep was the most practical man who was up and about at Satyam of those days, with a singular insight of humour that never got impacted by anything untoward that typically came in the form of verbal assaults from our boss whose teeth-gnashing name called GG was enough to make matters worse, he could do it — taking an unconventionally desperate measure of change into account to ensure his career continued to flourish after his time in Satyam — and he made those choices count. Nonetheless, if he wanted to move past the incredible Satyam years and pursue a new career path, exiting the Information Technology (IT) sector entirely was the sole realistic alternative he could realistically think of, and it was a stroke of genius that had been working in his favour ever since. That way, he excelled beyond what these mere words could convey about his professional journeys and conquests alike.

Mandeep joined a prominent real estate infra arm of the house of Satyam and quickly rose to the position of Senior Manager. Surprisingly, he became quite proficient in this non-native field. His transition from IT to non-IT allowed him to experience the merry-go-round-the-world of Property Realty, which he navigated with great aplomb before leaving the IT domain in a short time.

Good on him, though, since that bold career move, the sense of professional freedom he probably experienced, paid off for him in a way few people can venture in such a radical way. So kudos to him.

+*+*+*+

On the other hand, I planned to hit the hotspots of what lay ahead, post the Y2K brouhaha of 1999/00 and the dotcom bubble of early 2000s, in the IT arena and desired to become a Senior Consultant, first in Project Management, then MIS (Management Information System), and finally rapid and head-controlled headlong plunge into hard-core software and systems management, which was (and still is) my bread and butter, thanks to some age-old software engineering I had done from somewhere in some other era.

After that time of unexpected upheavals in Satyam, Revathy and Rafi, Renju and Gnana, Devi and Suresh — have all moved on to new creative positions in thrilling new directions, taking the separate paths they have chosen for themselves. With the sole exception of Mandeep, having launched himself cathartically into the active centre of the hurricane conventionally called the private Real Estate Infra sector, which had been amply providing excellent career opportunities since the mid-2000s, or so it genuinely seemed then. Everyone else, however, continued steadfastly with IT, including me—I couldn't just leave Satyam and go away because I didn't think of change—quite sudden and upfront as it was for me to grapple with, in the best way possible as all my colleagues could easily do so and move on to the next step in their career path.

Talking about change, nevertheless, Kavitha was an early adopter of change: a ‘frontiersperson’ if you will, a pioneer among the Satyam peers, who sought it out and used it to her advantage, capitalizing on them by shifting her direct-hit focus and resources toward the United States. Quite understandably, or as one would expect, she never looked back since then: American life devoured her wholly and completely, without a burp, and she settled in that country. (Virtually no social news about our hocking-mocking West Wing devil, Chicha's (alias GG) preferred pupil, Ann Mary R., the front office exec who married and later left Satyam to settle down and raise a family).

+*+*+*+

After getting back to HYD—which was sadly increasingly becoming traffic-dense, getting more and more congested and overcrowded to the point of madness, where the once-famous laid-back Kaiku-Nakko way of life was starting to feel hardly the same anymore—I joined a New York-based multinational IT products and software solutions company, which enjoyed significant business success till the Great Recessionary funk of 2007/8 hit the world, inflicting a heavy blow from which it never really recovered. I remember shuddering for some time before safely moving on to other greener pastures. And that was that.

Towards the end of the 2000s, many successful local IT establishments in the city doing good business began to brand themselves as "multinational" or “global” because they had several office branches in the U.S. and the European regions, though mostly U.S. ones were the brighter spots projects-wise as there were multiple projects to work on, effectively managing cross-project, intertwined dependencies. Leveraging project management software tools like SharePoint, MS Visio, etc., juggling multiple projects simultaneously became simple and less complex. If truth be told, I am already becoming too weary and tired if you ask me about this whole ‘multinational,’ ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ (AI) ‘low-code, no-code development,’ 'Machine Learning,' etc. technological new wave—these so-called ‘breakthrough technologies’ are already displacing full-time IT specialists who diligently have to master the latest and newest technology in the constantly evolving workplace—that has come upon us (like oh-no-not-again ominous storm clouds, disorders, if you like), which is kinda arduously tiring, truthfully speaking. Despite all that potentially helpful way of doing business, I played along in a status quo-ish way only to be able to earn my daily bread and butter, as I noted previously.

Changing Times. Priorities. That Is What It Was

As time passed, it seemed that everyone became less interested in our lively group of Satyam friends, and I believe I did too, in a way, because times have changed, and so have the perspectives regarding things that have become part of the past. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge.

Changing times and changing needs, perhaps, have taken over us all.

Suresh, whom Mandeep jokingly called "Truck Driver Suraj," rhyming it with one of Mithun Chakraborty's dialogues in a Hindi movie, and not that Suresh drove a truck to office, God forbid, probably felt the same way as both Mandeep and Devi, snapping us all into the ugly reality of the world once we were outside Satyam, a world, understandably, much meaner than we used to know or suspect when we began our IT careers quite a while back. Our Satyam friends were good, mature buddies, but the harsh outside world took over all our lives completely and utterly, me included.

There was no merciful escape; there never is, there never was, from the harsh realities of being ordinarily a software professional in the new millennium as we all transitioned from the dream castle of our familiar career landscapes that Satyam Computers on the Raj Bhavan Road had equipped us to the gossamer threads of the messed-up, chaotic challenges of the outside world looming with job-sized AI (Artificial Intelligence) perdition, filled with unfamiliar mentalities and even discomforting, trembling, unsettling physicality of typically bittersweet experiences that played at unexplored, uncharted workplaces of today.

While it's factual that modern workplaces cannot be 'charted' or 'explored' (the operative phrases I used in the previous line), the same way one would navigate a historical museum or a movie studio, yes, but one wishes the fundamental essence of the office environment to be rooted in the collaborative relationships and participatory cultures of productive employees coming together to foster a vibrant hub of entrepreneurial creativity and scholarly productivity rather than a static location to engage with.

At Satyam, we've garnered an array of understandings of the topics addressed herein whenever opportunities arose, positioning ourselves at the forefront of this essential conversation.

By Arindam Moulick

A Comedic Office Moment

Our Satyam Days, part XXX

Mandeep and I sometimes affectionately called Devi "Sexy Devi." A nickname that, while playful, had nothing to do with physical attraction. Instead, it reflected the unique chemistry we shared in our relationship as warm and friendly office colleagues, which made each of us feel attractive in our own right.

Mandeep’s comedic repertoire, which anyone with a sense of humour could appreciate, constantly filled his head with new, laugh-worthy thoughts that stuck with him like a second skin! Spurred on by this humorous game, Devi took it on enthusiastically, which brought us joy and deepened the charm of our friendship. And Devi liked the nickname very much.

Devi chuckled wholeheartedly when we first called him, "Hi, Sexy Devi, how are you?" He expressed astonishment at first as if not addressed to him but, oh god, someone else, and said, "I am... what...? SEXY…? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, Mandeep?! Kindly be specific!” Devi played along, and before saying anything else, he said with a naughty twinkle in his eyes: “Really…?”

Mandeep said, "Yes, man, you are TOO MUCH, Devi! I can’t get any more specific than this! You are sexier than sexy could be," without hesitation. Devi and I laughed as Mandeep's unapologetic humour shone through.

Devi laughed for a while, and since he was on a break and GG—our strong-willed human meat of a boss; incalculable rudeness was the strongest part of his personality, his effortless forte—was out of the office, he said, "Thanks for that ‘sexy’ compliment, Mandeep! Chalo, come on, let's go grab some coffee. I'll call Suresh to join us in the meeting room."

"Hunh…Haan... chalo chaltein hain re…, just give me 2 minutes. Oye!... thiss iss tooo muchhh yaarr…let me send this out," Mandeep said before finishing his task of report generation and sending a crucial operational email alerting one of our clients.

Looking at the good-natured Devi’s peart facial expression, I couldn't avoid laughing at his reaction to Mandeep’s remark about him being “Sexy.” It was a laughter-house!

On another day, Devi laughed when he considered teasing Mandeep in return. He joked, "You are so sexy too, Mandeep! Look at you!" Mandeep turned to face Devi and chuckled aloud as though he had proclaimed something surprisingly perceptive that caused everyone to erupt in amusing laughter in the cubicle. "And just look at Arindam!" Devi said, his tone too concise for comedy, but he was getting at it as he stood beside the open cubicle where Mandeep and I worked, hands resting on the wooden barrier, teasing Mandeep to his heart's content. "He is so attractive, sexy even!"

On hearing something like that from Devi, I pursed up my lips and made a serious face that was about to burst into laughter!

All of us made merry even as I declared to one and all present in our spacious cabin: "But Devi, you are sexy, sexier than me!" And I meant it when I alluded it to him: "Just give me a man as "sexy" as Devi, and I shall sail my humble boat into the last sunset!” That was once my favourite dialogue; I learned it from somewhere.

Mandeep revved up his imaginary Mustang and stated, "YEAH...didn't I say that before!" Apparently, the feeling was mutual, and Devi giggled.

The funny, quirky things when we joked around with each other in person or on the intercom were the best part of our days at Satyam! Devi was very sportive about everything anyone from our team said anything about him, and conversely, everyone seemed to take a leaf out of his book to learn how to be sporty and laugh at oneself when required. Life should be on an even keel, he seemed to suggest, not on—god forbid—spiky cacti.

Just then, Renju — a very pious soul who sounded, to us all, like a Magpie singing songs of love and longing for her lovely homestead in the deep south, where palm trees, backwater lakes, and lagoons abound: God's own country — entered our cubicle to check something with us. Thank heavens she was not in the cabin when we were joking around, our little bonhomie between us gentlemen. She smiled her hazel smile: her teeth seemed to dance in the whitest splendour (as though of the enchanting backwaters of her idyllic hometown) that you don't see pretty often until you work with someone as a friendly, pleasant associate of the team, and said, "Oh…kya chal raha hai...?"

"Kuch nahin…bas…" I said before adding, "Devi, Mandeep, Suresh, and I are going to get coffee. Do you want to come along?" She declined reasonably because she needed to get to GG's cabin quickly and apprise him of a pressing problem regarding a persistent technical issue that had been bothering him like a high-strung demon-possessed alligator! He wanted to get it fixed... "first thing in the morning." She promised to join us some other time.

Then Gnana came into the cabin, moving about with enormous curiosity for something he urgently wanted access to from our cabin. He hammered on the keyboard placed at the back but couldn't locate it. He then banged up the cupboard and peered inside, speaking to himself, "Nope, sorry, I didn't get what I wanted, or I got it, but I'm not telling yet." That was a good comedy show.

I said, "Hmmm... Gnana. Anything particular you are looking for?"

"None whatsoever. See you guys later," said Gnana, breezing through the short hallway by the HP printer station towards another hall on the right.

Before we could invite him to 'coalesce' with us for coffee from the excellent Nescafe espresso coffee machine, he went off again marching like a lumberjack on a mystery mission, perhaps, to the adjoining hall where he and Renju often camped together, programming their way through the other project they worked on—apart from the primary one on which Mandeep, Shiv, Shahnawaz and I had worked under GG's tutelage—diving into the minor/major or microscopic technical deficiencies (if any found) of the code blocks, testing the software application, troubleshooting, and the good old bug fixing.

I said to Devi, "Yeah…, let's take a break, shall we?" before having finished a few marketing reports and storing them in the 'common folder,' which only our team has view (read) and modify (write) access to. (Every marketing report due that day had to be delivered to every client by EOD; otherwise, a delay of even one day would subject you to GG-specific fatalities). While we strode to the Nescafe Espresso coffee dispenser machine in the green-marbled corridor, I jokingly added, "Is Chicha joining us by any chance?"

Everyone chuckled!

By Arindam Moulick

Alternative titles considered for this blog: “The Legend of ‘Sexy’ Devi,” and “Devi: A Sexy Legend!”