Roomie !

There are times...good times we spend, which we realize only long after. This thinking in retrospect and then brooding over had I done that ...and had I not is something I have been dealing with for quite sometime.


During my brief stint at Uncle Sam's country, I had this roomie. He was a mad Bong. Quasi-American or at least that’s how he liked to put it. The term madness is pretty relative. It starts from absolute craziness and tends towards absolute indifference and it largely depends on the extent of madness that you have handled before. This roomie of mine with a heart of gold was somewhere perfectly balanced in the middle of craziness and indifference. If ever in life you have seen a freaky computer geek for whom the whole world was around Data structures, algo's, AI's, DNA structures then this guy was actually a lot different. Now that you are confused how Data Structure can go along with DNA, I must state that I am more than undereducated to explain that. He seemed to have figured out a way to interpret the DNA structures with Data Structures or something like that. At time people say Ignorance is Bliss. What I figured out was Ignorance was by choice. Anyway I could not make out the head and tail out of the lectures that he used to give, not that I was really trying, but I always appreciated his effort. You had to, when you see someone sleeping 4 hours a day by choice just to dedicate himself to such R&D. More so when for someone like me who could not fathom class, inheritance of OOP in 2 years, and seeing someone using it like ping pong balls, a sense of respect is bound to generate automatically.


By the time I had left the country, this guy had credited to himself a book that helped thousand people solve thousand problems that was published by a well known publisher. My claim to fame- well a few pictures I had taken on my digicam for the book, and some countless lunches and dinners I had cooked for him during this time. Its not that I didn't enjoy my stay with him. He was really funny with a decent sense of humor and nice to hang around with. We used to travel a lot together and good part was, these are the times probably a miniscule of his entire life that he spent not thinking about all those #####.


Having said all that I was amazed at this guy's capability of trusting people right from the word go. It was just that we did hit off well from the very acquaintance stage and now we are really good friends. Had it not been like that i would have never really got to know this person, who is one of his kind altogether. Never ever he realized that going into a good restaurant and asking the waiter to deliver whatever was best was actually asking him to come and rob him off. I still remember those waiters taking the onus of selecting delicacies that never tasted like they were supposed to when ordered and trust me they were like dipped in French Wine, then prepared in heaven and transported to earth for his royal highness to savor.


People who belong to the generation prior to ours have a strange notion of solving every problem with marriage. It doesn’t always work, but at times it does. For thus guy it was a miracle of sorts. We still have chat over phone; most of it is spent in discussing what he had for lunch and dinner, prepared by his loving wife. Considering the kind of involvement he had with books and technical journals when people around him spent most of the time appreciating the beauty of the opposite sex, this is a change that must have taken a herculean effort. I truly appreciate his wife and I believe she is any day a better manager than most of us have at office. Having stayed with him and seen everything first hand, I must say this lady can give the IVY League grads a run for their money.