Stories from my father land

I attended a ceremony which is conducted when a person reaches his/her 60th birthday. My cousin reached that milestone and decided to invite friends and family to one such ritual based ceremony. If the birthday boy or girl is married at this stage, they celebrate it by having a marriage ceremony. To westerners and uninitiated Indians, this is like renewing your marriage vows. I went to cheer the couple and meet assembled family and friends.
I met quite a few of them after more than a decade.

Having described the context and the setting, I will now come to the gist of this narrative. I was pleasantly surprised that people were keen to narrate incidents about my father to illustrate how much he meant to them. Since it is 14 years since my father died, this was a surprise and a pleasant one as they showed my dad in a brilliant light. One long lost cousin's husband recognised me and it seems it was because my walk was exactly like that of my dad. If my intellect was half as sharp as my dad's, I will be thrilled. A few of them said they still followed his advice and one person has even safely kept a 20 year old letter from my dad.

Every now and then I will meet someone who will feel a kinship with me because of what my father did for them. And very few of these were material things. One person talked about his systematic nature. Another about his meticulousness and yet another person about his fairness.

There was one particular narrative which I had not heard before.
My father, Prof Y Satyamurthy was the CEO of a small sick unit which was taken over by Crompton greaves and he was on Crompton Greaves rolls. This was in Pune and those were the days when Mumbai and many pars of Maharashtra was ruled by labour union leaders. In particular people feared Datta Samant. He was one tough cookie. He walked into the office with some other people who I guess were union office bearers. my Dad was on the other side with his management team. Before a word was spoken my Dad handed over a list and said that those were the management demands. Datta Samant was surprised to say the least. He started raving and ranting that he would not tolerate this. Management could not make demands. My dad said that in those pages he just handed over were the details of what was essential to run the company. If those cannot be met, the talks were over. Datta Samant left fuming and furious.
I cannot vouch for this since this is a second hand narrative. Apparently Datta Samant came back to the table two days later and they reached a quick agreement. Then he said that this was the first management which he had met which had honestly and transparently shared all the details of the company and it's position and that he was impressed with the thoroughness with which this was documented. If this had happened in 24/7 news coverage, my dad would have been more famous. However I am what I am because he did not care to dwell on these since he generally believed in humanity and he cared two hoots about visibility.

What I have learnt from him is that I should be true to myself. I should not laze around because others do or work harder to please others. My father worked very hard and enjoyed it. He lived a hundred years in terms of what he achieved though in chronological terms he only lived till he was 66. I know he is one of my guardian angels since life is generally good to me.

Jobs and Palin-Way of the world

Steve Jobs died at the age of 56,  at what can be considered a young age. Almost every life I know has been touched by Apple and at least one if its products. For some it is buying and enjoying the product. For some like me, it is dealing with incessant demand for money to buy those product. For a very close friend , it was the dilemma of how to get her two sons to share the one precious I=Pod their rich NRI uncle presented. My firs brush with Apple technology was way back in 1986 when a colleague fresh from her PhD in BYU in USA came back with a Mac and she had this "Hide the boss is coming " single click feature which instantly transformed any game you were playing or any frivolous other things you did in office time into a businesslike spreadsheet. Nice touch eh!
I have heard that Steve Jobs did not believe in Market research. I am thankful for that. Collecting opinions from random people who can never imagine how things can be better. I heard many people comparing Jobs to Edison. It seems a very apt comparison. To twist Mark H McCormack's words, "If Steve Jobs had gone to Harvard, we would be typing on bigger keyboards and seeing bigger screens. Thank God he didn't finish college. So the world is worse off for losing someone who could show you a better way.

God (now Steve Jobs is up there to guide him)  works in mysterious ways. While he took away a genius, he saved us as well. I heard an announcement that Sarah Palin has decided to drop out of the presidential race. That brngs a bit of cheer back into my life. I don't know why she decided that. I hope she sticks to it.
I prefer watching her fish, trek, hunt and cook etc. Sarah Palin's Alska is where seems at home and hope she stays there.

Chin up...

101 % cut off

Long long ago in what seems like a different galaxy, I did not get admission to VJTI in Mumbai since my mark was half a per cent below the cut off which was a modest 84%. If my dad had been a defense personnel or better still SC/ST , I would have been in. Not having such luck, I joined B.Sc and life went on quite smoothly in spite of this admission hiccup. I had some 10 marks grace for having been in NSS (National Social Service) under whose umbrella for wo years, I read to a brilliant blind person by the name of Ramakrishnan. I used to read Statistical equations to him and he would instantly grasp it. The point is that if I and my fellow NSS mates had maxed our papers in 12th and had grace marks, the cut off could have been 101 % .

I heard that there were 880 eligible students with a cut off of 100%. Not surprising at all. The irony is that if they didn't have that as the cut off , someone who got 100% could be denied admission.

It is high time we had an exam like SAT which would be common for the state boards, CBSE, ICSE , NIOS and the lucky home tutored students. It is a standard test which can be taken any number of times at convenient times. You do not have to worry if you happen to catch the flu or have a hairline fracture in one of your fingers. And you get the same score irrespective of the evaluators. Sounds heavenly.

The least we can do is track these 100% club members and see where they land up after a decade. That would be an interesting read. TOI, DH , Businessline, are you listening?