Digging Into The Past Through Photographs

Photograph is more 'graphic' than pic, because it actually shows you a graph of your journey through life. Particularly when you are going through a lockdown like the present Covid-19 -20 one, you have some time to look back at the life you lived.

I have been enjoying this part of the lockdown- looking back at life through photos or pics. It helped that my parents were photography buffs, because that means I have a lot to look back on. Here are a few nuggets..

 With grandmom. (above)
SSB Selections which I failed.. no. 12 (below)

 With parents who were visiting the US. (above), and nieces, ditto, with their parents.

 My first day in the U.S, June 1986, with my brother.
My first day in a Gondola, Venice, 1987.

 Fooling around at a European beach, with sand covering.
My colleagues in ad agency New Horizons, CP, Delhi. (below)

 My sister, wife, and friends, Hyderabad terrace.
Deep dive, Bahamas

 Discussions with Dr. Gopi and Prof. Chary, KIAMS.

 Friends from engineering on a road trip. Srisailam.
Friends from IIM Bangalore, at a reunion.

 IIMB friends more recently, Bangalore.
My only stint in a play -Waiting For Lefty, IIMB.

 Taking a swing. (above)
Launching Marketing research, Edition 4, at IIM Indore.

 Heritage- not just the train.
Me and my alter-ego (below), Bombay Presidency Golf Club guest house.

Reconnecting With the Past

The past has a way of coming back. You meet people again, sometimes in unexpected ways. Here is a partial list of people I have met again (not counting online meetings) at least once.

Ram Seshu, Narendranath, from Hyderabad Public School

Mukesh, Jimmy, Chittaranjan, Siddhartha, Shveta, Savitha, Achint, Nidhi, Padmapriya, Anu Bhoopathy, Jogeswari, Vidya, Smita Mohan, Dheeraj, Swapna, Jacob from KIAMS

Venu, Nagarjuna, Phani, Basudev, Ramesh, KS Murthy, G Sreenivas, C Srinivasa Murthy, Krishnamurthy, Huma, Nagabhushanam from OU Engineering college

Mohan Gopalratnam from XIMB

Abhinav Kamal, Meghna, Animesh, Supriya Jain, Manjari, Nikita Kumar, Ratnashree, Aditi, Pallavi, Vrinda, Divya Singh, Shafique, Bhawana Sahay from IMT Nagpur

Jimmy Jain from IIMK

Anne from the US/France, Anil, Suresh, from the US

Sowmyashree, Viju Varghese, Mrunal and Aishwarya from PESIT

Sapna, Bhuvneet, Saumya, from IIM Indore.

Neetika, Varsha, Vinay, Ritu Pai, Shailaja, Nisha, Shobhna, Shalina, Kailash and Amar Gupta, Sonwalkars, Subodh, Manoj, Avinash, Ajit, Ashu, Milind, Anant, Chitrangi, Shubhangi, Senior Talpallikars, Kaushiks, Bhides, Chari, Bhuma Reddy from my childhood

Arvind, Rex, Rajan, Venky, Anuradha, Gopal Pai, Navneeta, Harish, Dash, Snail, Ravi, Ramesh Srinivasans (two of them), Sankaran, Prabhakar, Uday, Suma, Gopal Mahapatra, Sudhir Goel, Lingaraju, Ramamurthy, Rajeev, Paddy, Fayol, Reddy, Vikram Srirangan, Sardessai, Dunhill, Cheenu, Nandu Jr., Shankar Ganesan, Bishop, Sujit, Toffler..from IIMB

B.K. Mohanty, Vivek Gupta from IIM Lucknow, Chetan Bajaj, Dhanapal, Sandeep Kayastha, Shahida, Bhagyalakshmi, Manoharan, from other workplaces. Jayanti Ranjan and Sita Mishra from IMT Ghaziabad, Gadgil, Vijayakumar, TKC and Anant Ram from IMT Nagpur...

Enough to prove that where there is a way, reconnecting happens.

Facebook and Me

Blasts from the past are becoming commonplace. Thanks to this guy Zuckerberg and his invention. Of course, aided by Sabeer Bhatia who invented the basic concept of free email, the guys who put together the internet, and Google and Yahoo who made it flourish at various times. Thanks to facebook, I have reconnected with so many old friends (please note I have refrained from using the word girlfriends) that would have been lost to me otherwise. I am seriously grateful to all the world's techies, and to my daughters who forced me to use Facebook in spite of my many doubts, and to various people like my IIMB batchmates for starting a yahoogroup early on, that resulted in our meeting up in two or three large meets and several small meets.

We recently reconnected with our engineering batch too, thanks to an enterprising batchmate in Hyderabad who claims he is gainfully unemployed (read 'He is the CEO of his own startup') but started an egroup for us that has already resulted in a Big Bash. Most relatives are also on Facebook now, and we also meet more often now as a group. For example, a cousins group of my age (50 plus mostly) meet regularly because of an egroup that we started a few years ago. Helps to feel involved in the world, and it's a pleasurable experience to meet a known face (or many) wherever you go. In my last three trips to Bangalore alone, I met KIAMS alumni, IMT alumni and my own batchmates from IIMB. Without egroups or Facebook, this would have been impossible.

We are harnessing Facebook to conduct alumni meets of IMT alumni across the country and succeeding too. I think mobile phones have also played a large role in actually making the physical meets happen, after we connected on the net, in most cases. So kudos to whoever invented that, and made it affordable.