Meetings With Old Friends in Kolkata

 Met Navneeta, Shakti Ghosal and Indukant Gautam of IIMB 1982-84 fame, in the last year.

Met Banikanta Mishra of XIMB- a colleague from 1991-92, on his visit. Also Amit Gope, a student from the same institute, who is settled in Kolkata.

Renewed contact with Ananya Ghosh, a Ph.D. scholar with St. Xavier's University, whom I had earlier met in XLRI at a doctoral consortium. She is close to finishing her Ph.D.

Akansh Khandelwal, a former Ph.D. student at IIM Indore.

Jasbir Matharu, a former colleague, along with Abhinav Chandel, both from IMT Nagpur.

Sayantani Saha, also a former student at Nagpur who is with ICICI Lombard.

And of course, Dash who is also an IIMB classmate, retired cop now settled here.

Memorable Moments Bhubaneswar 1991-92

 Joined Xavier Institute of Management to teach Marketing in 1991. Just back rom the U.S., I had great enthusiasm.

Bought a Kinetic Honda, and moved around quite a bit in town and nearby. 

Konark visits, Puri and Pipli on the way.

One trip to Chilika lake, with Ghani Zaman.

Made new friends, Sudhakar Reddy, Banikanta Mishra, and more.

Prarthana came home in December 1991. She was 3 years-old, adopted her from Pune.

Faculty Colleagues

 Recent ones include ones I recruited, at Prestige University. Juhee, Riyaz, Bharat, Jyoti Dua and Asmita Mahapatra.

And some lady golfers from NMIMS Bangalore- Tanmeet, Alisha Thomas, Prerona Baruah, Preeti Ravikiran. Briefly, Diti Goswami too. 

Shahida and Manasa from PESIT Mgt. dept. were very dynamic. Manoharan and S.P. Kumar are still in touch.

Kirloskar Institute- Harihar had Dhanapal and Vijayakumar. We still play Golf together. (Note- lost Dhanapal in May 2025)

B.K. Mohanty and Banikanta Mishra at XIMB. 

IIM K, SSS Kumar, Neeraj Dwivedi and Keyoor Purani. Jeyavelu too.

IIM Indore, Shweta Kushal and Jayasimha. And marketing colleague Abhishek, IT colleague Rajhans. 

Thomas from VJIM. Dayakara Rao too.

Visiting faculty Nitin Sinha, Veronica Thavonat, Snehal Singh and Sayantan at Prestige.

Woman Umpire in Cricket

 More bastions are being conquered by women. One such is cricket umpiring. We got lucky, and met Gayathri, one of only 3 umpires in India who are women. She happens to be a friend of our colleague Preeti Ravikiran, and was on campus to meet her. So naturally, we hijacked her for a while, and had a scintillating conversation, and a little Golf Putting outing too (my idea). During the conversation, I found out she is an alum of XIMB where I taught early in my career (though she was there later). Some pics.

Prof. Preeti, Gayathri, Prof. Narayani and I try out putting on the front lawn of our campus.