A Bend in the River

Only dead people have a past. Rest of us living have a future. I find it more worthwhile to talk about the future, which we can change, than the past. At least until we have figured out how to make a time machine. But as I'm about to reach a bend in the river towards the end of this month when I take the oath of citizenship of the country of my dreams, I want my readers to allow me to indulge myself by reminiscing about the journey of these past twenty years. My plan is to try not to choke when I take my oath of citizenship. I'm proud of earning my citizenship.

Rule #1: Language does not belong to anyone. If you know it, it is your language.
I must have been eleven or twelve years old when I told my dad that I did not want to learn English, since it belonged to British, who treated India as a colony. My dad said spontaneously that a language only belonged to one who knew it. If you learned it, it would be yours.

Rule #2: You can't get something without giving up something.
Twenty years back I had an excellent job in the Reserve Bank of India at a middle management position but I wanted to be somewhere else. I was married with a new-born and I was about to resign from my job to join a masters program in information systems at the Arizona State University. All my good friends and family thought that I was going nuts, nevertheless they all supported me. It was hard to give up a nice job and liquidate the household, it was harder to leave the family behind but the hardest part was when I sold-off my Yamaha motorcycle. That did hurt pretty deep at that time.

Rule #3: You can't plan for everything but if you follow your heart you will find someone to help you.
In my twenties I had thought that I had planned every aspect of my life pretty well. Almost like a Prufrock, I had measured out my life in coffee spoons ... I had achieved what I had set out to do. But very soon I realized that I was just not enjoying what I was doing and I was not ready to do what I was not enjoying for the rest of my life. So I landed at LAX with about a grand in my pocket, about the same in my bank and a scholarship for doing masters in Computer Information Systems from Arizona State University. Very quickly, I learned that that was close to being penniless and I had to find a job at Arizona State University in Tempe. Richard at the Disability Resources Center of ASU was kind enough to hire me as a Tutor. I worked for Richard for the entire duration, while I was studying at Arizona State University. When I was leaving, Richard and his assistant Phyllis gave me a very nice memento that said, "You have opened the doors that will never close ..." I keep that with me.

Rule #4: It is important to focus on your strengths but it is hard to know about your strengths unless others tell you.
I found a job as a Systems Architect in Los Angeles a couple of weeks before I had completed my masters. Professor Michael Goul agreed to have me give the final test from home in LA. I completed the final test in the night after coming from work but I was hallucinating through the test due to sleeplessness. Somehow I completed the test without messing up and got an A in Artificial Intelligence logic. Professor Goul called my paper a "tour de force of AI."

Rule #5: What you can do for others is more important than who you are.
My wife and son joined me in LA after almost a year and a half. My son was excited to see me but I quickly came to a realization that we did not have much of a relationship. Of course, I should have known that there was nothing like a dad-in-absentia. Whenever my wife stepped out for anything, he used to start running around screaming mom. One day my wife was in the bathroom, when our son woke up and started screaming for mom. My wife was quite irritated and she kept quiet. I tapped my son on the shoulder and both of us walked to the bathroom door, where I bent down and showed him how to peek through the slit at the bottom of the door to see mom's feet. He saw mom's feet, felt comforted and then looked happily at me. We had bonded.

Rule #6: Procrastination will kill you.
I joined UCLA Medical Center as a Database and Unix Systems Administrator but I had to complete my immigration paper work. I was like a kid in a candy store. Finally, I had all the technology that I wanted to play with. There were symmetric multiprocessors, mainframes, gateways, token ring and ethernet networks. Any technology that you could ask for, UCLA had it. I loved it and I must have been working at least 80 hours a week on an average. But I procrastinated on my immigration paper work and almost got thrown out of the country of my dreams!

Rule #7: Be thankful when you get what you ask for.
I was working long hours, when my daughter was born. It would be a gross understatement to say that I was excited about her. I was loving every moment of it but I was not willing to cut down on my work hours. One day we had several system outages and I had to work until late night on problem resolution. I came home exhausted and fell asleep. Shortly after I heard my daughter crying in her crib and woke up with frustration and anger. But the very next moment I was filled with guilt and shame when I realized that this was exactly what I had wanted in my life. That was one moment of epiphany for me.

Rule #8: You have to be fair.
I joined HNC Software, Inc. in Irvine. This is now called FICO, yes they do FICO scores. HNC merged with Fair Isaac Co (F. I. Co) and became FICO. This was an exciting time since I was leading the development of one of the largest data warehouses. Vince Bianco was the Chief Operations Officer. When I was promoted to the position of a Manager, he called me to his office and said that one of the most important things he thought was that a manager must be fair. You can hear a sentence a thousand times without it making an impact but there are certain occasions when someone says the same thing and it just stays with you forever. I still vividly remember Vince telling me that a manager must be fair!

Rule #9: Its not about money.
At the peak of Internet boom, I got a job offer from DoubleClick, which was about to go public. DoubleCick was giving me 10,000 stock options priced at a strike price of a penny each. I went to DoubleClick's Irvine office, met with people and joined Perot Systems instead. Somehow I felt that everyone at DoubleClick was working only for money. Within a month Doubleclick went public with stock price reaching over $100. But soon afterwards, there was a bust with several rounds of layoffs. On the other hand, I was having a ball working for Perot.

Rule #10: You just can't connect the dots beforehand but you can make a difference at every point.
After my dad, Peter Drucker made the most influence on my life. However, it was a pure coincidence that I was passing through Clarement when I remembered that that was where Peter was teaching. There are too many coincidences in life. I left a nice job at the Reserve Bank of India, joined Arizona State University, worked at UCLA, FICO, Perot, studied under Peter Drucker, joined Kaiser Permanente and then came to ABPA. There is no way in hell that I would have been able to connect all these dots twenty years back. Sometimes, things just happened because I was at the right place at the right time. The only constant through all this has been that I have tried my best to make a difference and I've tried to be persistent in my efforts.

Rule #11: Sometimes the best moments of life come wrapped in a piss-soaked newspaper.
When I was working for Perot Systems, I had to work for two and a half months from India. I love trips to India but this was the worst time. I did not want to do it, since I had little kids and it was hard for me to stay away from them. But reluctantly I went to India. While I missed my kids and wife, I had a great time with my parents, brother, sister, in-laws and their kids. Those moments became incredibly invaluable for me, when my dad passed away a few years later.

Rule #12: Don't believe anything until you see firm evidence.
My dad passed away when I needed him most. Sometimes I see him in my dreams. I still miss his hugs. When all the drugs had stopped working on my dad, then he was treated with Trisenox. There is a more about my dad's battle with cancer here. Regarding his treatment with Trisenox, I came to know after his death that off-label use of Trisenox for multiple myeloma was really an Internet hype created through unethical and illegal marketing efforts of Cell Therapeutics, Inc. (CTI). In 2008 a federal judge awarded whistleblower James Marchese $1.6 million for tipping off federal prosecutors to a scheme by CTI to illegally promote unapproved uses of Trisenox.

Rule #13: Do the right thing one at a time and this too shall pass.
When I came to this country, I was alone, I was short of money, I had no job, I did not know how I was going to complete my masters or find a decent place to live or what I was going to do after doing masters. Those were some highly stressful moments. Similarly, when I was about to be thrown out of this country for delaying the paper work, I was completely stressed out. This was my country, my choice, my dream. But I had brought it upon myself by procrastinating. There were times when I had to wait in line outside INS offices for five to six hours. There was a time, when my wife was unable to leave for India to see her sick brother due to delay in processing of her paperwork by INS and I was scared. The law is that if your green card is approved pending status adjustment and you leave the country without seeking advance parole from INS, then your green card is considered abandoned and you can't re-enter the country. There are so many scary what-if scenarios that you can only pray and hope that everything will be alright. So next time when you have to sit on the Magic Mountain roller coaster with your kids, relax, take a deep breadth and remember that if you do one right thing at a time, this too shall pass...