Vijay Basrur

New Beginnings

New Beginings are always very exciting. There’s a lot of hope and dreams in the air and as time goes by the challenge is to keep those dreams alive. and more so if its related to a new job.

My career moves have been very non traditional since I love working with startups. My Mom usually gets upset trying to understand what the new company does and when I say its a startup her only point is usually will your salary come on time?

I am going on board a startup once again next week and I am really excited. This is the 4th startup I will be working for. Hopefully there will be a time soon where I can kick off my own startup. But this job is coming very close to it.

Times they are changing!

Man Friday

Robinson Crusoe couldn’t do what he did without his Man Friday. And he sure owes him a lot. Hopefully Friday also had a good time working with Crusoe.

Its a relationship you see so much in workplaces today. Some folks call it the Boss - Subordinate relationship, some folks say Mentor - Mentee. Whatever it is and in whichever form, I think in these days as much as the Friday’s have to look out for their Crusoes, the Crusoes also have to take care of their Fridays. Else it ain’t working for either.

Thankfully I’ve had a Man Friday since the past 8 years and its been wonderful having him around. Gishore started working under me as a network engineer and he has bloomed into a role where he heads the entire data center infrastructure at a large Internet company. We’ve had some great times together and I attribute a lot of my success to him since he took on pretty much any task I handed him and did a great job of it.

Our professional relationship is taking a break since I am moving to a new job where I don’t think I can absorb him (I would have really loved to) and I think I am really going to miss him. He is as good as a younger brother now.

This is one professional relationship I treasure the most and I am glad its with my Man Friday.

Thanks for everything Gishore!

Cooking Catharsis

After a long time I made dinner last night. It was nothing special. We had macaroni with bell peppers & diced chicken sausages. But the difference was that I did everything from scratch while Snehal relaxed.

But what I realized was that I felt really good after cooking dinner. I tend to get a bit tired once I get back home and my usual routine is to play with Mansi for a bit, lay the table for dinner and sit down for dinner. But that routine slows me down a bit and I kick myself for not feeling energetic.

Looks like cooking dinner works like a catharsis for me. I am hoping to do this at least twice or thrice every week. And I really hope the dinners are edible. Last nights macaroni turned out quite well

The more I learn, the less I know

That could pretty much be the mantra for the year gone by.

Parenting: Bringing up Mansi has been the highlight of the year gone by. Snehal and me can’t imagine living a single day (for Snehal its probably a hour) without Mansi. Kids can be so selfless and stubborn at the same time. While each day we learn a bit more about parenting, we realize that there is so little we know about it. And that keeps us going and makes the journey very memorable

Startups: I am onto my 3rd startup, the second time around in the Internet space. Life in a startup is always very unpredictable but usually there is always a method in the madness. We’ve been doing pretty well at Quikr and hopefully the next year will be even better. Its a crucial year for us. Having spent nearly 90% of my career in startups, I continue to be amazed by the vibrancy of small companies. There is so little I know and so much to learn.

Technology: The tech industry keeps redefining the rules every 15 days (probably even faster) and it takes a herculean effort to keep pace. But thanks to the Internet its become a bit easier. Some blogs like Techcrunch have become the mecca of information. Email for example has undergone a huge transformation. I remember setting up the mail server at my 2nd job. It took us 5 months to get a domain and get things started with an archaic text only interface. The 2nd time around, 5 years later, we went with setting up MS exchange and burnt a huge hole in our IT Budget. The third time around, 2 years later, we partnered with Netcore to get things kicked off. We were up and running in 3-4 days. The fourth time around, 7 years later, we signed up for Google Apps. We were ready to go in 6 hours flat.

Reading: I can never get to an empty Google reader screen. I have 148 subscriptions and very little time to go through them. The more I add subscriptions, the less I am able to read. But I have my A List which I swear by and not a working day passes by before I have read the A list

Music: When I took a look at the Last.FM Best of 2009 List, I realized that the music industry has moved far ahead from where I left it at. Inspite of my 35 gig collection on my iPod, there is so much music still be experienced

Travel: The more we travel, the more we want to travel. There is so much of the world to see. This year we took a mini break to Kamshet, near Lonavala and did nothing. Nothing! No sight seeing, no reading nothing. We just played with our daughter, drank and ate good food. It was bliss.

Food/Drink: The more cuisines we experience, the more experiments we make with food. 2009 has been the year we, as a couple, discovered the joy of salads. The more single malts and beers I taste, I realize that there are so many single malts and beers left to taste.

On that note, 2009 has been a great year, here’s to hoping that 2010 brings with it more joy

Cheers!

Happy Birthday Mom

My Mom celebrated her birthday yesterday. It was special on two counts. Firstly both her grandchildren were around to wish her Happy Birthday in the morning and most importantly it was her first birthday after the heart attack.

Considering that the doctors had given her outside of a 15% chance of battling the cardiac arrest, it is nothing less than a miracle that she’s made it back at an amazing pace. Her cardiologist is pleasantly surprised and is actually considering offering my Mom the brand ambassador role for his clinic (just kidding)

It is not easy to battle the pain, accept the fact that you have no memory of 14 days of your life, muster up the courage and strength to get back on your feet and prepare yourself for a second life. Not only has Mom done all of this, the fact that makes us immensely proud of her is that she’s done it with a smile. While she attributes the smile to constantly having her grandchildren around, we know that she’s made of something else.

She has inspired many, in every role that she has played in life. Daughter, wife, sister-in-law, teacher, mother, mother-in-law, social activist, philanthropist & grandmother. She has given it her best and handled each role with the same amount of dedication & love. All of this manifested in the entire world calling to check on her progress from the day she was hospitalized and many of family & friends offering prayers for her recovery.

By the grace of God, she is doing pretty well now and after a fairly hectic daily schedule before she was hospitalized, we are glad that Mom is finally agreeing to slow down, relax and start enjoying life. Her brain however continues to function at an abnormally fast pace, much to our amusement.

Here’s wishing many more Happy Birthdays for Mom

My first Scuba Diving experience

I decided to scuba dive at one of the beaches off Arbatax. Though I was a bit apprehensive about doing it (the breathing through the mouth kinda got be thinking) once I saw others do it, I was raring to go.

It was an incredible experience being underwater & watching all the fish swimming so close. I got a wee bit uncomfortable towards the end and decided to bail out a few mins before the session ended. The video grab makes it great to relive those moments

The entire photo set is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/basrur/sets/72157621967840887/detail/

Balloon Seller

I’ve been meaning to write about this experience some time back but it just slipped by.

There is a balloon seller who stands at the corner of the road near my Mom’s place. He is there every single day from 7:30 pm to 9 pm. A simple guy who is quite cordial and makes some amazing types of balloon. We usually buy a balloon or two from him whenever my nephew demands it.

For Mansi’s birthday, we wanted to put up some balloons and thought about him. So Snehal approached him a few days before with the offer of putting up about 30-40 odd balloons in the afternoon. He agreed and said he would come before 4 pm for sure. He requested for an advance. We agreed. But since he didn’t have any contact information we were a bit worried if he would pull a fast one on us. He said if he has taken money, he has given his word and won’t let us down.

On the day of Mansi’s birthday he didn’t turn up till 2 pm and that got us a bit worried since we were banking on him. Thankfully he rang the bell at about 3 pm and was very apologetic about the delay. We were quite fine with it since he had said that he would take about 20 minutes to blow 40 ballons.

So he came in, sat down on the floor and started blowing away. Upon a casual chat where I checked if was keeping very busy and therefore got late, he replied with a sad face that he lost his son the day before and was tied up with some last rites.

My jaw dropped and I was shocked. Did I hear him right? So I double checked. He repeated the same thing again with some more details. It turned out that his son went to help out to clean the drainage system for the muncipal authorities, slipped and got drowned in it.

Snehal heard him from the kitchen and came out with a expression of shock. We both stood there, looking at the ballon seller, in silence. We were in that state for over 2-3 minutes. I gathered the courage to tell him that it was really fine if he wanted to go back and the balloons were not really that important. But he insisted that his word was more important that anything. Since he had taken the money he didn’t want to let us down.

I cried. I wanted to touch his feet.

Moments like these make life worth living. God bless him with more happiness than he dreams of.