letters2bala

This fifth year anniversary of yours, I was travelling around some of your favourite cities. Places, I’m sure you would have loved to visit, Liverpool Manchester and Glasgow.   One of the first things I noticed here was how people are callous about rules when it comes to crossing the road and will cross from anywhere on the street. Tour guide also said that they considered this as of right to be able to cross anywhere. You would have absolutely loved that here.  When it comes to queues though, people are absolutely rigid about it. Even if there is no physical queue at a place, there will always be a mental queue, and people will allow the ones who came first to go ahead. This one might have taken some getting used to for you. But the sucker you are for these colonial idiosyncrasies, you would have followed it. I still remember how you would throw garbage right on the road in India, but search for the trashcan in the US. I kept myself very busy here, attending a ton of events, ...

You missed this fundamental insight to life. You need to suffer a lot to experience even a glimmer of happiness and it is not as straightforward as experiencing the lows to know what the high feels like, because it is not even connected. You suffer because you have to and you may achieve happiness out of it, but it is not the opposite feeling of the suffering you have endured. Take a child. There is a lot of suffering in raising one. Human babies unlike animals don’t start walking the moment they are born. They take a full year to do that, and so much more to develop other aspects of their life. Until then you have to take care of them. If you don’t they would die, as simple as that. And the only reason they are in this world is because of you. You have to take responsibility for that. Suck it up, put your head down, give up all those things you loved, and take care of them. One rare day you child might give you a kiss that would make you feel so happy. But you aren’t taking care of ...

Saw another dream last night. You, me, Noel and Atanu are together and we get a distress call about a boat being capsized and we're asked to help. I know the route to the boat really well since it seems to be a path I've taken many times before. I start leading the way, but halfway through you start complaining as you always did with any physical activity. However, this time you point to your swollen feet and the complaints seem genuine. So I find a bar where you can hang out and leave Noel with you for company. I decide to go along with Atanu, and return in the same direction once we have finished our work and meet you.  But just as I'm about to leave, part of me really does not want to go as I'm worried you won't be there when I return. Another part of me desperately needs to move forward and save all those people depending on us. You make that choice so difficult.  Every time I see these dreams, they seem so real. It feels like my awake time is actually a dream s...

Hey dude, how is it going wherever you are. I’m writing coz I dreamt of you again, which basically means you came to visit me where I am. But before I get to that, some news. Neo has arrived. Never thought this day would come, but it has, and there is so much I have to say about it, especially coz you were always intrigued with procreation. For now though, that would have to wait. I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. It’s to do with these 2-3 hour intermittent sleep spurts I have now moved to since the baby was born.  Strangely though, I never dreamt of you. Just as I wrote some months back, I had stopped dreaming of you. In all these recent dreams, I’ve been seeing so many of my friends, but it was pretty strange that I never once saw you. Until this one particular night last week that was, when I saw an entire dream dedicated to you. The whole dream was set up in the basement of a fancy hotel. I was traveling as usual for work and met up with some colleagues for dinner at this ho...

I was recollecting our computer science projects back in 10 th std. Back then I had created the front end for what eventually became Booking.com while you created what is now Skyscanner.net. I remember both of ours being some of the best projects, topped only by Gopal’s unique Mendeleev’s periodic table. That bugger combined physics with computer science and totally beat us. But ours were not too bad, and a bit too similar in fact. However, when I started comparing our code, I noticed one specific function you had that totally beat what I built. You had ‘undelete’. I still remember the moment I saw that function. It totally blew my mind how you could recover the details of a user in case they deleted their record by accident. After you explained it to me, it turned out to be such a simple hack All you used was the * symbol. But without that explanation, it seemed an amazing thing to do. And just for that I credited you with the better project. Coding continued to make you shine. I...

He would’ve been 38 today. He would have loved to see the pandemic on which he would actually have so much to say. But as unpredictable as he has always been, he’s not around for any of these.   He visited me in a dream last night though. He was wearing a formal shirt with jeans and sports shoes. The shirt untucked just as how he always wore them, but somehow he was looking very fit. Almost like the way he looked back in school.  We were joined by Munda and standing outside a small Tapri about to order a drink. What we got was that small glass in which you normally get cutting chai, but this had    some local alcohol which was putting me off even by its smell.  I didn’t feel like drinking it at all and thought Bala should not be drinking it either. But somehow I didn’t get myself to say anything to him. He seemed to know what he was doing and what importantly I believe people should make their own decisions.  However, the irony was that I couldn’t decide to...