DTC Memoirs

Yet another farewell gives me a chance to refresh and go back to those wonderful peaceful moments of the past, when things were just settling down. I have so much to say that I thought I will have a post on this for my blog. Here it goes.

The Beginning-

On the first day of landing here at Hyderabad, during my orientation, it was a very unpleasant thing to hear that I was put on bench. It also had some weird bay name to it too. I had been promised skies (was told that I would be working for Microsoft you see, thank God that didn’t happen) but landed in gutter. How stupid can it get? Over the next few days my grumbling came down and I was enjoying my bench days bunking right after lunch/gym in the evenings. Even during those times I met up some wonderful people who were in the same soup. Human mind is really funny. The joy of finding someone who is undergoing the same emotions with the unexpected results ( be it bad marks, bad dress, wrong address or as in this case sitting on bench after moving from company). It was during the same time that Nikmo and I were on full on diet mode, eating minimum food, doing some small exercise in the morning and staying light. I had also joined the golfing sessions by my aunt at Boulder Hills. On one particular day I got a call from Pranav asking me to meet him the next day for a project assignment.

For some reason the next day I was running late to office as I had completely forgotten about the call. I was doing little extra golfing time, when it suddenly struck me that I had something important to do that day. Putting my helmet on, I zoomed like a maniac on a high snaking through the heavy traffic and landed HDC around 9 minutes flat. Still panting, I called up Pranav and got the room number. Went to washroom and cleaned up myself to make myself bit more presentable. I just stayed there for two more minutes silently thinking and telling to myself that no matter how the work is, I hope I have a good team to work with a nice lead. It is a statistically proven fact that 90% of the people quit because of the managers/leads and this being my first move, I was little apprehensive. Entering the room, the first relief I got was seeing the young, fresh smiling faces. That kind of did it for me, hate being with budde log. No offence to nobody. I settled down and Pranav rattled on about all the abc’s of the project. Sounded good, with a transporting background and my ears pricked a little higher on hearing that the project was being done in collaboration with Paris team. I had also joked to my mom that I may go to Paris on that day when I called her up to catch up with the new project. Just drifting off a little here, in one of my first ever play that I had written, one segment carried off a conversation between wife and husband arguing over the issue of ownership of T.V. as wife want wants to see Bigg Boss whereas the husband is all rooted for IPL Semis. There is a dialog where the wife chides her husband that he tells virtually everything to his mom, even being as stupid as telling about the bug status. A bit of confession, I may say, I am slightly like that in reality and maybe the inspiration was rooted in me. I really like telling my mom everything and sometimes I tell her unnecessary things about deliveries, deadlines etc. So that day it was all about what my project was, number of people in it etc.

Work initially wasn’t much as I was given the task of testing. It was around December I had joined and team at Paris were going on long leaves leaving behind substantial amount of work for offshore. I was introduced to Anuradha and was told to take the KT from her of how the Corporate Website and Back Office works. One of the legacies I carried forward from my Satyam Days was my ability to go to trance-like sleep state where I am half-awake twirling the mouse up and down and staring at the computer. I was notorious for this and I do this usually when I don't have much work and right after good lunch. Sushma, another team mate of mine, along with me were involved in taking the sessions. Much to their horror and my embarrassment, during the course of KT, having Anuradha in the middle and we both on the sides, I was literally drowsing through the session yawning sometimes, struggling to keep my open. Luckily, being the genteel lady they were, they never complained and in fact Anuradha used to continue the sessions with slight remarks of ‘Karthik, I think you can go have a face wash now’ with a huge smile on her face. It also happened that sometimes even that was not enough to keep me awake. The sessions have been the toughest to attend to. To justify my stance I would say it wasn’t their fault but it was the objective of the session that’s at fault. Imagine a person teaching about website navigation as simple as ‘Go to this Menu->Click on this sub-menu->Click on this item’ for every page there is that we maintain and then after reaching the page explaining about all the elements of the page – ‘here you give your first name, here last name’ for over 40 minutes in same monotonous tone without a break. Why couldn’t it be as simple as ‘This is the website, do whatever you want and discover it’. That’s how my second project induction was at my earlier company which again dealt with a website front. The next month the work was at bare minimum with one task of a package and some debugging of reports.

Recollecting my initial times, chatting with clients was a bit funny. Back at Satyam, we dealt all our communication through mails or meeting and never with office communicators/chat. I remember asking Mote about how I should reply for a smiley and when to put a smiley, which is appropriate etc.? There is always the line that we shouldn't cross and all that crap were there. As we moved through cycles, through weekly status meetings, through the bug fixes, life began to gain momentum and for one particular time it got pretty hot with 5 whole days of torture for fixing a peculiar bug. I also got one of the best compliments too by our then manager Benoit for value-addition for a job he had assigned to me in quick time. There is whole new back story to it which I definitely ought to blog sometime.

We as a team were enjoying the whole process before the honeymoon period ended as Benoit was taken over by another lead at Paris - Idriss. His way of dealing things had shook each and everyone out of their happy cozy lives and united in a way we never wanted - frustrated and angry. Nobody liked giving status updates every half an hour, nobody liked doing multitasking and yet maintaining all the deadlines, nobody liked multiple meetings, and most important of all nobody liked escalations. Too many problems but we had one cool head Babar for us, shouldering all our responsibilities and to see that we weren't under scanner all the time. In fact, we went one step ahead and were firmly in the director's seat dictating our terms. There are lot many more things that had happened after that and not everything was exciting in terms of the workload. I was working on DTC part time and Presto most of the times and was in this mode for quite long not really facing large brunt of the project.

Let me now just highlight the best times -

Coffee Breaks -

Babar spear heads this meetings with his amazing in-depth knowledge of Indian history, mythology, Real estate, police, love, kidnappings ..err.. almost everything under the sun aptly named by all as the 'walking wikipedia' a.k.a wikitalkie. Between 10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on most of the days we gather as a team and go to our tea breaks. Once we settle down, we are transported into a whole new world and time cease to exist. We start with some topic as trivial as everyone's favorite food and then see the discussion going to abc's of lodging an FIR. Sometimes we stick to one and everybody has something or the other to say or add and it will be good 30-45 minutes before one of us realize that we had come to office cafeteria. This break up is done with huge reluctance. I can still savor those lovely moments. Happily enjoying the fantastic unexpected sojourn with your lead right their leading the party.

Meeting Minutes:

Meetings..hmm..meetings..just the word itself gives me that warm pleasurable feeling. Having worked in projects before that had not many meetings and little less people too, the meetings at DTC gave me ample scope to vent out my feelings and blabber rubbish continuously. For the first two months it was chaired by Pranav and it was like attending a convent congregation, performing the task of taking down the defects methodically and mechanically, planning for the upcoming weeks and ending the calls.

Enter Babar, exit Pranav, and voila it was just , AWESOME! We were no longer under the 'Eye' and free to do whatever we want. We enter the room and Babar starts off the calls. Meanwhile Joey, Sushma and I will be busying ourselves with games on my kick-ass phone only to lend support when its needed. Sometimes, we just go to the call fully knowing it was gonna be a 10 minute ritual but we utilize it to the full 1 hour booking doing nothing but good amount of idle chit-chat pulling each other's leg, discussing about vacation plans, thinking about a possible trip (it's still an open point, if you ask me), discussing about parties, or just idling away time. During the not so busy cycles of delivery this was quite common and we used to have ball of a time during the 'DTC- Meeting'.

I am attached to it so much so that, even though I was completely out of it, with a great reluctance and nostalgia, quite painfully I removed the 'DTC Weekly Meetings' from my Outlook calendar. I also took a screenshot but somehow I am not able to find it now.

Joe -

Am singling out Joe here because he is fit to be singled out like a Joker in the Pack. Mostly funny and mostly dumb (sarcasm). Joe is one of the best people I have met in my life and I admire his outlook towards life with clear focused intentions, his religious discipline, his conventional views on marriage, his affliction to food. Its precisely for these that he is gullible and easy to get started off on a conversation and bug him to no end. He just can't accept some things and I have never fought so furiously with anyone trying to rationalize certain arguments. It is so much fun poking fun at him. There was this one tiny little time when this went overboard (and I did behave like a jerk) which had a cold war feel to it. It just cooled off immediately the day after anyway.

His greatest weakness that I have observed is his inability to get along with Hyderabadi food and marriage views. Somehow we both as a pair are nicknamed 'tom and jerry'. Ironically I am supposed to be the Tom (the loser who gets hurt no matter what he does), when in fact I should be the Jerry (the clever, witty, innovative, creative mouse that gets away with Tom in whatever it does and in style). It was a open-and-shut-case, I win all the matches. Since its the majority that gets the say I let the case rest with all of them truly believing in the fact that Tom is the best in taunting and getting what he wants i.e. ultimately winning. On second thoughts I would rather be cat than a whining mouse. Howzzat!

Team

The team as a whole have been one of the best I have worked with. With absolute no egos and ever helpful to each other we have well supported our tasks and sharing our duties. In times of trouble, we huddle together, have a 10 minutes discussion, laugh about it and let it go.

Carole's visit

Another great highlight. When Carole, our onshore big shot manager, had come to Hyderabad for meeting sessions we were completely floored. That two hours meeting we had with her, we felt as if we were given free tickets to avant-garde theatrical performance I had ever witnessed. Mesmerizing to say the least. Tracing the history of e-Ticketing, DTC, talking about the government problems, project handicaps, challenges facing ahead, road maps and it went on. Never once was she off-the mark and it was completely impromptu performance. I was literally spell-bound. We also had a quite nice time with her during the AFMS bash with Joe, jumping like a kid, to get a solo pic with her. Such a sweet kid, ain't he?

Twists-

Around November last year, we were supposed to shut the shop. It was in news, it was in papers (Danish i mean), it was in their parliament, it was everywhere. The writing on the wall was clear. The landmark judgement was doomed to failure. We also had a farewell celebrations too. Personally though all of us were quite sad knowing it and were also little taken aback with calmness with which Babar had taken the news. Somehow miraculously 90% certainity became 0% and BAM we were back on track doing same things again. Only this time around my percentage of involvement receded gradually.

Well, that's all there is to it. I know I am missing something but it will be for later posts. Let me end it all with some personal notes -

Babar garu- For the life of me , I can't remember why the thought didn't strike me to bring more chocolates exclusive to team. I really feel bad about it. I am at loss of words right now to express my feelings except to say that you have been one of my greatest inspirations.

Narsingam - You have been the unseen glue sticking our spirits of undying passion to the cause by being there and helping the team all the time. You have excellent leadership qualities and though it may have felt like a joke when I kept mentioning you would be the next 'TL', I did mean it. With your soft entry to PNG, I hope we will get to work on some common tasks. Even otherwise I definitely would like to seek your counsel on movies, inner gossip, and life in general.

Joey- refer above

Sirisha - Silent and hard-working. Hope you have great time under Babar and reach fantastic levels. You are in one of the most enviable positions ever and am sure you will have great learning experiences of your life going ahead.

Cheers!