Wit Wisdom and Whoop

In 1993 or 1994 or so I was working as the Branch Manager of Alfa Laval. We had a brilliant infotech manager called Mahesh Deshmukh who was looking for an office which could be the test case in his computerisation plans for the company. Wipro the contractor was in Bangalore and given my interest he chose my branch. The company planned to set up a local area network system with about 5 or 6 desktop units and a gentleman with a similar name – Vashishta – was the Manager from Wipro. As they executed the job, I discussed with him that the LAN would be of no use if we still had to call up/ go meet colleagues when all we had to do was leave a message. Could he have a system wherein we could send messages to each other and when the person logged in, it would pop up. They did it and we soon had a very effective communication system where we didn’t forget messages and even instructions/ feedback were typed off and sent instantly.  This effort gave me immense satisfaction at a personal lev...

  For whatever reasons, call it a lack of focus, ambition, my career, and life has often taken a direction by default than design. This 2-part blog is a small story of my life as related to the field of Infotech. Sometime in 1981-82 as I was finishing engineering, we didn’t have campus recruitments and were left to our own efforts to find jobs. I have no clue why but felt would like to explore opportunities in the Computer field. It wasn’t called Infotech, but we said – I want to do Computers – whatever that meant. When I broached this subject the unanimous feedback, I got was this was a field where career aspiration at best would be to become stenographer to the CEO/MD of a company because computers meant highly glorified typewriters.    The main names those days were Wipro, Microland, Hindustan Computers Ltd (HCL) and I was thrilled to receive a call from HCL to attend a selection process. Savera hotel in Chennai was the location and we assembled in the morning. T...