A proposal – PART 2

Links -- PART 1

PART 2 - Life After

They say life is like a river, it flows on.

After college all of us stated with our software job. One year into our first job we all realized that a bunch of true friends, that was the all that we had picked up from the educational super market. After learning Electrical and Electronics for four year most of us were working for software giants, writing software codes in java and C for banks, retail chains, telecom majors etc. It had nothing even remotely electrical or electronic about it.

Good Friends change you when they are with you and but the best among them change you even as they leave you. Life had destined us to make more friends and change. In spite of sincere effort all four of us ended up in different IT companies different cities. As we parted company we changed in our own ways. Away from the careless, talent wasting and criminally lazy gang of ours Mithun discovered the genius with in him. Two years on Mithun was a well established expert and a genius in embedded software, often spotted in big conferences. Brought away from the romantically challenged, slightly jealous and female reflecting gang Jovin found the suppressed Casanova within him. Couple of years later when I met Jovin at Forum mall in Bangalore he was with three beautiful girls. That was not all, to his own good he was also a testing lead for a team of 6 girls in his company.

After college far away in different parts of the world, thanks to gtalk, yahoo, skype etc we still remained the same close knit gang. Meeting on rare occasions set by office needs or friends traveling onsite for long-term. Although far away, this circle of friends did have a huge but not often explicit impact on the thought pattern even career moves each made.

Moving away from the gang did bring one positive change into Arun’s life. Arun and Priya were the in Bangalore. Thrown into a silicon valley of India, Bangalore, alone away from our prying eyes he got to slowly build on his friendship with Priya. The love part was well hidden with just friendship at the forefront. She too had a good impact on him. She helped him increase his confidence with girls and horning his romance skills. That influence could explain his new girl friend Neena. She was his talkative, straight haired, lean, anemic and ever smiling colleague. They were in different projects but on same 7th floor of their office tower. Friendship started when they met at a tree planting drive in a social service club in the company and grew over a period of 3 year over tea, lunch, weekend movies, shopping and travel to kerala for vacations. From a mutual friend who is also Arun’s and Neena’s colleague told even the office gang who were with the couple through out never knew of it and were surprised when they announced their marriage plans. The love was again a well guarded secret (There are a few who say Neena was the one to propose marriage). Even I got to know of this a lot later under some special circumstances.

That year the get-together was in Bangalore. Jovin was hosting the party, as he was going onsite to US for a year.