How to Quit Smoking

In a departure from my usual stories, I shall write a How To. Now, in my day job I have written many a How To so I have a reasonable amount of expertise on this. Add to that the fact that this How To is based on a real-life, empirically proven method. So read on…

Tea and dBaseII

(This is the story behind the reference to tea in this earlier chapter of the memoirs.) The phone rang as I started shutting the front door behind me. In one of those momentous decisions that define history  I overrode my initial inclination to continue on my way out and stepped back in and picked up the…

Bengali COBOL

In the early summer of the following year (following the on-time, on-budget arrival of the baby #1, chronicled in this post) financial conditions hadn't really improved. A meager income was being gleaned by teaching. My wife and I took up part-time lectureships at various schools that were mushrooming everywhere. Schools that gave out diplomas on…

Hello World! The Edge of Darkness!

Read Part 1 No, you're wrong. It wasn't my COBOL code, or my system design skills. The floppies were not corrupted, I could see the data outside my code with tools I had. As more boxes were delivered, I went down to ask for tea and a conference with the accountants. I took a sip…

Hello World!

In the spring of 1987, I was lured away from my employer, a fast-growing, much respected Indian IT company by a startup. They offered double the salary, nice. A department to run, nice. A chance to put my reputation as a crazy, wacky and arrogant solver of weird problems on the line and deliver solid…