Life is Work in Progress — Part 2: Becoming

Bombay was probably my first real turning point.

By the time I reached there, I had already understood that technical ability alone was not enough. I had made mistakes, I had lost an opportunity, and I knew I had to rebuild myself in more ways than one.

So I worked like crazy.

There was very little distinction between day and night. Work and learning simply became part of the same cycle. At the previous company, one of the reasons given for rejecting me was that I was not good enough at socket programming. So in Bombay, I started writing multithreaded socket programming so many times that I sometimes feel I could probably write it even today with my eyes closed.

It became personal. I needed to prove to myself that if I did not know something, I could learn it.

Bombay also gave me something equally important: exposure. I met smart people, made friends, and began understanding how others communicated, dressed, behaved and carried themselves. My English improved steadily. The foundation laid by my English teacher, along with years of watching British programmes and reading, started showing results.

I became independent too. I survived on very little money but still managed to have fun — bhel puri, pani puri in Juhu, South Indian food in Matunga, movies watched repeatedly, and a five-rupee Mysore masala dosa near my apartment. I was lucky enough to live almost opposite my office, so life was simple.

Somewhere in that period, I also started paying attention to personal grooming. Good clothes, clean shoes, perfume, toiletries and neatly maintained personal belongings began to matter to me. I did not want to go to office in a crumpled shirt, and I did not like leaving my bed unmade.

That influence probably came from more than one place. One of my aunts dressed impeccably well and carried herself with great style. My father too was always extremely neat and well-dressed when he went to work. Without realising it, I was collecting habits from people around me and slowly becoming a more polished version of myself.

Then Denver happened.

If Bombay changed me, Denver refined me.

Very early in my career, I began getting noticed in my division. People started saying things like, “Oh, that Anand? He can crack anything.” I became the firefighter. If a project had a difficult problem, I would get pulled in. If the solution was unclear, complicated or high-risk, I wanted to be there.

I had only two or three years of experience in the industry, but I was already handling situations that were far more complex than anything I had imagined doing so early. It did not happen easily. It was toil, toil and more toil, but it was also enormous fun because I had a wonderful group of friends around me. Many of us are still in touch, still meet, and still talk about those days.

Denver also gave me one of the most important mentors of my career. My manager there took me under his wing.

I was driven, ambitious and technically aggressive. I would raise my hand for everything. I wanted to solve every problem, and not surprisingly, that attitude sometimes rubbed people the wrong way.

My manager understood me very early. He did not try to reduce my drive. Instead, he taught me how to channel it — how to work with people, how to conduct myself, how to disagree, and how to get things done without making every interaction a battle.

His influence on me was enormous. By the time I left Denver, I was a very different professional from the person who had arrived there.

I had also discovered a kind of freedom I had never really experienced before. I cycled to work, went on long drives, drove into the mountains, and spent time around snow, lakes, peaks and roads that are still etched in my memory. Years later, when I visited Denver again, the place still felt magical.

From there, life moved into a completely different phase.

Marriage happened in 2001, and I very quickly discovered that whatever I had learnt professionally was not automatically useful at home. Family life had a completely different syllabus. There was no training manual and no mentor sitting beside me explaining what to do next.

My wife became one of the biggest influences in shaping and polishing me during this phase of life. In many ways, she was one of the major reasons the raw person I was slowly became the person I am today. She brought a different way of looking at people and situations, and over the years she made me more balanced, more patient, more socially aware and much more conscious of how I came across to others.

She also taught me something I had taken a long time to learn: being right was not always the most important thing in a conversation.

Then came my daughters, and they refined me further. They made me more flexible, more approachable and taught me when to speak, when to listen and, sometimes, when to simply leave things alone.

I had spent years learning how to become a better professional. My wife and daughters quietly taught me how to become a better person.

My career continued to grow through different organisations, countries, cultures, personalities and increasingly demanding professional situations. Every phase took away another rough edge. I learnt to communicate better, listen better, handle difficult conversations with more maturity, and understand that getting something done through people required a very different skill from simply knowing the answer.

By then, the small-town boy had travelled quite a distance.

Life, of course, did not become perfect. There were difficult personal and health-related years that changed the way we looked at life as a family. Those years slowed me down, made me think more, and perhaps planted the seeds for much of the reflective writing I do today.

And through all these stages, there has been another constant in my life — my faith.

My belief in Kanchi Mahaperiyava and Shirdi Baba has grown with me over the years. There were periods when life was moving beautifully and periods when I did not know what was coming next. There were doors that opened unexpectedly, people who appeared at exactly the right time, difficult phases that somehow passed, and situations where I could only look back later and wonder how things eventually fell into place.

I have always felt their presence through these moments.

I do not claim to understand how everything works, nor do I believe that faith means life will always go the way we want. But I do believe that I have been guided, protected and nudged in the right direction through many stages of my journey.

When I look back today, I cannot separate that faith from the person I became. Without the blessings of Kanchi Mahaperiyava and Shirdi Baba, I genuinely do not think I would be sitting here today looking back at this journey with this sense of gratitude.

Somewhere along the way, another idea stayed with me through a movie I loved — Abhiyum Naanum. It is a story about a father growing along with his daughter, learning to let go, learning to accept, and learning that life does not always unfold exactly as expected.

Through all of that, one simple thought stayed with me: life is beautiful.

I relate to that more and more as I grow older. My life has had confusion, failures, mistakes, difficult years and plenty of situations that did not unfold the way I expected them to. But when I look at the whole picture rather than individual episodes, I still come back to the same conclusion.

Life has been beautiful, not because everything went right, but because somehow I kept moving.

Whenever something did not work, I usually found another route. Maybe that is one quality that has stayed with me throughout my life: flow like water. If one route closes, look for another. Do not stay stuck.

When I look at myself today, I can see how much has changed. I can travel anywhere, walk into a room full of strangers and speak, handle difficult conversations, work with people from different cultures, and deal with situations that the younger version of me would probably have run away from.

I am probably what my younger self would have called a “city person,” but I do not really feel that way inside.

Somewhere in me, I am still that small-town boy — the boy who could spend an entire day playing cricket, make a cricket ball out of paper and rubber bands, spend his bus fare on kulfi and walk home claiming he had special class, drink borewell water, run through fields and eat whatever he found growing there, last three days in karate, injure himself dancing, and have no idea what a board exam was until it almost arrived.

He was curious about everything, personally naïve, emotionally intense, increasingly independent and constantly learning after making mistakes.

I did not become who I am through one dramatic transformation. It happened through transfers, cricket matches, comic books, blank exam papers, good teachers, job rejections, mentors, cities, friendships, my parents, my wife, my children and a lot of trial and error.

The funny thing is that I spent a large part of my life trying to become less like that raw small-town boy — more polished, more confident, more articulate and more sophisticated.

And now, after becoming all of that, there are days when I wish I could borrow a little bit of him again.

His lightness, his curiosity, his ability to spend an entire day doing something simply because it was fun, and his freedom to run outside with a bat and ball without worrying about what tomorrow looked like.

I know I cannot become that boy again, but I hope I never completely lose him either.

After all, everything I became was built on top of him.

And after all the twists, mistakes, people, places and lessons that brought me here, I can say this with complete conviction today:

Life is beautiful.

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