Page out of my autobiography.......

I had planned for it to be a low key affair, but my 2 daughters had other ideas. They invited all of my and Shreysi’s friends and arranged for a grand party to celebrate our 25^th anniversary. I was so overwhelmed with their efforts, they had invited everyone from our school friends to our friends in our MBA school, they even invited Surenderpal, the store manager of the store I audited during my first summer training at Harayali. It had been so long that I had met many of them. After the beemer acquisition that established our company on the global stage I became extremely busy, shuttling across the world on business trips trying to grow our international business, as a result I had lost touch with many of my friends. So had Shreysi who had been equally busy looking after our business in India. It was thus a great experience catching up with friends and reliving old memories.

We decided to go on a vacation together with many of our friends to Leh. I remember Alok (yes our respected, now retired ex Governer of RBI) suggesting that we go on bikes like we had in college, this suggestion was perhaps a bit too ambitious considering most of us now had stiff bodies with fragile bones which could no longer take the 1,010 km journey on bikes. We thus discussed alternative plans like taking a flight to Leh directly or taking a flight to Srinagar and then driving down from there to Leh etc.

We continued making many such plans throughout that evening (only a couple actually materialized, yes the Leh plan did). It was one of the most enjoyable days of my life, after such a long time I was meeting with so many of my old friends. This day helped me to realise how important friends are and how much I had missed them over the last few years.

If I can go back in time......

A friend recently came up to me for help on an essay. The question read something like "A recent event ( popular or personal ) that seemed wrong to you and how would you handle it in retrospect ". I helped him brainstorm through some of the options and we came up with something good around the 2G scam which he wanted to write about.

I too thought a bit about the question from my perspective and this is what I thought I would have written if the question was posted to me.

This event happened about 8 months back when I was in a market with a female friend. A couple of boys walked close by and used some foul language for my friend. Both my friend and I were offended but we just walked past ignoring the 2 boys. Looking at this incident in retrospect I believe it would have been better if the two of us had confronted the boys as by keeping quiet we were silently encouraging such behavior.

We read about numerous incidents of eve teasing, kidnapping and rape in newspapers and I believe most of the criminals involved in such incidents indulge in comparatively smaller incidents like what we faced. It is because no one raises an alarm at that time thinking it’s not worth the hassle that these people start believing in the fact that they can get away with almost anything.

I thus strongly believe it is very important to confront perpetrators of such incidents as far as possible so that we do not encourage graver crimes. Thus looking at the incident in retrospect I think I would have confronted the boys and would have raised an alarm. Being a crowded marketplace I think it would have been extremely embarrassing for the two boys and hopefully this experience would have taught them a lesson and ensured that don’t think of doing any such things in future.