Today 5 PM,
was the end of an era. The oldest IT outsourcing company, Patni, closed its
original office inside SEEPZ. The people, all of us, will be located in the larger
campuses around. All of us met to commemorate the passing of this age in the canteen
on the first floor of SDF II for the last time. As we reminisced, it emerged
that amongst us were some who had been here since the beginning, twenty five
years. A few more, for twenty years. Perhaps
only TCS can trace back people who have been with them for this long. In the
rest of the IT industry in India, there is no other company that can talk about
times a quarter century ago. As I listened, it felt akin to the stories of
swashbuckling pioneers of the gold rush in the New World. While it may not
compare exactly in the number of years spent, but IT as an industry has in fact
evolved into a behemoth scarcely recognizable as the one in the eighties. And
here were the veterans of that time, talking about which room NK Patni, the
founder-owner of Patni, sat. The time when M Revi, the man-Friday for all
hardware work, would readily agree to staying late. A colleague from the same
vintage piped up saying, no, he would eagerly look for excuses to stay back. For
Revi, this was not even second home; it was home. He worked and ate, bathed and slept here. Someone from the security team, the Three Musketeers, would wake him up in the morning for
chai-nashta. Then one morning he did not wake up. Sometime in the night, he had
taken his last breath in this very place.
And then
were the fond memories of the Three Musketeers, musicians all, when in the
evening, once the bheed-bhaad was gone, they would go to the cupboards here and
bring out the tabla-dagga and harmonium, play and sing lustily to the
enthusiastic waah-waah of NK and the core team of Patni leaders. NK too has
passed away. With him has gone a whole way of being, a gentle elegance, an ecosystem
where empathy and compassion were not rebuffed, where calls were taken based on
many human attributes not found in the list of the hard-headed business report
sheets of then and now. Yet it was an inventive place, a joyous place, a place
where experiments were done without the fear of failures. Even as a relative
newbie, I recall moving to virtualization in 2008, investing in Cloud in 2009
when it was horrendously expensive and primitive. We discussed the need to have
platforms and applications, not just infrastructure on Cloud. The words IaaS, SaaS
and PaaS had not yet been coined. And these are examples from my limited
exposure. Ah! It all seems a lifetime away. I could almost taste the sweetness
of nostalgia tinged with the chalky astringency of regret that many spoke of. The
regret was for the finality of it all. No lingering now, no wistful glances into
the dim corridors of memories. It was done.
What I will
miss most are the magnificent trees. The giant Kapok, for instance, near the
lake at SDF VII, squat yet spindly like the bizarre baobab in Madagascar; and
the benevolent banyan, under which the TCS campus was built. I’m sure no one
knew then that it would become the noisiest corner inside SEEPZ – not because the
jewellery chaps made a ruckus or the fresh-faced developers shouted coding
secrets rudely. No, it was because the banyan became the home for thousands of
fruit bats and they would scream and screech all morning and afternoon while
roosting and preening and exchanging gossip. And with godhuli, this time not stomped
up by hooves, but by the revving of a hundred buses making the homeward run,
the bats would glide away silently in bunches of tens to the nearby fig trees.
