Extinction of a way

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.