An Old Friend

Okay I just got my new MacBook Pro 15″ with Touch Bar. It is working quite well as I type my first post with it. But this post is not about my newest friend, the MacBook Pro, but an old friend, Rajib Roy, who I had the pleasure with catching up tonight over a table filled with maki rolls at a sushi restaurant in Richmond Hill.

Although we keep in touch once a year, typically on my birthday, we never had an opportunity to physically meet and catch up. Tonight he happened to be in town, and I was really looking forward to our discussions. He reminded me that we haven’t seen each other since 1998, so we are talking about 18 years! This is a significant intermission. In that time we’ve been through two financial melt downs, and we went from web page ubiquity, to apps, to machine learning and internet of things.

We discussed many things, which Rajib was kind enough to jot down in great detail on his blog, where he so eloquently recount our dinner, and certainly made me look much wiser than I really am. Thanks for the kind words Rajib.

We exchanged many ideas, but two major take aways that really made an impression on me were:

• His technique of trying to keep in touch with his friends by calling them up on their birthdays. I am really lucky to have myself to be a member of this lucky group. It is always a pleasure to hear Rajib’s voice either on or close to my birthday. I thought, what an ingenious way to ensure that all of us keep in touch. In the age of instant messages and social media, a real, rare, and most definitely welcome voice, can sometimes make all the difference to liven things up for the day. I applaud him for making the effort to keep in touch with so many, when I learned from a recent book that I read, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, that we humans are only capable of forging a limited number of relationships.

• His work ethics of work hard for several years, and then take a whole year off, is a great way to maximize your time with your friends and family and appreciate the things in life that you can enjoy by giving them due and full attention without the day to day distractions of work. This is the best work-life-balance technique that I have heard to date. I only wish I can some how make this work for myself. Only if I could rationalize my personal economics. He  poignantly recalls a book he read about an Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware, working in palliative care, that those on their death beds wished that they didn’t work so hard.

It would have been good to have other past coworkers along this evening, but at the same time, our concentrated exchanges, reminiscing about past colleagues, and contemplating on our outlooks on life was really — in a word — enjoyable.

Until next time Rajib, and this time let’s keep our intermission in months instead of years.