An unusual evening with a maverick..

What can be more pleasurable, intellectually stimulating than spending an evening with one of the brightest, enterprising and mercurial software brains that I know of in a nightclub (colloquially called a Strip bar) with garrulous laughter all around me; naked sultry girls and boys hanging, gyrating and lasciviously leaning over a pole; Sweaty bodies meandering aimlessly in the midst of swirling intoxicating music; alcohol flowing in thick density lowering inhibitions and heightening passion - and here we were, Bill (name changed) and me, holding a can of coke in our hands and talking over the mystic lure of programming and idealistic abstractions of Spinoza’s “Ethics”.

Bill is a MIT drop out. Nearly six foot tall, in his mid-forties: he began his tryst with programming in a small gaming company in Silicon Valley – disgruntled soon enough; joined a music band and played the electric guitar for a while before his inner urge to code drew him again to take up a developer position in a startup company. In three years, his astonishing talent and intuitive understanding of Enterprise architecture helped redefine software that drove his retail business (the framework he created is still one of the most recognized design patterns in distributed development, widely used and built upon). Fell in love, got married, fathered two kids; and decided to leave IT to contribute to work for a Non-profit organization for war refugees - an urge, he tells me that overcame him when he read about their plight in a popular magazine. Disillusioned with Bureaucracy - he made his leap back to his first love- software; but this time for one of the biggest sport apparel companies in the globe; where he found his passion, brilliance and freedom coalescing into one wholesome bundle of energy. This was in 2005; and since then his vision and direction has established some of the finest practices in retail and logistics of this Multi-billion dollar business. Dressed always in hooded jumper-suit; wearing the same branded shoes, making wise crack jokes, multitasking, holding his teams spell bound with his freshness and sudden flashes of insight into problems - he is at once adorable, handsome, incorrigible and supremely intelligent - all at the same time.

He had walked into my class a couple of month’s back (his 200+ team was getting trained) without any announcement, briefly for ten minutes holding a cookie in one hand and the largest mug of coffee I have seen in another. He listened intently to my lecture and walked away abruptly, again without any acknowledgement. It was only during lunch that he came over and said “Bala, you are a passionate instructor. Your technical conviction is infectious… I like you man...” That broke the ice between us, and since then I have been in numerous calls, conversations, tech discussions - and our bond has only deepened. I realized that he was a very deep man with a strong sense of life and meaning outside of his professional life. This time around when I landed at his office on Monday, he shouted out a warm round of welcome and straight away jumped into a technical discussion around a conceptual hurdle. After ten minutes, I had to get to my class; and he said with a twinkle in his eye “Hey Bala, this evening, I can take you to a special place, if you have time.. We could talk about Rebecca Goldstein and her views on Spinoza there… We had left it half finished last time”. I readily agreed...

Little did I realize that his “special” place was this uptown Strip club? Apparently, he was very comfortable there. He knew all the bouncers, managers, and waiters and of course the girls - who would occasionally cuddle up, and he would land a polite kiss on their cheeks, only to continue our discussions on metaphysics. We sat in a corner booth, ordered some chips and salsa with coke... “Bala, I somehow knew you wouldn’t be offended I bought you here. This is my favorite spot, if I needed my brain to work itself through a situation. Most would prefer solitude, but to me this din and roar of this place numbs my senses to the point of withdrawal, and allows my thought processes to take on an independent life. The chaos of this joint fascinates me. My wife loves this place as well...” he laughed out aloud. “Well Bill, I must agree that this is the perfect place to discuss Spinoza… The human scales of right; wrong and good, bad falls away here; and we are confronted with brute reality of existence in its raw nudity…”

We were there for nearly two hours, talking, eating sipping coke; intermittently slipping into admiring a model on stage for her stunning beauty and grace. Time passed without any heaviness to it. From software architecture to development instincts and attitude; to God, religion and chaos, we explored common interests with strange passion and intensity. It was almost as if two souls were connecting at a deeper level leaving behind the façade of one’s personality and vocation. It was 11 in the night; time to leave and Bill drove me back to my hotel. Both of us visibly silent after the intensity of last few hours; and strangely, all that remained with me was the substance of our conversation and not the lusty images that surrounded those words. In the midst of sensory explosion there was an anchoring within oneself. As I got out of the car, I peered into his window and said “Thanks Bill. It is an evening that will leave its mark on my soul…” He smiled back and revved his engine and said “It was a great evening Bala... Stimulating conversation…See you tomorrow in office…”

God bless…

Yours in life,

Bala