My story so far....

I was borne and brought up in Dombivli, a small town in the state of Maharashtra, India. I lived there until I moved to US for higher education. My immediate family includes my Parents, grandmother and younger brother Ajay. Both my parents are professionals, my father is a Civil Engineer and mother teaches in a secondary school. Ajay is the genius in our family and currently  he is pursuing a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Purdue University.

I did my schooling at Swami Vivekanand Vidya Mandir, and for junior college I went to K. V. Pendharkar College of Arts, Science and Commerce, both in Dombivli, my hometown. I chose to be an engineer and enrolled in V. J. T. I., a leading technological institute in India. I started learning Civil Engineering, but soon developed keen interest into computers. My first interaction with a computer was during a basic course on programming in very first semester of engineering program. The first programming language I learnt was PASCAL and that really shaped my future programming skills. I still believe that PASCAL is the best programming language for a beginner. At the same time I also enjoyed analysis and design of structures. Thus I pursued both Computers and Civil Engineering with equal passion.

But when it came to jobs, I had to choose between emerging field of software engineering and age old, (in my opinion) slightly stagnant Engineering Design & Consultancy. I chose the former because I thought it would be more exciting to work. I easily got into Tata Infotech LTD (TIL) as Associate Systems Engineer. At TIL, I had to first complete a four months full time New Trainee Program (NTP). For me it was like an extra semester in school and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This was a very useful program with a balance between development of technical as well as communications skills. However the romance ended as soon as we were put into projects. During those days TIL was going through a bad patch with most of the projects disappearing in the pipeline itself. It was very frustrating to keep on shuffling across teams without getting any opportunity to make any significant  contribution. I sustained for a year, before calling it off.

I used this period in TIL to harness my software skills. Although I knew couple of programming languages and though I had successfully completed training program, I knew I could not compete with a Computer Science graduate. My colleague and friend in TIL suggested that we should go for part time studies and National Centre for Software Technology, better known as NCST was a good option. We studied together for the entrance exam and got into Post Graduate Diploma in Internet Technologies (PGDIT), a year long program devoted to Computer Networks.

During the same period I quit TIL and joined Indicom, a subsidiary of Maryland, USA based Comsat Labs. Indicom was a small team of 20 people and the culture was totally different from TIL. Here everybody was an important part of the organization, and your opinion counted. I was learning computer networks in NCST and in parallel applied the same technique at work. Our projects were interesting and challenging. I sincerely think that the year and half at Indicom shaped me as a Software Professional. Every individual in Indicom was exceptionally nice and we always worked as One Team. This was the place where I made some of my best friends like Ilias, Sachin, and Amit. However good things in life don't last long. We had the first hand experience of this proverb when Lockheed Martin which had bought Comsat, pulled off tabs after dreaded events of Sept 9/11.

It was a major personal setback for all of us. In spite of getting termination notices all of us used to still come to office until the last day, hoping for some MIRACLE. Slowly we accepted the reality and moved on. I got into Reliance Infocomm LTD, an emerging Telecom company. At Infocomm soon I made new friends, worked on some challenging projects and learned a lot about management. By this time I had learned to keep emotions out of job and decided to pursue further studies in the field of Computer Science.

In July 2003, I joined University of Missouri - Kansas City for MS in Computer Science. Now I am about to finish my masters and  move on in life. Last 2 years were a totally different kind of experience. But I have already written enough for day, so more about it later......

PS: If you have patiently read so far, then I owe you a real  big THANKS!! I wrote this whole story for my own satisfaction and I did not really expect any one else to be interested in it. Do drop me couple of lines in comments.