Remembering Murali (YRM)

Regularly we hear or read stories of extremes (accident, robbery, loss of job, life threatening disease like cancer and even sudden death of a healthy person). As many times as we hear, we tend to ignore in the belief or hope that it won’t happen to us. 31st May 2008 was one cruel day that ensured that the life is never the same again. This day we lost Y R Muralidhara (known as Murali in family circle and YRM in professional circle), suddenly due to brain haemorrhage. He would have been 40 in a month. Its an year today and there is no better thing to do today than paying a small tribute. He never saw this blog as I had kept it under wraps even from him. Just keep wondering all the encouraging words he would have had, if at all he had seen this blog.

No other person than Murali has touched me in multitude of relationships (Distant relative, Classmate (at SJCE, Mysore), Colleague (at Sasken, and reporting to the same boss), Competitor for a while (I ran Sasken’s Multimedia engg and he ran a similar group at another company which was Sasken’s competition in Multimedia), Potential vendor (I was at Freescale and were evaluating possibility of working with a local company and one such company was where Murali was working and he made a presentation to the Freescale team led by me. Before the start of the meeting, we even shook hands and exchanged cards with a smile that only we two could understand) and of course he was my Brother-In-Law (when I married his sister in 1996). Above all these, he was one of my closest friend/philosopher and I miss him the most in this relationship. This is an attempt to describe him from “my” perspective and to recall some happy memories of the 24yr association I was privileged to have with him.

Our first interaction was in 1984 when we got introduced in a family function. I figured out that this distant relative is of my age and also studying in 10th standard. We quickly became friends and I got some bragging rights very quickly as he secured 19th rank in the state level 10th exams that year. We continued meeting in family functions and the seeds of deep friendship were grown when he moved to Mysore in 1986 for engineering.

We both went to SJCE Mysore (Murali by sheer merit having secured 54th rank in the CET and I getting there with some luck, having secured 1000+ ranking in the CET), and were soon meeting daily. Murali was quickly recognized as one of the brainy of the batch and throughout engineering he was the go-to person to crack hard problems. Many people scored more marks than Murali after learning from him, but Murali was above all the petty thoughts of getting above someone by not teaching; his satisfaction was coming more from the thrill of solving a tough problem, than from scoring some marks. For some reason that I do not remember, we both were commuting together for all the exams. For most exams he used to complete only about 80-90% of the stuff and used to complain that he couldn’t get enough time to complete. Nevertheless, he regularly used to score almost 100% on the stuff he attempted. A big shock came to all of us, when he flunked in “Control Systems”, I guess in 5th Semester. Murali was confident that he has done enough to clear the exam and applied for revaluation and started preparing again with vengeance. However, just a few days before the repeat exam the revaluation results declared him as “pass” and he was able to maintain his 100% record. He is the one that taught me programming, FORTRAN to begin with. I was so scared of going to the computer center alone and Murali helped me by drawing screen shots how the screen would look at the end of every command, till I became confident of fiddling around with the machines. Never did I realize at that time that I’d have a career in software engineering and the foundation laid by Murali would earn me a livelihood.

He was so focused on higher education. He refused to attend to campus interviews as he was sure not to join any company till he completed his masters. However, Murali used to hang around the place where the interviews were being held and was helping his friends on the tough questions the interviewers were posing as and when the guys completing the interviews coming back and leaking the questions.

We prepared together for GATE (1991). We made a timetable on the topics to be studied and it used to be a marathon session from about 10AM to about 9PM. Murali was never allowing me small luxuries like playing cricket in the evenings. We used to take a subject and used to solve all the problems in the text book. If one of us is stuck (it was usually me) the other would wait and/or offer hints to go over the hump. Invariably we used to encounter some really tough problems that we both were unable to solve. I was happy to let it go after spending some time, but Murali won’t. It used to be good for me because that would allow me to go out and indulge in something more interesting.

He got 100+ rank or so in GATE and went to IIT-Kanpur and I, having secured 500+ rank went to REC Surathkal. During this phase our interactions were limited to the “inland letter” or snail mail as people call it now. He used to write beautifully, as he had a natural talent in telling stories – be it narrating some incidents in life, explaining a movie, a novel, a place or something from epics like Mahabharatha (BTW, SriKrishna of Mahabharatha was the person that he admired most). He was always looking for intellectually challenging themes and chose “software reliability” as his area for M.Tech thesis. This field was still nascent at that stage and therefore came in the way securing some “good” jobs in Bangalore based companies. He enjoyed his stay at Kanpur. He was very active in the Kannada Sangha activities and made many friends for life over there. For a while, he was little down as someone known to him played some serious pranks over several weeks, but otherwise he was only reporting happy memories, including a trip to the “valley of flowers” in Himalayas.

After M.Tech, he joined CMC Ltd (1993) (now a part of TCS) in Hyderabad. Though he was staying alone and the salary was relatively less compared to the hi-tech MNCs of Bangalore, he enjoyed his work and the people over there. Our communication now had moved to email. After much prodding from everyone, rather reluctantly he moved to Bangalore when he took up an offer from Sasken (SAS as it was called then, 1995).

We were now colleagues. It was little strange initially as we started sitting in the same meetings, training programs, task forces etc., In Apr 1996, I married his younger sister and 12yr friendship moved to a more formal relationship. Till he moved out of Sasken in early 2003, we used to chat for atleast 1.5-2hrs daily in both office and home and were sharing almost everything.

We both had become managers and were dealing with “people”. Murali, being very big on “values” often used to tell me that he is out of sync with the younger generation. He strived, till his last day, to strike a balance between the “needs” of his people and the “requirements” from his management. It is never easy, especially when the personal value system is out of sync with that of company’s.

He oversaw a tough merger of his small company (300+) into a bigger one (12000+ enggs). He had more problems to sort out as he tried his best to ensure integration. He always felt he was doing a thankless job and was neither appreciated by his team nor by his management. We all were urging him to change the job as it was too stressful. Once he wrote “I am in the state where I am following DVG's kagga line "Kallagu kashtagaLamaLeyu suriye"” He continued, “I am finding "this world" fairly negative in energy and I am feeling tired fighting it out. May be I am not the person to improve things OR things would rather improve without me meddling in them”. He had become philosophical “…some strange peace has descended on me. Peace of some one who has accepted the fate, I guess. May be every scary pressure will be followed by this kind of peace”. It still remains a mystery as to why he hung around in his last job that he had stopped enjoying a long time ago. In one of his last emails to me he had written … “I am sick of salary/money/power related issues, but I have not reached a clarity in mind about my own requirement of salary/money/power”. May be he was a few weeks away from getting that clarity, we would never know.

In between all these, he completed his MBA (PGSM) from IIMB (2003). This was one hell of achievement as his responsibilities had significantly grown both at home and at office. From my perspective, it gave yet another avenue to talk. He used shared stuff he learnt at IIMB, his new classmates, professors and everyone else around. It was a proud moment for the family to participate in the convocation and witness his graduation ceremony. He made some good friends and was an active alumni lending his hand for various activities of IIMB long after he had completed his PGSM.

He had a passion for life in general. He bought a Bullet, though he didn’t go on any big expedition on that. He even taught me to ride this big bike. He bought a site and invested lot of his time and energy with one of the best architects in Bangalore to build his dream house. Unfortunately, he was hit by land mafia and had settled for a very good apartment. Reading books was his another favorite activity. He did have quite a few books on wide range of topics.

Music was his yet another interest. We have had a lot of discussions on the classical music, Kannada songs, the artists, the lyrics, concerts and just about anything related to music. Balamuralikrishna was his favorite musician. Without any formal education he was able to recognize lot of ragas and used to bring out symmetries, patterns and other subtleties in the music. He also drew my attention to the importance of “silence” in classical music.

He was well versed in literature too. Quoting Gita and other Hindu philosophy was very easy to him. Yoga was his another interest. I remember offending him by asking him “who is Patanjali?” In short, as I reflect back, he achieved a lot, knew a lot and experienced a lot in a short life span.

We miss him. Lot of us used to consult him on a very regular basis for several things. Be it a good translation of some poem/phrase, any scientific thing, details of a place, advice on life, advice on work or even interpretation of an unusual/recurring dream. You would always be satisfied and feel comforted after Murali had spoken to you. It’s been tough for everyone around.

Lot of people helped the family to cope; with support, love and compassion. However, I wish to thank one friend and ex-colleague of both of Murali and myself, who went out of the way, perhaps making lot of enemies in the organization, just to ensure that the family got everything they were entitled for.

We both used to discuss our life after retirement, when kids are all grown and perhaps gone out of home. We wanted to stay in the same compound so that we are together for the rest of the life and perhaps carry out lot of activities that we missed during our busy work days. We wanted to help each other on day to day things when we were old. It would have been so comforting to have someone like Murali next door any day, but definitely when I’m old. I now have no option but to rue “Murali, why did you leave so early?”.