Meeting with the Delivery Manager – Samesh Balluri

It was about 10 days since we had entered the account. We had been assigned mentors, and guess what – My mentor was SUJATHA (A few months down the road, when me and Suj were best of pals, she told me that Srikanth had assigned me to Suj on purpose. Just so that we could iron out our difference. The moment I heard that revelation, my respect for Srikanth went up a notch!) …

It reminded me of “Murphy’s Law” – ‘’If something can go wrong – It WILL!!!’’ I mean, I couldn’t find any other logical explanation for that, besides being an exercise to validate Murphy’s Law i.e.

So … There I was – Stuck, I believe is the term! And that too at the hands of a lunatic bungling baboon, who had a special liking for making a fool out of me.

But heck, I was not the sort of person who was going to be intimated by some women who was out of her mind. Another week passed, and still no solid “work” had come our way. We were asked to learn some stuff like EJB’s, JDBC, Weblogic Tuning, etc and complete some menial “understanding based” assignments on these areas. But, they were not the sort of “work” I was looking forward too.

Being a master as plagiarism (thank my 4 years at NITC for that), I’d wait till Ram or Meen completed the assignments and then ask em to share it. Once I had the code on my machine, it was just a matter of mins before I changed the variable names, tweaked the code to be more efficient, add a System.out.println once in between every 15 lines of code (in the name of “aiding debugging”, and ‘Hey Presto’ you had a completely original bit of code ready for submission.

No idea why – but the folks never caught my little trick. Maybe, they didn’t give a damn. But, I prefer to think that - I was successful in “pulling a fast one” on the unsuspecting souls. Either ways, bottom line – It was close to 2 weeks now, and I for one was getting bored at not getting a taste of the action.

During one of those days, the entire team got together for a meeting. It was in this meeting, that I came face to face with Samesh Balluri, the Account Manager for Pespi ODC. Every single person in the account was full of praise for him. He welcomed us freshers on board (obviously – it was about 2 weeks overdue, but heck – I’m just being over critical here).

Maybe its just me, but in life, you come across some people, who for no reason scare or intimidate you. Take the policeman for instance. You know you haven’t stolen anything. But, for some reason you see him and you start panicking. Similar was the case with Samesh Balluri – atleast to me. I still have no clue why I was scared of him. But, every time I see him or run into him, nervousness hits me and I end up all tensed and worried. Maybe it’s the perfume he uses. Or maybe it’s his aura. Or maybe his Yin v/s mine. What the hell – bottom line – I was and still am a little intimidated by him!