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Friday, February 23, 2007

All about Amar


After watching my roommate and friend “Amar” in action at New Orleans on last weekend, I decided to write something about him.

He hails from a town called “Jangaon” in the Warangal District. After his birth, his family moved to the glorious city of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. So, now he is a habitant of Hyderabad. He speaks fluent Telangana (a famous dialect of Andhra Pradesh).

Though we worked in the same building and for the same company we never met each other when we were in India. I met him for the first time when I came to know that he will be one of the guys whom I have to stay with in US for the next one year.



He addressed me with his trademark ‘shy smile’. My other roommate Srinivasulu was sitting next to Amar and I extended my regards to him too. After our rush for the documents at our travel agent’s desk, we took a break and celebrated our onsite opportunity at “Seventh Heaven” restaurant. Amar paid the money and we (Srinivasulu and I) still owe him that money.

After we landed in US, he paid the cab charges ($200) from Jackson to Hattiesburg and he is now happy as that amount was finally reimbursed by my company.

Amar basically is a complete family man. Both his strength and weakness is his family. Even on his busiest day, he allocates at least 2 hours to chat with his family in India. But at the same time he never stops enjoying by passing some ‘strong’ comments on girls we see on our way to office/home. He is a silent killer. He analyzes peoples ‘attitudes’ with great enthusiasm. Of course, sometimes his analysis about couple of persons failed.

One more interesting fact about him is his smoking habit. He needs a max of two cigarettes per day. And as any other smoker, even he thinks that cigarette relieves him from his stress.

He is habituated to count money in Indian Rupees only. He never thinks that he is earning a $1; instead he thinks and treats it as INR 43. He is very calculative and meticulous person.

He looks like a very common man from India, but his brain is very uncommon. It is full of wide variety of ideas ranging from hair pin to aero plane. He is the most popular guy in BearingPoint’s .NET team at Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Lot of youngsters in his team respects his problem solving skills. They love his presence in the team and they never leave a chance to say good things about him in team meetings or conference calls. He is well appreciated.

As his roommate, I see a totally different Amar at home. The moment he steps out of the office he removes his disguise and turns into a very romantic guy. In fact, we realized this fact long back and affirmed this on our trip to New Orleans for the New Year and for the “Mardi Gras”.

Coming to his food habits, he adjusts his diet as per the menu. And he supports this by remembering all the hardships he had went through during his younger days.




These days, by God’s grace he is doing well in all aspects of life and he was blessed with a baby girl (see her in the above picture - Sankeerthana is her name) in last year. He is missing his daughter more than his wife and we can see that special ‘glow’ on his face whenever he speaks about her.

One interesting thing about his family is that there are two “IIM” graduates in his family. I will write more later after identifying more interesting things about this amazing guy.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Allons.......Mardi Gras...........New Orleans

All of my friends eagerly waited for the Mardi Gras at New Orleans.
As planned we started in Raj Kiran's car at around 12 in the noon and reached New Orleans after 2 hours drive. The drive was quite comfortable in his new Mazda6. Raj Kiran is another desi guy, who joined recently in BearingPoint as a sub-contractor. He was graduated from University of New Orleans in the year 2004. So, he is aware of all the roads and routes in New Orleans.

After meeting Raj's friend, Siva Reddy at University of New Orleans, we went to Lake Pontchartain. After a brief photo session, we started to "International Bazaar" where we shopped for more than an hour. Almost every month we purchase our groceries (mostly Indian stuff) at IB.

Once we were done with our shopping every one realized that they are starving (nobody had anything in the morning as they got up from their beds at around 11 AM). Raj wheeled us to a Indian Restaurant called "Salt-n-Peppers" in the downtown.

After a long time, everyone had revitalized their taste buds with some spicy Indian food. I had couple of Aloo Parathas with Chana Masala as the side dish. Yaseen Bhai and Raj had the Hyderabadi special, "Goat Biryani". We had enough food for the next two days.

We headed to Bourbon Street and was lucky to find a parking place for our car. After parking the car we took 15 mins to identify the important things to carry on the Bourbon Street. We parked our car in the public car parking lot right behind the "Jax Brewery" Building. We were happy that we found some space to park our car. It is next to impossible to find a parking place during a Mardi Gras weekend in the downtown.

We finally entered Bourbon Street and saw the "flow" of crowd moving in all directions. We saw people in different and weird dresses through out the street. Most of them are decorated with lots of "beads". Those beads are very colorful and are in different sizes. The whole street was resonating with different flavors of music. People dressed themselves in the most weirdest way possible.

We stepped into the most famous club on the Bourbon street, "Razzoos". They charged $5 per head and stamped some letters on our left palm. We really had fun for the next one hour with the best Hip Hop music I ever heard. The most funniest part of our visit to the club is that one big fat white lady started rubbing her back on my back and I slowly moved away and let Amar (my friend) step into my place and he enjoyed it more than anything on that day ;).