It is one of my hobbies to mine the internet to see if I could reach somebody whom I knew sometime. Most of the time this is an innocent passtime to just see if I can indeed locate somebody in a remote part of the world somehow.

This morning, it was relatively quiet and I decided to hunt for two of my long lost friends. First was Md Showkat Osman who did masters with me at IIT Kanpur. Last time I heard of him, he was at Bangladesh Institute of Technology, Dhaka. So I started there.

Well BIT Dhaka no longer exists I think. All searches ended up in Bangladesh Universtiy of Engineering and Technology. But buet.ac.bd ended up in broken link. Search for him on environmental ground took me to another institute. I called them up and the guy who picked up told me that Showkat left 2 years back but kindly gave me the phone number. The phone numbers did not take me anywhere.

I came across an article by Showkat in a magazine which had worldbank in it. So I hunted down the page of world bank in bangladesh and asked them if they could put me in touch with Showkat. Let us see.

If I do manage to get him online, then I would have successfully hunted down all my classmates from IIT/K. That will be a new year gift for all of us.

Christmas also brought to me the thoughts of another classfriend of mine, this time somebody who as at school with me. Jolly NV, a very pretty young girl with a nice mole on her cheeck, was my classmate from 6th to 10th standard and it was essentially a two horse raise all through those period. Every exam we fought to see who got better marks. I think the competition assisted both of us in securing higher marks than what we would have managed had we been on ourselves.

I last saw her in 1979 walking to St Xaviers college, though I did hear about her as late as 1990s when one of my friends told me that she is now married to yet another of our friends and she is working in Life Insurance Corporation of India. I had done a little bit of mining for her before but that did not succeed. So today I started looking for her based on the limted information I have about her. Her name, LIC and family name.

I wasnt very successful for an hour or so when I thought, hmm, may be I should check the telephone directory for her family name. That did bring me few names but in India where telephone numbers are mostly installed in the name of the guy, I couldn't get much closer. I then searched the telephone numbers listed to see if that gets me a better contact.

In the end, I did get a contact with similar family name but someway far from the village. I am not sure if they actually belong to the same village. Let us see.

I will keep you posted on the progress.