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| With a little help from my friend� One person who has really helped me in my career is Rajesh Rajani. You have to see him to believe me as to how exceptional a person and how much of a true friend he is to anyone. Babli (Rajesh Rajani) is the person I would term as the person behind successful IT career, though if you ask him, he'll deny it - modest that he is. The reason I credit him is because he taught me the language of all languages - C. My knowledge in C may be very little as compared to the stalwarts, but I must mention that I was the most highly rated faculty in C when at Asset. If your students threaten the management and ask for their money back if they don't get trained by you, you know you've reached your career highpoint. I would credit this success to Rajesh who is currently in San Jose, happily married to the girl of his dreams, Twinkle. Overture� While exposing you to my 'intellectual music preferences' (as I always proudly term it) I would also like to mention the names of people who helped me build my music collection, I can never ever forget them!!! First it was school chum Jatin Paranjape, who somehow managed to get the latest Amercian Top 40 recorded on tapes and sourced from the FM station WPLJ Power 95. Those were the days of Wham, Madonna, Billy Joel, Police and the start of Sting's solo project with Dream Of The Blue Turtles. Jai, who never had much music with him but had a whole lot of 'bandaas' in Chembur who would be more than ready to share their music with him (I think they still do it in fear of not getting thrashed by him!!!) Jai introduced me to Naresh Ramnath, an extremely proud lad, proud of his massive collection that consisted of Yes, Hendrix, Yardbirds, Zeppelin, Who to name a few. More importantly the tapes he had were 'rare' during those times, though most of the recordings would be awful, we were pretty satisfied to be among the lucky few Indians who have heard it. Ram Sampath (the ex-keyboardist) also some good music with him. Rikhav Desai, standing 6 feet tall, would become 'the man' owning some real awesome music. During those times when I met him, it was like, you name it - he's got it!!! Although a very gentle person who always wanted to share his music, he must have been pretty annoyed at me for having troubled him for music. Then along came Raghu, the blues man, he must be easily having at least one recording of almost all the blues artistes in the world, apart from other genres of music. Raghu I heard last was based in Chennai and Rikhav has ventured into ad-films direction and is currently not in touch. Vijay Desai - the Kishore Kumar clone, not just in voice but also in his whacky and crazy behavior, was the guy who actually made me appreciate good Hindi music. Guru Acharya, a pal who credits me for introducing him to music, is my other source for music nowadays and has some of the best fusion and rock music collection found on CD; Jethro Tull, Santana, Shakti, Trilok Gurtu, L. Subramaniam & Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to name a handful. Pankaj Sharma, easily the best percussion artiste I have ever heard live, was the key person in my shift towards jazz. Another fair six-footer nearing his forties then, with massive torso and arms and a charming face! Though he never had any music to give me, the names he provided were really helpful. He also taught us guys (band members) the essence of timing and how simple mathematics could change a beat sequence into a complicated jolt of thunder & lightning. Blackhart Rendezvous� My search for more music continued when Guru Acharya, tipped me about a doctor in Shivaji Park who was reputed to have a mammoth CD collection. Dr. Kiran's residence had handouts stuck to some walls about a guitar instructor by the name of Rajesh. The address sounded familiar and whoa!! All of a sudden I realized that this was my schoolmate Rajesh Hemrajani who had been out of touch for almost six years. I took down the address and walked right into his house one day at 12:00 in the night!!! He was awake and playing the guitar in his terrace annex. We are back again as good pals, and he has taken up the guitar quite seriously and has finished the seven grades of music. He teaches the guitar and is currently working for a computer institute teaching programming languages. Rajesh is also an excellent lyricist and writes songs with strong lyric content. |
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