Thanksgiving, Tourniquets and Trains

There are some who gather friends on social media like it is a contest. While we can debate about how many of those connections are meaningful, we should be grateful for the opportunity to track down old connections and friends.

Not a single Thanksgiving has passed by since 1988 without me thinking about Emma Carney. She was a colleague, friend and mother figure when I started to work at Bell Communications Research in Piscataway during the late eighties. I remember asking her questions about the festival, and she was gracious enough to invite me to her house. She even took me to her Indian neighbor’s house (the Mehrotras’) in Hillsborough. While the turkey lovers dug in, I went for the stuffing. Every Thanksgiving season, I remember the Carney family.  Even with social media it took me a while to find Emma, but this month I was able to track her down. It felt awesome to listen to her hearty laugh again. And through her, I connected with Tim Ivins, also a colleague at Bellcore.

In 1987, my father tripped on a sidewalk in Piscataway, NJ and broke his forearm. Since my parents were tourists, they had no health insurance. Two samaritans came into my life. The first was Dr. Krishnan, a name I picked frantically out of the white pages right after the incident. He connected me to an orthopedic  surgeon, who managed to bring down the cost to $2500 for the surgery. The second person was a colleague, Dinesh Nettar, who co-signed a loan at the United Teletech Federal Credit Union at Bellcore, even though he barely knew me, because I did not have the money. I run into Dr. Krishnan every now and then, and I connected a couple of years ago with Dinesh. Every time I see a cast or a tourniquet, I think of these wonderful people.

Arunkumar Sadanand was probably 19 years old when I met him on a train journey to Mumbai from Southern India. I was eight, traveling back with my family, after a summer with my grandparents. A very unlikely friendship started, and we remained pen pals for a decade. During my first year in Engineering college (REC, Trichy), we freshmen were constantly looking for ways to leave campus to avoid ragging (or hazing). Arunkumar rode a Royal Enfield Bullet and lived about an hour away in the town of Poovaloor. The reunion was dramatic- he came just in time to save me from “mass immersion” – a ritual that required each freshman to skinny dip into the overhead water tank in the middle of the night. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to escape every time, but that night I knew that Arunkumar and Reena were the only family I had in a strange town. Trains remind me of Arunkumar. We re-connected, again, a few years ago.

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To me, connecting or re-connecting on social network in a meaningful, healthy way has more value  than posting a new recipe or an exotic locale. Maybe there is someone from your past that you need to thank, forgive, ask for forgiveness, do business with or simply get back in touch with. I don’t think I can ever repay the kindness  and the timely support I received from the people in my stories, but getting re-connected with them gives me comfort – like tying up loose ends.