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Rahul Shah

Turn the clock back to Dec'74...  The day the ISC exams got over, went and saw "The Horsemen" starring Omar Sharif with Vinay Dongre - the movie in which a dead pig is used to play polo. A blissful 6 months followed, "tooling" around the WIAA club area with Vinay, Ashok Jatia, Ravi, amongst others.  Other fond memories include being Ravi's band "roadie" for the Cosmic Junk - and having him and Ranjit Barot (I hear he is kinda big in the film scene today with his latest being "Main Hoon Na") practice at my flat. Elphinstone followed - a leap straight into Inter Science that proved to be a diasaster - since I wasn't willing to put in the work after skipping FYear.  After playing around in Agarwal's classes during Spring 1976, ended up in Baroda at M.S University for a B Tech in Electrical Engineering.  Having finally developed much needed focus, graduated in 1981 and headed out to Abu Dhabi.  This was with an outfit called DODSAL as a refinery site engineer. A 95 percentile GMAT score got me a bunch of admissions - but decided on the MBA program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Great program, lowest cost amongst the USA's top 10-15 business schools - after all I am a Guju Baniya, and value for money mattered. Graduated in 1984, met Ravi in Manhattan that year, and moved to California.  Got married for the first time in 1987 and did various interesting jobs around Silicon Valley. As fate would have it, ended up interviewing at a company called Rockwell in 1997 - with none other than our illustrious Vijay Parikh who was a vice president at Rockwell.  Started working at Rockwell, managing a product line of modem chips.  So if you are connecting to the internet to read this using a modem, there's a 50% chance it's a product Vijay initiated and I brought to market! :-) Vijay moved on, but I ended up marrying a second time - to a lady I met on the internet - or more precisely on America Online.  Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared to deal with a bunch of wild step teen kids, and three years later decided it was time to be single again. Which brings me to 2002.  With my mom's coaxing, met a nice gal from Bombay on Shaadi.com and got married in October 2002.  Vina, my wife, came to the USA in March 2003, and we're expecting our (her's and mine) first kid this November - which kinda screws up my reunion plans. The Campion nostalgia campaign has had the benefit of bringing me closer again to Ravi, Arnold, Sunil and of course Vijay, since his dad lives two miles from my house - it's indeed a small world. And so that's the story of my life so far - it's indeed like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you'll find in it.