I am on a late-night phone call with my manager, sitting in my tiny apartment.
"I am sorry to tell you this, but it looks like your code is shit," he says.
I am curious but I keep my mouth shut. I thought this guy had always been a little full of himself.
Almost a year back, I, along with a bunch of folks from all over India, joined Rapidd, my previous company - a startup based out of Banshankari, Bengaluru. It was our first job and Venkatesh, who had joined about a month before, was there to guide us.
The first few weeks were a lot of fun. It was the first time in my life I had faced a proper enterprise application of that scale.
Venkatesh was like the lone guide when you were navigating the jungles.
You might have learned a lot of theories on what the jungle is like, what to look out for,
But being there amongst the undergrowth, leeches at your feet, the thick shrubby trees all around, and birds screaming like anything above your head - you don't learn how to deal with it till you deal with it.
When Ganesh Chaturthi was ongoing, Venkatesh and I were alone in the office, with nothing better to do, going through all of our coworkers' code, just so that the client had nothing to complain about.
Bhoopalan, the CEO of our company, came and pulled me to the side. "Is everything going ok with the project? Is there a lot of pending work from your side?"
It was a difficult conversation to explain that our work was done way ahead of schedule and we were just polishing things by our coworkers, just for the sake of it.
I was glad Venkatesh was there; he was the only like-minded soul I had come across after moving from my city to this new one, for the sake of work.
We would often critique our colleagues’ skills, somewhat arrogantly assuming we knew better.
"I have started freelancing. Don’t trust them to pay fairly. They earn much more from our work but pay us peanuts," he tells me.
I am curious. I knew he didn't like the cofounders of the company much but wasn't super clear as to why.
"This shit salary that they pay, they get a lot more for each of us. But they still pay us these shit numbers."
It was true, I stayed in a small room which was a little bit bigger than the kitchen in my house in Kolkata.
It was a compromise, but given that it was my first job and the first time I got independence in my life, I was too thrilled to care much about it. But the rent for that took away half of my salary.
Bengaluru rents suck.
But I was happy since I had a job which paid a bit, whereas all of my classmates from college were still waiting for the joining letter from Wipro, which they hadn't even sent after 4 months post-graduation.
I asked a few more questions about what he was working on, and what all he learned, and the conversation trailed off from there.
A few weeks later, he set up a call with me and a few of my colleagues outside of work.
"I am thinking of starting up my own company. We are going to become like a Kickstarter for India. Once we get some funding and stuff, I can give you a lucrative offer here. But for the time being, I would like your help in building out the platform."
I was really excited. I immediately asked him what I could do, and he assigned me some work, which I got started with.
A day after this call happened.
I was like, "Ok, tell me the next steps and we can do it off."
But it was mostly radio silence on this line after that. No newer tasks, and no progress in the birth of this new startup.
A couple of months after, Venkatesh started getting very jittery at work. He would just wait for the working hours to finish when he would vanish from the office without a trace. We barely spoke.
One day, I saw him writing out a letter on an A4 paper on his desk. I ask him what it was, and he says, "None of your business."
Later that day, when coming back from lunch, I saw that he rushed to his desk. He grabs his bag and disappears.
I asked my friend Nikhilesh who was in the office about what happened. He said, "Looks like Venkatesh gave a threat to the cofounders saying he will resign if they don't give him a hike. And they accepted his resignation and told him he won't have to do the notice period."
The architect and lead of our client company reached out and asked me to lead the project after that. It wasn't something I ever expected. But since Venkatesh had left a void, they had considered me for the position.
Venkatesh was mostly out of reach after that. I got to know from my coworkers that he is doing the freelancing thing full-time.
A few months hence, he moved to Ireland to do an MS.
The person I had thought of to be like-minded has become a stranger, his actions and motives opaque, all within a few months.
Hey Aiyush, I remember this incident