Remembering two old friends Udayakumar Arunachalam and Veerasamy Vasudevan

I was given an assignment to write a program to read a “.out” file and extract the symbol table and the other meta data. This was one of the first assignments in my programming career. This came as part of the boot-camp training in the first company that I worked. We were about 30 odd people in that batch and with all due respect to others, I thought only Veeraswamy (aka Veera – as we fondly call him) could solve this and I possibly had an outside chance. Even if I end up solving it, it would take a day for me. When I was telling all this to a friend from another batch, he told Udayakumar (Uday) had competed it in about 45 mins.

That’s how we (those from the boot camp) started to compare and talk about these two nerds. Both of them were from same college. Both had studied in non-CSE backgrounds. Veera – ECE and Uday – E&I.

Veera became by roommate after the training. It was my early nature, to try and outsmart the people around me. But with every discussion and argument, I started to feel that I am talking to someone in different league. He had extremely good memory – that I could only envy of. While I did envy him, I couldn’t help but admire how his brain worked. How it could store, collate and process so much information and how much that memory can hold up to. 

We fought for so many things. Our views hardly matched. Even now I remember, we could have ended up with physically attacking each other any day. But we never broke up we stayed on as friends. When we occasionally catch up now, we joke about those days. 

I distinctly remember a conversation with him after  a dinner, where I touched upon some Moghul Empire and Veera went on to lecture about the entire Moghul dynasty in details – to a precision which was unbelievable to me. To do it without preparation and having studied it years back and to deliver it suddenly when no one expected you to – it was surreal. I had petty prides in remembering some of the old poems I studied or a math concept I learned in school. All that were shattered. 

What's astonishing with Veera was that he could do that for many and many subjects we studied. Be it Electronics, Physics or time travel. He could pick that information, like picking up a document from disk and talk about it for long. That brain was capable of storing and processing data like an expert of years would do. 

In a programming class, which was about inheritance, Veera asked the trainer, “If you say the derived class should be destructed first and base class later, it is akin to I have a father and I am the son, and son dies first and father dies later. Is that how it works?”

Well, to simply put, he was not ordinary. 

Uday was not that different in the way that the brain worked. He was a genius of his own sort. While we all had compilation issues in C, he would develop a Java application and would come and tell us, “This morning, I thought we need a separate application to handle this. I thought it is better to do it in Java” and not having written any line of code in Java, he could come up with a production worthy tool in the afternoon. While a hardware Engineer was absent, he would jump into soldering the circuit components. You could see him talk about Tamil literature and another day English literature. In a team meeting where the manager was present, you could not distinguish who the manager and who the report was. 

Once he and I were tasked to conduct an organization wide coding competition. While I had self doubts, Uday was doing it like a seasoned pro. He didn’t even try to get help from others. He told me, “Prakash. Too many cooks will spoil the show. We will decide the winners by ourselves”

I was like, “Dude, Are you serious?” The competition was thrown open to 3000 odd people. Though we had only about few tens of submissions, Uday had the audacity to set the question by himself, wrote a test application and evaluated the submissions and declared the winners as well. What was I doing there? I was just watching. I realized, When you have a partner and he is a genius just enjoy watching him and let him be in the flow. 

Later when I was deputed for another project in Chennai, Uday became my room mate for six months. Unlike with Veera, fortunately, I didn’t have to fight with Uday a lot. But he never failed to surprise me – like, by walking three kilometers when the bus was getting late, riding a bike for about 550 kms at a stretch to his native, going for a serious trek and doing it like he does it for every day or preparing poori for me in the morning and packing it and keeping it ready before I started to office. 

He was a Mad-genius, a friend you can trust if your life depends on anything. One day Uday told me, “Prakash, while attending interviews, you must remember, the company should not select you, instead you should select the company”. I was awestruck by that statement and the clarity that he had at the age of 21. But he was definitely telling what he could and would do. 

I parted ways with Uday and Veera about 10 years back. We have hardly spoken after that. But my thought process has hugely been impacted by these two mavericks. For the rest of my life, I ll travel with these two personas.