Old boys club

Take a group of kids who came of age in the eighties and went to school together in Bangalore with each one of them having developed his own profile and interests.What binds them together are shared interests in cricket and reminiscences from "those days". Not to mention a high cerebral quotient and very strong opinions. Take them to be in a state of voluminous communication via emails. Some of these emails tend to be brief, some long enough to put a PhD thesis to shame. Some are clear, sharp clinical analyses. Some long flights of verbose fantasy. The topics of these discussions tend to be as wide a range as one could possibly fathom. Or probably not. Sample these:
Cricket; Rajan Bala; Gundappa Vishvanath; Phantom; Mandrake; derivatives; stocks; bonds; Iraq war; Rahul Dravid; Kannada literature; Steven Covey; U R Ananthamurthy; S L Byrappa; B.R Ambedkar; Dalits; Manmohan singh; Thomas Friedman; some of the chicks from college (too many to mention here); IPL; Tintin; Asterix; Hedge funds; 529s; Jargon from our college days; katte (a meeting; talking; idling place we had there); Young Engineers -- Dos and Don'ts; Infosys; Microfinance; N R Narayanamurthy; Satyajit Ray; Tennis ball cricket; Kannada Poetry recital; Kannada litterateurs Kuvempu, Shivaram Karanth, KS Narasimha Swamy, G. Adiga, Nissar Ahmed, C. Kambar, PuTiNa, Siddalingaiah, GS Sivarudrappa, N S Lakshminarayana Bhatta, BR Lakshman Rao , HS Venkatesha Murthy;

start ups; venture capital; Chicago Business School; Karnataka Cricket; Vijayakrishna; Keki Tarapore; economic recession; China, Vijaya high school (Bangalore)

. This is but a sampling of the sweep of discussions. This group represents a group from my college -- BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore. I bring this up because ever since I have been engaged with this team I have never ceased to wonder what life can do to a group of kids who started their journey together with a set of shared values. As a school kid I used to read a column in Deccan Herald that had eminent seniors comment on what life taught them. I did not quite appreciate it then. I do now, as a forty +. If child is the father of man then life certainly bastardizes him as he goes along. It is quite fascinating to reflect on what one was, what one is and what one would be! It is said that a good work of literature always starts out as something and metamorphoses into something else as it goes along surprising both the creator and the reader. Going by that each one of us is a great literary work!
Oh, By The Way, our self given name to our email distribution list is techincal_11 (Spelling error on purpose).