Neeta sipped her coffee. She was not nervous. But there was a strange feeling about this meeting. She had never been in a situation where she was the decision maker. Somehow this meeting seemed big to her. She looked at the group of Chinese tourists, as she sat in the large food court of CNN building, Atlanta. This place always fascinated her. This building represented state of art technology with a better vision in broadcasting and communication to her. She had visited this place at least 10 times in her last one year in Atlanta. She checked her watch once again and went back to the book she was reading "The Google Story".
"Hey Neeta" said Sahaj as he pulled the chair to sit with her. Neeta looked up from her book and gave a warm smile.
"What are you reading? Oh Google story. Nice! Did u like it so far?” asked Sahaj.
"Yes Larry and Sergey amaze me as much as you do. Isn’t Google amazing? The world's best search engine" said Neeta as she made a round with her hands to form a globe.
"Oh yeah Google used to be good. Not anymore. Dogpile does a better job I think" smiled Sahaj.
Dogpile combines search results from all the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista.
Neeta had learnt her lessons in the last 5 months of knowing Sahaj. Sahaj always knows more.
They had met in the Airport parking lot when Sahaj had helped her pull a large suitcase till the airport shuttle.
"Thanks for all your help. I would have freaked out with that suitcase" she removed her jacket from the seat and made space for Sahaj.
"Well I should be thankful. I get to help a beautiful girl. I am Sahaj by the way. Nice meeting you Neeta" said Sahaj sitting beside her.
Neeta smiled and asked "So did you enjoy going to University of California, Berkeley"
"Indeed! I am heading for my graduation ceremony there."
She looked at Sahaj completely for the first time. He was lanky, smart guy with good features. His mouth looked as if it was set in a permanent grin.
Neeta liked intellectual people. She wanted to study in IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) herself. When her dreams shattered she developed a fascination for intellectual people and interesting technologies. She dint mind to be a back bencher. She just carried this admiration with her. She used to go to the IIT Chennai campus and sit hours together in the library. Apart from reading, she enjoyed looking at the books and the students like a small kid in a museum. No wonder Sahaj impressed her. But she did not want to be too obvious. She never asked his contact details.
She was surprised when she got an email from Sahaj 10 days after the first meeting which said "I thought I should be in touch with you. After all you can read my car sticker as much as I can read your name plate. Our cars reveal too much about ourselves. Don't they? .I got tour email address from myspace.com" with a signature which obviously revealed his phone number. Neeta had responded to that email in next 30 seconds.
Soon they were meeting each other at least once a week.
What amazed Neeta was that, Sahaj can talk anything from srimath bhagavatham to subprime losses, Mani Rathnam to Mayan civilization, Kelly Clarkson to Kambodi, objectivism to atheism with equal ease and clarity.
"I spend most of the time reading Wikipedia and searching the things Sahaj said. If I had read like this in school I would have been in IIT" she would tell her friends. When she was not reading she would picture both of them in a beautiful lake side reading her favorite book "The Alchemist"
She always would work hard to impress Sahaj and prepare for the meeting every time as if it was an examination. But Sahaj always seemed to know more. This did not disappoint her. She just had fallen more for him.
When Sahaj did propose a month ago, all she could do was panic and ask for a month's time.
And she scored very low in GMAT :P
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to my beautiful roommate for the title.
Thanks to "Know it all" guy for MS word version.
Thanks to sunny for the last line !
No comments:
Post a Comment