Mumbai Slice: -- GOD -!- RA

Life was well on its way in full throttle. Slog by the day and all through late night, enjoy weekends as a "Royal" stag (Pun Intended) . Come April enter Siva. Dark, Lean and a Burning .... cigarette. Fresh from Coimbatore (or was it pune) ILP. He and his other folks from ILP were a good addition to the junta on the floor. I was overloaded and Siva's coming was a blessing for me. Cool, hardworking and with loads of attitude. Siva was just what the doc ordered for the team -- that would be Kamal and I :), not the team we worked for . Taking one of the projects I owned naturally meant working late nights for Siva. Initially fretting, he soon underwent the training with ease and effortlessly slipped into the monotonous 11 AM to 2 AM routine. I kinda of liked the guys attitude towards life. He was a hard worker and his composure was something to envy about. I introduced Siva to Kamal and in no time we started spending our midnight maggi-time together. (Midnight maggi: Like college addas, we had our very own maggi hangout in the canteen. We used to stay late, and after 10.30 PM, office canteen would only provide juice, sandwich or maggi. Most of the late night owls, used to flock this place at about 1:00 AM for some midnight snack, a sutta and some good light hearted chat). All would order double maggi, egg burji and lots of tomoato sauce. Those were the times for bloating :)

Another character (yes and I mean that) who used to stay late night was Rohit GADE (spelt GAA-DEY, though most of the time Kam used to call him "Gaid"). He was another God of Coding, Java, Portal anything that ran on a PC. You could see him sitting in a dark, desolate corner of the northern end of the floor near the window. The corner seemed a perfect setting for a witches' den in a failry tale. A recluse, a coder par excellence, comparable, sometimes better than the Devil himself. Gade was a god of Jboss Potal or was it weblogic... duh!. All you could see him do, was look at a multi layout screen all day fixing hard to find defects or enjoying a ciggarette in the basement or at the shop. More on this chap later...

Finally a silent entrant into the group was Shubhra-- Dada. Silent, composed (on the crust) and a guy you would not want to mess with. The Most silent of the lot. Another comrade of the sutta party. This is probably how Siva, Kamal, Gade and Subhra started coming closer. I used to join them when they smoked, I was not a smoker but enjoyed the company. Thus formed the a developer to developer heart felt bond between us... to vent our frustrations we called ourselves GOD -- RA.

Good Offshore Developer --- Resource A$$ho**$ (GOD - RA)

None of us had even the remotest chance of going onsite because we were good developers (resources) hence the stress on offshore. This was a start to many more adventures, fun times and ofcourse lotsa booze.

Cheers ... hic.
:)