Karthik S on being with Rajesh

My Personal experience with Rajesh:

I joined infravio on Dec1 2003, and was introduced to Rajesh. He inspired me in the very first meeting with his speech. Even now I remember his words “Technologies and specifications alone not do business; you have to think to make use of them to do business"

I knew you had studied Design, patterns etc. How did you use in your college projects? Just because you come from Anna University nobody will respect you, I challenge you how fast you do those in the product going forward was from Rajesh and the talk was more technical.

I had to do some research on how I could write a RMI component that could be used across all application servers that supports JMX specifications. I came up with the proposal but unfortunately JMS was preferred after some time. Next I had a new challenge that I needed to persist the event and MBean data from X-Broker, Specification suggest a way. So I came up with the proposal using the specification and it was implemented. My first successful task in Infravio. Why I am saying this is, Rajesh keeps on challenging me that made me to work hard and even harder on doing new things which later became an usual thing.

Also I had an opportunity that only a few would have had as a fresher. Each and every line of code that I check-in was reviewed by Rajesh so I need to be very careful about performance, quality, coding standards etc when I code. That made me as a good programmer. But at the same time he allowed me (everyone) to think new things and accepting those ideas to be part of the product.

I still remember he kept saying to everyone, “Do work hard the way you do now, In the next 5 years you will be differentiated from others. You will feel the difference in the hard times like recession. Like these he kept saying so much of encouraging words that made the work environment so beautiful and made most of us to come even in holidays (Infravio had 6 working days. Only Sunday was holiday).... :)

He never hesitates to allow us to take new responsibilities. At the same time he groomed me (everyone) a techie other than coding and designing. He allow me to participate in important calls as a slient observer. Then after some time I automatically started participating actively in important calls. This kind of progressive guidance from him allowed me to become a good professional. He always wants everyone to write a new specification that could bring business. As a first step a few of us became member in OASIS.

Weekly meetings by Rajesh made us really to understand what is happening in the Registry market and where we were standing. The requirements from the clients were also discussed in those meetings which helped us to learn about the business world. Technical session and technical talks helped us to keep update ourselves with the outside world.

On the other side we had frequent outings like cricket, lunch (emptying somebody’s pocket), Each and every day we had coffee sessions where we kept talking some crazy things and some serious issues too. I hope lot of guys remember the lunch time spent with Rajesh. All these things kept us unite as a team and succeed as a team.

He was always inspirational and showed us the way to look forward. He is a very approachable person even for your personal things. His advice helped most of the people in solving personal problems. I could keep writing about him…. But there are other friends too… I would like to end this post by one initial experience that kept me 5 years in this company.

Rajesh told me one day, “From India we did not write a killer product. We need to prove the world that, in India we could innovate and do a successful product”. He was successful in achieving it to some extent. I am extremely happy that I was also a part of it. I have been so emotional sometimes while talking with him because I like him that much personally.