Raman

I have been working at Adobe Systems for over a year now. I have written about my life at work & my friends a few times. But I haven't yet written about the man to whom I owe it all. Raman Nagpal. 

He is a true leader, a man with a towering persoanlity ( both literally & figuratively ). Ask anybody in my team , and I mean the 100+ strong Print Technologies Group, and they would all tell you that they are inspired by Raman, awed by him, shocked by him, and most importantly respect him.  A lot. Every man & woman here knows that he is a brilliant person, with a razor sharp mind, it is never easy to fool him, as emplyees frequently fool their managers ( :D ) He needs just a couple of minutes to get to the bottom of any problem, and see the idea in its entirety. I could go on & on... But that is not why I wrote this post.

His most endearing quality, and that is the reason why I work at Adobe, is his knack of picking a person and backing him to the hilt. That is what he did to me. While in my last year at college, I was offered an internship by Raman, during the course of which I worked on an interesting project under him. On the basis of my work, he offered me a job here. And that was despite my disastrous interview just a couple of weeks back. He called me & told me that while he knew that I had basically sucked at my coding interview, but he had received a very positive response in others, and he personally also felt the same after having worked with me for a better part of my 4 months at Adobe. And the reason he was offering me a job was nothing but his willingness to back me inspite of my having been rejected in my interviews. 

Since then, well, I have had the good fortune of having worked with him on something or the other a number of times. And each experience leaves me further in awe of his ability to think of crazy ideas, execute them, and prove to the (higher) powers that be at Adobe, that it ain't so bad to think out of the box, something that Adobe magnanimously fails to do...!

Time & again, he thinks of crazy stuff and it is precisely this crazy stuff that helps me land up a patent here, a spot award there & many many interesting interactions with great minds at Adobe, be it Shantanu, Naresh or Ajay. 

It might sound very inane & tacky, but I am forced to make a comparison. Harry was accused of being Dumbledore's man through & through by Rufus. Well, I confess that I am Raman's man through & through. I hope, as he put it, that I don't let him down. This one is for you Raman.