I find it hard to believe that it has been 40 years since we graduated from IIMA. Sushil and I got married in 1977, and have lived since then in what I call the “Beautiful” cities: Bombay, Boston, Bangalore, and now back to Boston. 

 

I started out at A F Ferguson in Bombay, moved to Boston in 1980 to do a Ph. D. at MIT in Operations Research, but went back to a corporate career after that, with a very short stint of teaching at Sloan School, MIT. 

 

I worked at Verizon for most of my career and enjoyed being part of the enormous and exciting changes in the telecom industry. 

 

I started out in an R&D role focused on network planning for both landline and wireless networks, moved to managing the internet backbone network capacity and performance at the start of the internet boom, then to developing systems to support the new fiber-to-the-home technology, and along the way worked on the systems merger with MCI, before retiring as part of the senior management team of the company.

 

On the personal front, we have two wonderful daughters, Samira and Anisha. 

 

Samira taught in Honduras and New York City, then did a master’s in Education from Harvard and now lives in San Francisco, where she helped establish a new charter school and was the Assistant Principal till recently. 

 

Anisha has just started a joint master’s degree in Public Policy and Business at Harvard so she will be in Cambridge and close to us for at least the next three years. 

 

Both the girls have inherited a love of travel from Sushil, as well as a passion for trying to change the educational system and its outcomes.

 

After retiring, I am going back to spending more time on things I enjoy as well as trying new ones. I have just started learning to play bridge, am trying my hand at quilting, and am back to reading, doing crosswords, watching NBA games and reconnecting with friends. 

 

My close friends from high school and undergraduate years, who are now spread across the US, Europe, Canada and India, have started meeting every year to catch up and have fun. Now that Sushil has retired as well, we look forward to spending more time with IIMA friends.