Recipe

“What are you doing?” asked a very happy looking Raj.

It was eight in the evening. We were tired.

“Just looking into a simple problem”, I said. Sam and I had decided a long time back never to get into specifics with Raj. In this case, the simple problem was a bug that threatened to stop our major software release. We had been trying to fix the problem for two days without any luck.

Raj offered to take us to dinner. Raj is the chief technical officer of our company. How he got to that position was a corporate mystery. Usually Raj delves into our problems and was ready to give us unsolicited advices. But today he stayed away from our problem. So far.

“How about some beer first?” Raj asked. After a marathon debugging effort, we were ready for anything. Even a beer with Raj. A break from the monotony also would give us some rest and hopefully a solution when we attack it again the next day.

As were driving down the streets of downtown Washington, Raj got into his trivia mode. “Do you know that Washington, D.C. was designed after Roman cities? Look at the numbered and lettered streets. We said that we were not aware of that.

“If you notice you will not find the letter ‘I’ , in the lettered streets. That is because there is no letter ‘I’ in Latin. Did you see that movie Indiana Jones? Harrison Ford steps on the letters to get to the Holy Grail. Stepping on a letter could mean death. Just imagine – a letter in a foreign alphabet decides your life and death.

I said something in appreciation of his knowledge of history. In return he lectured us on the need to keep our ears and eyes open. “Who knows? You will end up in that show “Who wants to be a millionaire”. And this alphabet nonsense could stand between you and a million dollars”.

Raj was not technically sharp. He followed his own processes and methodical and slow approaches to problem solving. We on the other hand considered ourselves free spirits. We just attacked a problem in a “prodigal manner” almost till a solution presented itself! And we had been lucky often. Raj was successful in his career probably because he just kept his eyes and ears open. Whatever that meant.

We were at the Capital Brewery. Raj wanted to know if they serve Manchurian. He then went into how he used to enjoy beer and a snack called “Gobi Manchurian” that-goes-well-with-beer in the Bangalore pubs. He said that was a Chinese food and wondered whether the Chinese really had a food item called Manchurian. I suggested that they would probably have it in Manchuria.

When we were gulping down the beer, Raj went into how he had to work with slow and outdated computers, almost no software tools and no documentation too. He explained over an hour about how they pulled out quality software from thin air.

Then came the question. “What exactly is your problem today?” Sam said that the program was crashing after taking the stock symbols without giving the stock quotes as the program was supposed to do. I suspected that it was the beer that made Sam break our long standing resolution. Raj asked if we used any other software in our program. We knew where his questions were leading. There are two types of programmers. One who readily blamed other’s work for the problems and our type who always suspected their own work and worked continuously to improve it. “May be you should check the data when it is processed by the WebStream’s library. Who knows what they are doing”. WebStream is a partner company whose programs we used in our product.

Surprisingly Raj touched something we didn’t suspect for the source of the current problem. Sam silently nodded to me conveying that we ought to explore that path. Though our motto is that our product is guilty unless proven otherwise, we wanted to examine that angle as we had tried everything by then.

Then we went to dinner. When we were devouring the Ethiopian bread, Raj launched into recipes and tastes of about ten similar delicacies from his homeland. And somewhere between preparing the dough and deep frying the eggplants, I decided not to take up Raj’s suggestion. It may be that I wanted another dinner with Raj to punish ourselves for our oversight. Or it may be that I wanted to master that eggplant cuisine!