Network had grown in the last two years and there were a lot of additions all over India and Head Office at Delhi. A few stalwarts from Head Office was the cool Arvind Wable our Marketing Chief. Rajeev Khanna with his impressive voice and stature was a favourite of many. Chacha with his genuine behavior was always a pleasure. Mr. Dang was the MD so I understood his keeping distance from us but I guess he had managed a good team at the helm. R.Kannan our Sales Chief was our God but I guess he was on his way to carve out a different future for himself outside Network. Asheem Dasgupta the cool dude and Manufacturing Head was the calm but perfect person to talk to!! There were more and off and on names would be cropping up depending on my brain sparks!!! I will always remember Nandlal ji from the factory and wonder where is he now!!
So Agra was to have all these people and I was as usual waiting for the Kolkata Office contingent since the Bong Girls were there? My friend Prithvish would also be coming!!
There were about 30-40 people supposed to travel from Mumbai and due to logistics we were booked in one of the worst trains possible. It was the Dadar Amritsar express that would straight take us to Agra in the middle of the night. It was a bit of chaos since a few of us did not have reservation in AC 2 Tier and they had to be booked 3 Tier Non AC!! I pity them and something like that cannot ever be undone and erased from the memory. You could spew your salesperson –should-bear-it-all logic all day long but I am not going to accept the same!! To make some sort of amends we used to bring one or two guys into AC 2 Tier by rotation. We became quite adept at the same and in the 2nd night we made sure all of them in AC comfort!!
We had the typical gambling and unlawful liquor consumption. The girls were there too and being a manager(!!) one had to be ensure that nobody’s behavior was compromised!. Mohan George was a good partner in generally looking after people while K Ravishankar absolutely behaved like the King which meant that he just enjoyed and did no work, at least in the train!!
Our train reached Bhopal when the GT express from Chennai also happened to chug in. We heard that Sumathi Gurumurthy’s gold chain was snatched in one of the stations!! There was no time, and off we went in our different trains, only to catch up later on the details!
Our train reached Agra and there Rajiv Khanna’s pet Kapil Chawla was waiting at the station to greet the team. We were shunted into couple of buses and taken to Mughal Sheraton an Aga Khan Proze winner for Architecture. It was a sprawling hotel and we were shown to our rooms – three in a room. Joydeep and Anil Bedi were my room mates and I remember Eunice Coutinho and two other girls in the room beside us!!. We were informed that breakfast was at 0700 while the sessions would start off at 0900!!
It was a total surprise package and the next day was the start of what I call the Golden Era of Network that lasted approximately 5 years!! (Refer http://networkdays.blogspot.com/2009/06/network-years-classified.html).
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