I, Aditya Gandhi was born in Jan 1980 in Bhatinda, Punjab where my dadaji was posted at that point of time. Other than being born in Bhatinda I do not remember anything else of that place as I spent first 17 years of my life in Ranchi (which was part of Bihar then and now is the capital of Jharkhand). This is where my dad used to work, i.e. in Heavy Engineering Corporation Ranchi and we used to live in the H.E.C colony. A nice and small city with a great neighborhood and excellent friends. I spent these 17 years mostly enjoying with my friends and studying at various schools from St Mary's to St. Xavier’s to DPS and finally DAV. All these years were interspersed with regular summer breaks which were spent with cousins and relatives at Delhi (my nanaji's place) and Jalandhar (where my dadaji had retired). The high standards of education at Ranchi helped me secure a seat in Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. I joined IIT in 1997 in the Mechanical Engg stream and spent the next 4 years of my life living as a hosteller in Karakoram hostel and enjoying the IIT life. Obviously as we went through the IIT grind other than all the fun we had I also learnt a bit of Mech and Comp. This helped me secure a campus placement at Sapient Corp, a US based IT consultancy which had recently opened an office in Delhi. I joined Sapient in May, 2001 and since then have been working as an IT professional. While with Sapient I have traveled to various locales across the globe while trying to help deliver my projects. This has taken me to places like Denver, CO; Boston, MA and Chicago, IL. Along with these have also got to travel to places like Seattle, WA, New York, NY and Florence and Venice in Italy.

Professionally, I have been working on all kinds of technologies like Content Mgmt Systems, Portal Builders, Web Applications based on J2EE, Client Server / EAI solutions based on C++ and Tibco. Maybe I will do something on .NET next. As far as the domain is concerned I have been working on Financial Services for quite some time, on listed securities like Equities, Indexes, Bonds, Options, Futures and OTC like CDSs, IRDs, Variance Swaps etc.

Started the year on a very quite personal and professional note. As it progressed there is more that started happening. Around May got to go on a paid trip to Italy (Florence and Venice) with a few friends from office. This was a reward for the good work we had been doing in office. The trip was great fun and my first experience in Europe (i.e. outside the airports). Here are some photos of this trip. A week after I came back from Italy I was off to Chicago for that OTC project that I was working on. It was an intersting project which dealt with creation of a generic xml based framework for booking Over the Counter trades using the industry standard FpML for modelling OTCs. In the meantime my bro was going through all his engineering exams. In Chicago, the weather was great and the trip was fun. Here are some photos from this trip. I came back a bit early from this trip to help my brother get through his admission process and it was a great relief for us all when he got Electronics and Communication at NIT, Hamirpur in Himachal. During this time I also got promoted to Manager Tech. Then there was Anoop’s marriage 26th Aug. Spent most of August around things related to this.

I was a bit disappointing that I did not get into a better branch like Comp or Elec but was happy that at least I got to be at Delhi where most of my relatives were. Also I was lucky to be the second last guy to get Mech in IIT D. Anyway, in our year the JEE had been leaked which lead to a reexamination and therefore lead to a delayed start of our session. Therefore when we started of there was a lot of pressure as we had to compress the same course and complete the curriculum on time. When we joined IIT I was allotted to the Karakoram hostel which was to be my adobe for next 4 years.

We started off with the usual ragging (officially called healthy interaction) where seniors got us to do a bunch of useless things. Indirectly it helped some of us open up, get to know our seniors and get used to the idea of living independently. I remember me getting up at 4:30 in the morning waking all the freshers and then going to wake seniors so that they could take us for our morning jog/ exercise. For most of us having been maggus for last 2 years in our quest to get into IIT, we had very sparse stamina and this small jog in the morning was a big challenge. We slowly lived through that and the welcomes and veiled threats showered on us by our professors and seniors. This time also included getting to learn to be jingoistic about our hostel Kara and with every passing event that we partcipated in our naras of "Kara ka enthu high hai!" became louder. The most intersting event for me during our faccha time was the fresher skit in which I was the narrator in the kara team.

As the faache period passed by we became more used to the hostel life and slowly IIT system started to sink in. From academics standpoint I remember the first IIT quiz that we went through was PH120 (the subject that must give Jat nightmares to date I am sure). Having performed right at the median on this one I was fairly satisfied as I did not know what to expect from myself and knowing that I was among the best of the best and been able to perform like most of the others seemed good. Especially when who so ever you talked to was a topper in their school. A distinction I had ever been a able to achieve.

The good thing that happened as time progressed is that by some natural process a group of folks started to come together to become close friends. This group would go by the name kara_cp in days to come after the name of the wing that they inhabited in the hostel. This was the group of my best friends from college