REMODELING A LIFE
A long former post of mine returned to me this week—after we returned home from my husband's first external conference trip post retirement.
When we began the remodeling of our second bathroom in July 2020, I was forced to ponder our lives as we juggled that project and my husband’s impending retirement from IBM on June 30, after 38 years with the company. Two days before his last day at work, we discovered—and we happened upon it only when the workers set about demolishing the innards of the bathroom—that a part of the subfloor of our hallway bath had begun rotting.
Staring at the debris inside, I told my husband Mohan that this was why we needed to examine our bathrooms at least once every decade. Over the course of our lives, I’ve always maintained that the overhaul of our lives was of paramount importance—whether it was to pick apart bits of an old house or to question the trajectory of a career.
For years, my husband has claimed that I was too hung up with change for the sake of change. My retort to that has always been: “If that were the case, why would I not have changed my spouse?” His answer always came back pat: “Because I’m your golden goose.” My repartee to that has invariably been that he did NOT lay our two eggs, first of all, and that there was also, secondly, the grim reality of our shared nest egg, given that California was a community property state, after all.
Mohan’s decision to retire could have arrived sooner but the pragmatic optimizer in him decided that “65” was the magic number, with Medicare eligibility being the clincher. But, really, who was I to tell him how long he must stay or how he must feel about a company that had given him both a voice and a life?
I’ve long admired his core principles for a fulfilling career: Work hard and deep at a few things; be unafraid to speak your mind; become an expert in the field; build your brand in the things that matter (and do not matter); expand your network; collaborate, always letting others in on your own adventures; finally, be your own self-appointed evangelist because no one else will do it for you.
I enumerate these because in the thirty-six years of my life with him, I’ve envied my husband for his obsessive love of work. To him work has been unadulterated fun. The manner in which he has chosen to perform it—by never assuming the role of a manager—meant that he would have to prove his leadership qualities in a myriad other ways: By diving into problem solving; by taking on senior naysayers and fearmongers; by collaborating with people in his research lab and elsewhere in the company; by messing around with IBM’s many products, by being in touch with others in the length and breadth of the high tech industry; by forging relationships with universities; by remembering to give back to his alma mater in India.
While doing all of this, he danced the night away with his colleagues in exotic locales; he fed kangaroos in Australia; he downed one too many shots of Moutai in Beijing; he posed with the prettiest, smartest women in every corner of the world; he gossiped late into the night with Tunisians and Egyptians and Israelis and Turks and Greeks and Germans and Brazilians and Croatians and countless others. With each of them, he seemed to find something in common with himself. He listened to their life stories and came home from trips to narrate them to me in gory detail (never failing, of course, to mention the names of their Ph. D. advisors and the universities they graduated from). I’ll have you know that each of Mohan’s stories is its own Eiffel tower of pylons, girders, trusses, rivets, joists and beams in which no nail or nut may be missed.
I seriously believe my husband missed his first calling: that of an international diplomat, even though, upon second thought, he is likely the least diplomatic human being I know. The parties celebrating his retirement last week made that clear. An ex-Harvard professor now at Microsoft Research called our now-retiree “a gadfly” and told him how mad he was that as a doctoral student, my husband, his junior by several years, had attacked a mega project of his. Nonetheless, he wished him warmly telling him how unusual it was that one person could have so many “home runs” to his credit in the database field. My old man puffed with pride as each and every person spoke in glowing terms. But no sooner had a compliment been showered on him than someone else held the needle (or a hatchet) to his ballooning ego. His first boss at IBM heaped praise on him but not before calling him out on having been a bit of a pest. “Even as a student he’d keep sending me his research papers so I’d always know what Mohan was up to,” Pat said, laughing. Speaking about him were many current and retired colleagues from his lab, professors from universities, technologists in the industry, and young researchers. As I watched these farewells last week, I was reflecting on how these talented men and women who had all grown old together reminisced fondly about the products they had built together; most of all, I was struck by how they shared a deep respect and an abiding affection for Mohan.
Not too many people know that one of the other reasons Mohan began toying with the idea of retirement in the fall of 2019 was owing to the sudden demise of two external database colleagues last year. One was a professor, Hector Garcia-Molina, in the computer science department at Stanford and the other a professor, Christine Collet, in Grenoble. It gave him pause. We all had a finite amount of time. What else must we do before our time was up? I too was shocked and saddened at Christine and Hector's death. I knew them well just as I know many of my husband’s IBM and external colleagues. For me THAT has been the greatest reward to my husband’s long stint at IBM. His career meshed with his friendships. His special connections with the people whom he met as part of his work were also my own. Mohan has this fetish for collecting business cards and it has amazed me, through the years, that he remembers the actual faces behind the cards using his gift for rambling stories. A friend, another computer scientist, once said “subroutine, return” as he listened to another of Mohan’s elaborate tales. But, darn, like my husband, I too digress.
I’ve had endless arguments with Mohan for choosing to stay with the same company for decades. Why do that—in Silicon Valley, of all places? Who does that, I said to him on and off, especially when he knew people in the right places who would likely want him to join forces with them? But his answer was always the same, that it went against the grain of what he had established for himself as his key personal and professional values. “And, in any case,” he said, “who needs money—beyond a certain point?” If he could provide for the family, if he could give our children and me a life in which I was free to write without ever having to worry about putting food on the table, why would I want anything more?
Over the years, many friends whom we’d met before we had children went on to a life of great luxury in the valley. But my husband stayed with IBM. Database fledglings working alongside him grew wing and muscle to start their own companies or flew away to more lucrative careers at Google, Facebook and other sexier workplaces. Some became serial entrepreneurs. One of them, I found out at my husband’s party, now had a net worth of $1.4 billion (and almost no hair). But my old man stayed on with IBM and still has a head of silver-gray hair. In keeping with Mohan’s philosophy of loyalty, he also ran his cars to the ground—first the Mazda GLC with the license plate “C Mohan”, then the Toyota Camry, then the Dodge Caravan, then our Toyota Sienna and then the Mercedes Benz, an ultimate driving machine, that returned home one evening battered by miscreants in downtown San Jose. At that point Mohan decided it was time to let it go—after seventeen years. That was him. He stuck it out with everything.
I must admit here that IBM, too, stuck it out with our family. In our 38-year history together, the company sent out silver spoons for the birth of our children, invited the family for Easter, Halloween and Christmas and several other special occasions at the cafeteria of Almaden Research Center in the spectacular hills of Almaden Valley. In our living room, we have a handsome collection of booklets celebrating the company’s milestones. In many of them, I see my husband’s name. In our home office, I see Mohan in framed photographs standing alongside people whose names were the byword of our lives for years. In the kitchen, we have several Swarovski bowls with a labyrinth engraved on them, souvenirs from IBM’s corporate technical recognition events that we have used every day as receptacles for candy, pistachio, strawberries, tea and probiotic capsules. In the garage, I still have some dark blue IBM binders, legacies from the time my husband carted reams of papers between home and work.
I recall a time when I was frustrated with my husband’s long hours at work. I bore most of the burden of juggling work and the demands of our two children. My husband had been an excellent provider but there was a cost to being aggressive at work and guess who got to pick up the slack? I wrote to Laura, his then manager (although she mentioned on the retirement celebration call that she had never actually been his manager). I complained to her saying I wished he’d spend more time at home. In those years, I worked at IBM, too, and I felt, in some way, that the company owed our family, just so the two of us could balance our lives a bit more. Laura wrote back saying that my husband was self-driven and that he charted his own course. I was vexed. I suspect, however, that my frustration was more deep-seated. I recognized a self-assurance and, most of all, contentment in my husband. Many of these feelings—and the recognition that I must love my work so much that my vocation must feel like a part of myself in order for me to thrive—impelled me to pursue a life of writing in December 1999 after ten years with IBM.
I wanted to find what my husband had found. Twenty years later, I can say that I have found it although I’ll have you know that I still haven’t discovered the moolah. But as long as I have my golden goose, I suppose I will live.
👏🏽 To your post and to appa!
Beautifully written @Kalpana ji. I could relate to almost every sentence about Mohan and his style of "operating" and you me smile so much. Keep it up !!