I had come back from Munich, Germany with a dream to live. HCL Technologies, Noida was my breeding ground of ideas which were put into action, developed as concepts and frameworks. The ideas of quality, respect and love for individuals, high-on-design, taking people along, skill building, respect for the environment and surroundings, being the initiative taker, and many more all brewed – while shaving, brushing, driving, reflecting and introspecting. From Nov’ 05 till I left HCLT was a period of experiments and deep learning.

These years were also full of action in the Social Development Sector (the efforts I refer to as “Nation Building” efforts). This was the duration of cross-using and inter-relating knowledge and capabilities, from wherever I was engaged in my life; a period of discovering what it is to be a Whole Person.

One aspect that surprises me too was I did not read a single management or leadership book or article in this period, what I read about was India – the education sector, the traffic sector, democracy, some religion, some Constitution and I thought a lot. I also lived the years of transformation of HCL Technologies, the era of Vineet Nayar.

Courses at SOIL were interestingly an affirmation – that the work done and fundamentals developed, at HCL and while Nation Building – were aligned to the latest thinking and some, even before time.

With this context and the spirit of “that knowledge shared is knowledge doubled” I dedicate, to the people I worked with at HCL a series of stories in blog posts to follow – labeled: “Stories from HCL Technologies Feb04-Apr08: dedicated to the people who gave me the opportunities and the opportunity to work with them”. Hope they would be useful and yes, I would be eager to hear your comments and improvement suggestions…

Dedicated to: Abhishek Jain, Ajai Ramachandran Pappu, Avijit Manna, Charu Kwatra, Gaurav Grover, Itika, Kshitiz Saini, Mohit Tandon, Mohit Vaish, Namita Mishra, Neeraj Kumar, Pragya Sarswat, Prashant Srivastava, Puneet Mehta, Rajesh Gupta, Sachit Tewani, Sandeep Jindal, Sanjeev Kumar Gupta, Saurabh Grover, Sanjeeva Nand Sharma, Shashidhar Murthy, Shashikant Renake, and Shilpi Jain.