Haradhan and his Ten Kids

Haradhan and his Ten Kids

It started with 10 kids that some guy called Haradhan had. Interestingly, Haradhan never appears in the tale. The first kid probably gets eaten up by a fish, while fishing! Of the remaining nine, the second kid gets cut by a hacksaw or something. (Ya, pretty grim!) And so on and so forth, till there are none left.

The above is the gist of a Bengali poetry for kids going something like this, “Haradhaner doshti chhele….”. I had read it when I was a kid. I had also heard that there is another piece of verse existing where all ten come back one by one. But the latter is not so popular, and I have never come across it. In all probabilities, the latter was cooked up by my mom because I was rather sad on reading about Haradhan’s ten kids.


We had a group of twelve, who used to hang out together. Well, I don’t remember many occasions when all twelve were there, but we used to go out in subsets out of the twelve! The whole group existed only as a list of e-mail ids, but everyone was there.

Ankur Saboo was the first to leave. He has joined a reputed Management Institute of India. Right now he is doing his training in Hong Kong. Sumeet Kulkarni went for an MS degree at Darmstadt University, Germany. He was always keen on going to Germany and anything German had interested him. He knows Duetche well enough to have topped exams at the end of a pretty advanced Duetche course (advanced enough to make him eligible to teach German!) at Max Mueller Bhavan.

Swapna went to the USA, and Souradeep relocated to Belgium. Both of them will be returning of course, in another few months. Now with Prerna and Ashish all set to fly across the globe to Canada for higher studies, it’s six down out of twelve. And there is one guy, (name withheld, may be disclosed by himself in comments page) who has got admission in Stanford University, and will be flying in September. One more person has been studying furiously to crack the GMAT (name withheld etc etc).

I don’t foresee myself leaving Bangalore in any long term basis in the near future. Anant has also declared that he is not going to leave TI India till he has obtained a black belt. (He is learning Karate from an instructor who teaches TII employees, and currently has an orange belt.)
So it is time, as I am told (by one of those who is now outside India), to incur fresh blood in the group. So be it. The group of twelve will still exist as an e-group, but there will now be more gmail.com in the list of ids than ti.com. As I think of the people moving on, I can’t help but think of Haradhan’s ten kids. All Bengali kids have read about the ten disappearing one by one. But no one has read of them coming back together again!