Sitting in a classroom under the icy glare of a pedantic teacher, struggling to decipher the strange symbols and wondering how the acceleration of a moving object could be linked to the weird script in my textbook, I slowly unravelled the mysteries of calculus.
Limiting functions and their secrets were yet another discovery. Little did I know then that the lessons acquired in those hot summer afternoons, under the whirr of fans, the booming voices of the professors, the race to decrypt the arcane signs would one day acquire dimensions hitherto unforeseen.
In late December when I took charge and learnt that Arun was the Integration Manager, the term had me dumbfounded. I wondered how my good friend of old days with whom I had played cricket in the now decrepit adidas sports hall had anything to do with the professors who taught me Differentiation and Integration, Maxima and Minima and spelt doom with a concatenation of d’s.
For with Arun, the only curves I knew were those on the slopes of the Alps where we had tumbled together on skis, oblivious of the area under them. And the only accelerating object was a cricket ball which ricocheted off the hard turf seemingly defying every law of motion.
But as the project took shape and the complexities emerged, I counted on Arun and his vast repository of knowledge. He tamed every variable with finesse. He balanced every equation with poise. And he stretched beyond the limits imposed by any constraints.
In the good old days, Arun and SUSI were quite a pair. And every waking hour, Arun spoke of SUSI with a lovelorn look that had me worried. It was a whirlwind affair lasting a few months.
SUSI by the way, stands for Scheinfeld Uffenheim System Integration, an integration project of such complexity that SAP declined to play a role in it. So it was left to the Integration Manager to court success, which he did with heartfelt fervour!
Strict martinets, the professors taught me a lot. They stretched the limits of reality and took me into a realm of imaginary numbers. They reduced infinite series to manageable proportions. And they honed my mathematical skills to a point where I could reduce everything to equations.
But my literary icons rescued me and opened the doors to worlds beyond mere numbers. They nurtured a love for words that made parables out of parabolas, hyperbole out of hyperbolas and thus balanced my mathematical forays with literary outpourings.
Now when I thought of limning a farewell to Arun, I started with a set of equations which would accurately map his upward trajectory. My mathematical acumen failed me. For his knowledge has few equals, no equations.
But the writer in me rose to rescue. And it dawned on me that over the last few months, amidst all the mirth, the pressures, the peaks, the troughs, the Maximas, the Minimas, Arun has done what would have made my learned professors proud.
He has rewritten the hallowed precepts of calculus; of Integrals and Differentials. He has made a difference, so in some sense, well in every sense, the Integration Manager has been a true Differentiator!
