Once upon a time in Belarus

On the eve of christmas about 3 decades ago, in a furnished hospital situated in one muffusal corner of belarus, a young baby was born - it had blonde hair and blue eyes and had an exceptionally sweet toothless smile. But as the doctors in furnished hospitals in that muffusal corner of belarus usually say, with a touch of pain and regret, the baby was born with bad blood - which in terms we normally use is translated as, the baby had too many complications and wouldn't live for long.

The dejected parents had nowhere to go to - back in those days in USSR, there were no gods or no faith in a supreme soul. In case of storms, boatsmen didn't resort to prayer but clutched their oars harder and when the oars gave away .... no one really knew what they could do. Resting their faith on fate, they let their little baby count its days. Fortunately for them, the baby kept counting. Every year that passed was a miracle because the life of the kid was was beyond the realm of reason and against the rules of science. At the age of 4, after a close medical check-up the doctors made a grave statement that the kid will NEVER ever be able to raise weights heavier than 5 kilos - to put things in perspective, that's the weight of the average school bag that a kid carries to school in India and is less than what even air-india allows to you to take on board as a hand luggage.

And hence the boy was left to walk around, read a couple of books, given a special chair in school and left to be stared at by curious kids and sympathetic neighbours. Thankfully he was too young to realise the precariousness of his existence or to be bothered by the eventualities of his bane. One fine day, his father got a newspaper clip home that listed a set of traditional exercises like yoga and japanese martial arts that can be done without the usual weights.

That was a beginning of a miracle that shall last a lifetime. Much to the amazement of doctors, his muscles started gaining strength and after a couple of years he was termed "normal". At around 14, he realized the distance he's walked since his birth and how many times the walk to light and life was so slippery that had it not been for his father's hand, he would have ended his life a long time ago. As the old women in the muffusal corner say, no one would know the value of something more than someone who's lost and got it again.

He knew he was a miracle and set out to do two things - one to find out who far this miracle could go and two to find out a reason or faith that could explain what happened to him. His workouts started getting more meticulous with every passing day and his shelves soon had books on gita, taoism and the japanese art of samurai.

One fine day, he came home deciding to be a kick boxer. And for the next couple of years, he was in and out of bouts handling blows that would have left my fellow pedestrian on the bus to heaven. And when the blows took time to heal, he ended up in the university doing his masters in computer science.

Back in those times in Belarus, too many things were happening and as political analysts sipping a cup of tea in coffee shops predicted, an empire was about to break. So, our young man came to europe for a living and soon was a security guard for a hi-flying businessman. Of course, there were better things that a graduate could do - like falling in love with a fellow russian and marrying her for starters, working in software companies as a software programmer and then a technical lead, being recruited in a leading software company to design and build one of their most important components that forms the corner stone of their next generation of products and .....

... having coffee with me in the SAP's coffee's lounge as my project lead and telling me his whole story leaving me awestuck and speechless.

This story is entirely factual and is substantiated by my kick-boxer project lead who breathes and eats (and sometimes even sleeps) in the cubicle next to mine.