A decade of destiny
It recently dawned upon me that I’ve spent more time outside of college than in it. But it seems like those four (or six, depending on how you look at it) years are suspended in time; somewhere in the back of my mind, and I always feel like I just graduated last year. They say that time flies when you’re having fun, and I can’t deny that the last ten years of my life, I’ve had as much fun as I could possibly have.
As a kid who grew up being fascinated by time travel, and whose only wish was to meet myself from a different time, today, I want to take you back ten years and narrate my story.
A conversation by chance
21st May 2008 — the day I got my board exam results. On the way to school and back, I dropped by my friend Ravikiran’s house and happened to meet his elder brother, Raghuvansh — who had just graduated from Sastra University. I had a small chat with him about the college, just generally curious and asked how it was. I may not remember the conversation verbatim, but this was the day some words got subconsciously embedded into my head — ‘club’, ‘Kuruk’, ‘Carpe’.
When I was deciding what colleges to apply for, I was only looking for three things.
- The college had to be within Tamil Nadu. Next preference - Kerala, Andhra, Karnataka. Nothing Norther than that. I knew I would never be able to learn Hindi, so I didn’t want to venture into unknown worlds.
- I had already eliminated a couple of courses from what I wanted to study. No mech/civil related courses — they involved too much physical effort that I was not suited for. No bio related courses since I had no interest in that. It was down to electrical and computer courses — and I wanted to do only CS because I considered what I learnt in my 11th and 12th as a solid foundation to build on top of.
- I wanted to experience hostel life. I knew that my health and immunity were poor, but I wanted to push myself outside my comfort zone and see if I could handle it. (Funny story — my school friends used to bet on how long I’d last in a hostel before I fell too sick and end up moving out. But it never happened.)
The top colleges that I had in mind were (in no particular order) Amrita, SRM, NIT Trichy, Sastra and SSN. I had missed the deadline for applications for Amrita, so that was eliminated first. Between the other four, the counselling dates were months apart. Sastra's and SRM's were in June, NIT was in August and SSN was in September.
SRM was just too far away — didn't see a possibility in staying in a hostel and visiting home. I didn't even attend the counselling. During this time, my school friends and I were generally hanging out a lot and having fun — birthdays, movies, video games. The last serious day in our lives was April 27— the last entrance exam we ever took, AIEEE. Right afterwards, all of us went and watched this movie. Little did I know that it was the start of something that would span a decade into the future. My connection to the MCU.
Sometimes, you gotta run before you can walk.
The first trip to Sastra
I went for Sastra's counselling along with my dad. We stayed in a hotel in Trichy, and took a car to the college. I bumped into a few known faces, friends from my batch across different schools. We were called to the first floor of a place called Gnana Vihar. There was a person (who looked like a cross between a very old student and a very young teacher) who spoke about the hostel situation — the girls hostels were full inside the campus, so he said that the college would find a suitable hostel in Thanjavur/Trichy for the excess students. The whole process was pretty straightforward (and a bit boring), and I was called into a room where one Shankar sir from the finance department spoke to me and gave me my admission form. I picked Computer Science, which was my first and most obvious choice. After filling out some forms and paying the fees, we headed back to Trichy and back home.
The biggest twist in the story was that I had less than two weeks for my first day of college. I tried my best to catch up with all my friends and binge watch movies and TV shows that I was saving for my holidays. A few of my friends threw a small send-off for the few of us who were leaving to Sastra. The last few days of being a just-out-of-school-vetti-fellow.
Two days before I was supposed to leave for college, I fell sick. Nothing unusual for me — I'm used it, having grown up with very poor immunity. My parents cancelled my train tickets out of concern. If there was one thing that I hated about my life growing up, was the fact that I kept falling sick so often and because of it, I've missed so many 'first days' at school. I've always loved the first day back, because you get to know who your new teachers are, make new friends who've joined your class and it generally symbolized new beginnings.
Against all odds (it was too late to get tickets on train/bus, there was a petrol strike — we had to rent a diesel car from a travel agent and drove to Trichy), I ensured that I ended up on time. I reached the college gates at 8.30am, right on time for classes which were supposed to begin at 8.40am. I thought I was the last person to enter — but there was someone who came even later than I did.
Over the course of the next couple of days, our gang formed.
I met Bala and Sridhar in class. Vidhvath was in my hostel wing. I met Rohit when he got his sim card delivered to him through Amogh's dad. In Rohit’s room, we got acquainted with PK, CP, Narsi and Abhinav. Chandru was next door to Baba, whom I already knew from school. Akshay was Abhinav's classmate from school and in college. The last member I met was Shreyas after we bumped into each other at the entrance of SPS and recognized each other from our school days, when we had competed side by side at Sishyamrita. All this happened in two weeks of our college lives.
Though all of us were from different departments and hostel wings, we used to gather in one big room and hang out together every day. Three of our gang members shared a room (in a 5 in one), and by default that became our HQ room. If there was one thing that we really wished — it was for all of us to be roommates.
FTN
Somewhere, someone heard our prayers and our wish was granted. We were informed that the college was building a new hostel, which was still under construction. They asked for volunteers to move into that hostel — which was still under construction, with not many facilities yet; the catch being — we could choose our roommates and move into a room together. We were debating this a lot but the pros outweighed the cons, and we eventually moved into two rooms facing each other. KN (Kamadhenu New) 210 and 220. That was our Avengers mansion.
By this time, we spent so much time trying to name our gang that we just gave up and said forget it. That's how the name was born. Forget The Name — FTN.
You could see that we were quite creative in our teen years and gave ourselves some cool nicknames. If you know me in 2018, there's a high chance that you know me as Body and not by my original name (Vignesh, which is mostly forgotten).
Everyone keeps asking me — "Why Body?"
A quick flashback to the day I got that nickname.
The birth of Body:
“Vignesh” is a very common name. Throughout my years in school and college, there has always been at least one more Vignesh with me. Sometimes, even four. In fact, it's the median name in my company — counting all variations in spelling, there are 35 of us; 45 if you count those who've left.
I have hardly referred to myself as Vignesh. I always wanted to be different — stand out from the rest of the crowd. Before college, I was always Vikku and it was a few months into Sastra that Body took over.
I remembered the day I finally relented and moved out of the common first year hostel (SPS) and into the still-under-construction Kamadhenu New hostel. There was a huge debate around this because I wanted to be part of the hostel which had ~1000 people so that I could get to know everyone in my batch. The alternate was to move to a hostel with only ~100 people — that felt really restrictive to me. In the end, I moved because all my close friends moved. I remember that day very very vividly because of a chap I met at the mess during dinner. His name was Vignesh (yeah, another one) Sunkara and it happened to be his birthday. Sunkara was one very weird and funny dude. The reason why that day is etched in my memory is because he narrated one story over dinner that really made everyone on the table lose their appetites and drop their plates.
We went back to our hostel room, unpacking our suitcases and setting up the new room. I used to feel really cold generally (remember my poor immunity?) and almost always, used to sleep with a blanket that covered me entirely from head to toe.
The blanket above was my travel blanket. The one I used in my hostel was green in colour. A very hospital green. Whenever I slept, it reminded my roommates of a mortuary and in very simple terms 'ponam maadhiri iruppen'.
A direct translation was made and I was christened "Dead Body", which soon became just Body.
So why did I mention Sunkara's birthday? As most of you know, I have a tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data.
For someone who boasts a lot about his memory, I must admit that I didn't remember his exact birthdate when I tried to recollect this. I wanted to trace back to the actual date Vikku became Body and that journey led me to:
- Looking his birthday in his Facebook profile (which he's not added)
- Looking his birthday up in our placement database sheet (which I was responsible in collecting and filling up for the entire batch) — our man is so lazy that he didn't even bother filling it
- Brute force method of logging into our college's portal (username is register number, password is DOB)
It would only take me 62 tries (Oct 1–31 /[90/91]) but I instinctively went to the portal and keyed in a date that I hoped it would be.
My destiny:
October 13th. Because that's the day Freshdesk was born. And if you rewind it even further, it was the day DX was born.
Maybe I was destined to find my way to this place. Because on the day that Girish and the founding team launched our very first product sitting in the middle of nowhere, I was getting ready for one final year of college with my team, the '3 idiots'.
In 2012, I moved to Bangalore for my post grad in design. Towards the end of my final year there, I interned at a company. Funny story — I was interviewed on a Monday and joined on Wednesday. They told me that I’ll be evaluated based on my performance for the period of two months and after that, if they liked my work, they said they would consider offering me a full time job. My manager gave me an offer letter on Friday and wanted me to sign it immediately. Thankfully, there was a four day weekend for the elections, and I came home, got an appointment to meet Girish and walked out with a job offer from what I consider my destiny: Freshdesk. The irony: my last day of work as an intern at AQ was June 7.
Two years ago, I wrote this post:
And on June 7, 2017, we hit the refresh button on Freshdesk. Six years (I am the sixth Vignesh in the company, btw) to the date that Freshdesk (the product) was launched, we rebranded ourselves to Freshworks. To quote our founder and CEO, that date really felt like day one all over again.
And today is no different.
I've stopped introducing myself as Vignesh. It's been ten long years since Body was born, and I created an identity for myself. For everyone who's asked me what the story behind the name was — now you have the answer. I'm not Vignesh. I'm no longer even Vikku.
Some people refuse to call me by an ominous nickname related to death. But I chose to embrace it. Like The Undertaker, I will be immortal. After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. This name is who I am, and this is what gave me my identity.
