1999--- The lesser events ( compared to Hey Ram debut) and 2000

Sandeep finished his 12th Std in Mar 1999. He joined Vivekananda College for his B Com.This was the Evening College, so he used to go around 4 PM and was back by 9 PM.

He practically breezed through his B Com and , on the way, did not forget to see practically every Tamil and English film that was released in Chennai.
One other significant event that I can remember about Sandeep from his Vivekananda College days is about the Tennis match that he played with the brother of Gayathri- a singer friend of ours. I'm told that after watching Sandeep serve, Gayathri's brother actually asked him whether he played for Tamil Nadu!!!!

Akhila gave birth to Siddharth on 23rd Apr 1999.at Bangalore. Siddharth has features very similar to my grandfather A N Chaluvaiya. Anil and Sandeep are also cut from the same mould.

Karnataka Sangha was celebrating its 50th Year in 1999 and asked Kannada Balaga to put up a Kannada play. Our friend Kiran Kumar had written a play called " Sherlock Nanjappa", a detective thriller and Sudha and I both acted in the play.

The play had a lot of sound effects like thunder and background music. One of the unique features of this play was that we recorded the entire dialogue including the sound effects and the background music and just lip synced on stage. It came out very well and many people were not aware that all the dialogue was pre-recorded.

The other exciting event of 1999 was the approaching millenium and the so-called Y2K problem. When computers first became popular, apparently a lot of software companies did their programming in such a way that the year was denoted with just the last two digits eg "98" for 1998. So there was a lot of apprehension as to what would happen when year 2000 came around. Would "00" indicate 1900 or 2000?

Therefore, a lot of companies in USA and Europe hired Indian software companies whose only job was to convert the two digit year to 4 digits in all programs. Even then, there were many companies that were left out and they were all waiting with bated breath for I Jan 2000. 

The New Year dawned first in New Zealand and there was a huge sigh of relief worldwide when nothing happened.

This Y2K issue also generated some humour. There was this joke about a Sardarji who said he didn't know what the Y2K problem was all about. He said " Just change Monday to Mondak and January to Januark and so on and the Y 2( to) K problem could be solved by anyone."

Sachin graduated in 2000. This was the height of the dotcom boom and any graduate worth his BE degree was joining a software company. I expected Sachin would also do so. However, he showed surprising maturity in deciding what he didn't want to do and that was software programming. He also decided early on that he would do his MBA and it would be from an IIM only.

Sachin had an aptitude for Maths. He joined Career Forum which offered coaching to MBA aspirants. I thought this was an excellent move because he could still keep in touch with subjects that he would need to study for his MBA Entrance exam. His friend Bhaskar was into MBA coaching and Sachin would take some classes to help out .

After some time, Sachin was transferred to Pune and he stayed there in a company Guest House.

Meanwhile Sandeep continued with his B Com and helped the economy grow by watching almost every Tamil and English movie that was released in Satyam. Sachin was also crazy about movies, but I suspect he leaned more towards Hollywood movies, unless it was a Rajinikanth movie in Tamil.

It was fans like Sachin and Sandeep that helped Satyam Theatres generate their internal revenue to expand into a multiplex in Express Avenue Mall and elsewhere in Chennai.

So that's how 2000 ended for us with Sandeep in 2^nd Year B Com and Sachin in Pune.