Kisiki muskuraahaton pe ho nisaar ...

Was going through some old folders and happen to see a photograph taken almost 4 years back – Lunch with team and our Delivery Manager Muzaffar – Person I have met only once but have interacted with him before and after that many times . In life you meet some people you can never forget – and you wish there were more people like them around, Muzaffar is one such person. When I think of Muzaffar the first things which comes into my mind is – Laughter – His jokes and sense of humor , his ability to make fun of himself first and then on the situation around – something very difficult to do for most us .

This snap was taken in an Indian Restaurant (Well Bangladeshi actually :)) at small place in Somerset , the occasion was first team lunch with our Delivery Manager at clients site. It was more of getting to know each other and understanding the work and expectation and any concern of the team. Since it was initial stages of the project the talk was more on getting to know each other , like place we belong to, food we like, things we do after work , the weather etc etc . Though majority of the people had come from Trivandrum , we had couple of people from Chennai . So in team we had Mallus, Telugus, Tamilians, Kokanis, Odishi and Muzzafar ! Muzaffar a Brit in all his ways but Pakistani origins – yeah very interesting combo :). Well most of us in the team knew about Muzaffar before meeting him except one and the moment he heard Pakistani roots – he blurted out very strong cmment  ‘All of them are Te$%^&&t !‘ All of us were shocked to hear that and did not know what to say, I looked at Muzaffar, he was smiling and then i politely told my team member its not like that – My dad who is a retired paramilitary service man who has worked in different locations of Jammu & Kashmir and very close to Pakistan border during 1990s, he used to say that the Pakistani locals are very simple and nice people and I added let us not generalize.  Muzaffar then told us funny stories of his last visit to a remote village in Pakistan where the roads were not well maintained and the they had a local Driver .He speaks impeccable English, Urdu and of course Hindi. He was very cool and friendly throughout the lunch and we parted saying we would next have lunch at his home- all Pakistani cuisines (which ofcourse never happened :) )

Most of our interaction with Muzaffar  used to happen on phone calls and almost all the calls used to end up on some joke – no matter what ever serious discussion we would have had during the call  - he would take every team members name and talk. He would tell real life situations and jokes – like he told us how he named his son ‘Usman’ in honor of US , or that his was also an early marriage – well the marriage happened 5 O’clock in the morning !or looking at one of the youngest team member who looked just out of school he would comment ‘do you have to run under the shower while taking bath’. I came back after 6-7 months and even after the assignment used to mail him once in a while -now i don’t have any contact with him..... A simple warmhearted gentleman who would find something funny in anything – I used to tell my friends at office that  Muzaffar should compile collection of his jokes – like Sheik Chilli ke kissey ‘ -Who would not want to have such person around :) Hope wherever he is - he is smiling and making others smile. :)