Travel and Hotel

It was a very fast decision to go to DisneyLand. DisneyLand was always in my dreams starting from my childhood when I saw one photo from there. I still remember the photo of a bridge in disney, from somewhere. So during the second week of Jan I talked to Rajiv and sachu whether they are intereseted, they both had different plans during that time and we decided not to depend on anything else and just go by ourselves. I reserved the tickets thro the Disney's official site.

We left Portland on 1st Feb07 and reached LA by 2pm. The express shuttle picked us up and the we started our trip towards DisneyLand. We reached our Marriot Suites , Anaheim by 3 -4 pm. While checking in to the hotel I remembered that I am a Marriot Platinum member and asked the receptionist for an upgrade. She gladly upgraded us to the 14 th Floor with a good view. Below are some pictures from the hotel room and outside.

Our initial plan was to go for an LA trip that night and start the Disney Trip from the next day onwards. Reaching Disney Land we changed the plan to go to Disney Land the same day itself as the whole purpose of the trip was to visit DisneyLand and not for anything else. Our return trip was after 4 days . 3 Days in Disney Land and 1 day at Universal Studios.

Ping-Pong in office

I never had played ping-pong in my whole life and started my ping pong career the day I joined T-Mobile 10/10/05 and hence plays kind of Ok. Below are some of my pictures in various pose.

See the Panther in action below. Look at Gurjeets expression- oh my god here he misses another shot.

George Apatachioae in action. "OH COME-ON" and "THE BOTTOM LINE IS" are his famous sayings.

Gurjeet in action

One of Chris Martins re----d shots

One of Jerry's returns: Remember Jerry who took us on his nice boat

Ali recently got married , see his shot below:

This is how Ronaldo always misses a shot

Recognitions in T-Mobile

Yahooooooo, I finally got recognised. I started thinking at one point that I will never be recognised for doing all these things like churn projects, Radio add projects and all sort of other parameter trials.

Yes First it was my colleague George Apatachioae who recognised my efforts( I think he felt sorry for me that no-one is recognising my efforts). I value the recognition as a valued possession especially when it comes from a Perfectionist and technocrat like George.

Okey then comes the next Big One. Finally Management felt that I am doing great and recognised my efforts in the ALL HANDS MEETING held in April. I got the "OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT" AWARD from the Management Team. Wooohoo!!!!

Career in Airtel

Overall it was exciting to work for that big of a portfolio . I had to work 12 hour days starting from 9 to 9 but enjoyed the management work. Rollout was going on but I was involved in a very limited manner. Mr.Raghunath and Mr.Kumar were managing the rollout.
I created lot of new process and preventive maintenance procedures referring to the bible written by Mr.Jacob Mathew,GM ESCOTEL.

Ravikumar was the switch Asst.Manager and he was very friendly to me and I always had full switch support for any activities. RF Department was reporting partially to me and to V.Kumar.
We had a get together with all the engineers, Mr.Pritam, Mr.Pandian, Mr.Sridhar and Mr.Raghu at a hill resort near Salem for 2 days and it was fun.

I used to go for cluster visits , which includes all the places in TN where we have coverage inlcluding Pondicherry. I used to have bimonthly meeting with the cluster engineers in their respective place and visit couple of their sites for quality assurance. I always enjoyed the stay in Pondicherry, Annamalai (5star) hotel and the nice fish fry there. The travel to pondicherry was tight 7 hours in the tata estate. Ganeshan was my trusted driver who accompanies me to all the places I visit. He was the best driver I ever had.

My works and management skills started getting known slowly and I became part of the executive committee Team in TN. So I used to attend the weekly meetings involving the COO and Sales heads. But I was not getting a very good exposure on the project side and hence was not involved in big Chennai meetings. But I had nothing to complain as I was enjoying my management career and used to hold weekly conference calls with my 15 engineers.

And then came the moment in which Pritam the CTO asked me to step into the project manager role to assist Mr.Raghunaath. I had a concern that I have to do this role by letting my BSS role, to which Pritam said to handle both. So finally I started managing Project Rollout of TN , rolling out 400 sites in 5-6 months along with handling my BSS role. During this time the management changed in chennai , new CTO was Mr.Sugumaran and Mr.Pandian was overlooking TN operations.

It was great fun to work with Mr.Raghunaath , working on project plans, site planning from the scratch including Microwave planning and Capacity Planning. The engineers were all excited about the amazing rollout to follow eventhough they had to put in lot of weekends and extra hours to bring up the sites. There were instances in which to launch a town like Palani where we had only 1 E1 capacity and the drop will give only a very few timeslots, we had to try innovative methods with the help and support of the switch engineers along with Mr.Ravikumar.The peak achievement was turning up 43 sites in 30 days and an article got published in our hub newsletter. There were lot of awards to follow.

I want to state that if it was not for the wonderful Team work and the excellent team of engineers of TamilNadu this project would never have been successful. Thanks to my entire team of Engineering TN.

Joining Airtel

I started looking for a job change in Escotel for quite some time due to the fact that the job was getting monotonous and the rumours that they are going to sell off Escotel(which happened in 2005-06). Shafeek had joined Airtel, Kerala during that time as the RF Manager and I told him to refer me if he has some contacts. He being a sincere and honest friend(I have very few like him) referred me to Pritam who was the CTO for South, who inturn asked V.Kumar (Head Tech,TN) to interview me.

Kumar called me for an interview and I went to Coimbatore for the interview. I still remember it was a Harthal day and Shanavas dropped me in the Rly Station. Stayed at Kochachans place the night and attended the interview on Saturday. Interview went well but the pay they offered was not very promising. The position was too good to neglect, Head-BSS for the state of TamilNadu,with 15 engineers reporting directly to this position. I decided to take the offer.


See my Team below:






Joined Airtel on 11/11/2002.

Boat Trip - Portland 22May07

We T-Mobile RF group decided to go on a boat trip on Jerry's boat. This is how they push the boat into water in USA. I got my spot on the first hand itself since I dont want to get into water because I am a good swimmer and swims like a "STONE". We were a group of 8 including Jerry.

Thats me and Julio on the left and right . We are called "THE PANTHERS". I started the name for fun when we play ping-pong and it became and instant hit.

This is Portland Downtown view from the Willamette River.

I convinced Jerry that I can drive the boat(eventhough I dont know it). So he gave me the wheels to drive and it was great Fun. Oru Sayippu vellathil pokendathayirunnu, eeshwaran kathu.

Look at me driving with confidence, it was too much fun to drive at 50 MPH.

Kindergarten Days - continued

Here I go, so I have been promoted from the kids nursery to bigger kids nursery. This is the Sacred Heart School's nursery. I dont have much thoughts about this nursery except crying the first day as it was an "All Boys" nursery... I think my Achan realised the mistake of admitting me in a mixed nursery and quickly changed his mind. After this day he never admitted me to any school or college with girls till Engineering where he had no choice.

Kindergarten Days

This is the first kindergarten I ever attended. It was called Kluny Nursery (I think so). I am standing near to my best friend(girl) ;-)

I think that was the first girl friend I ever had (or was there someone before that) hmmm, no idea.. or maybe she is the first one I really saw as a 4-5 yr old. I dont remember her name anyways.

Achan and amma used to tell me that I was very naughty during these days and I used to be a trouble maker in the nursery fighting with lot of kids.. Maybe because of these attitudes as a kid made me a wonderful peaceloving and caring person NOW....