On April 9th, we started from Gurgaon for our Himachal trip as part of the ShikshaDaan Yatra. We had decided to meet with Venkat in Chandigarh as he has a lot of experience in the education space. Venkat Matoory is the CEO of Junior Achievement, India and known to us for a long time. I had tried to setup a volunteer base in Aon Hewitt for JA long time back but it didn’t gain much traction then. We have stayed in touch although infrequently, every interaction was as though we were regularly in touch. Venkat had got married a couple of years back and we hadn’t met him after that. We were to meet his wife for the first time.
We reached Chandigarh around 1.30 and as always the “city beautiful” made us feel refreshed and happy. Chandigarh is indeed city beautiful, and I wish every city in India is as beautiful some day. We walked into Venkat’s house and met Shikha and their son, Shreyam. Well, as expected the little fellow immediately got interested in Krishnan first, probably the matching hairdo’s … Must have been wondering how come this guy is taller and bigger but has my “no hair” style :):).
And then the marathon “talk” session started – we never stopped talking till nearly 10 at night and yes Shreyam too. During this time, filter coffee got made, Rasam got made and we managed to eat the awesome Rajma chawal that Shikha had made and we still had topics to discuss !!. Mom sneaked in a quick nap, but we continued. Ofcourse ShikshaDaan was the focus of the discussions but we went over books, politics, personal stories, past life regression, travels, and so on. Krishnan managed to teach Shreyam how to make a particular sound and poor Venkat and Shikha now have to bear the brunt of it. Am sure Shreyam thinks that sound is Krishnan’s name :). While leaving I remarked that it doesn’t feel like we met Shikha for the first time !!
I have a simple philosophy that I spend time only with people who bring positive energy and are not a drain on our energy and with the amount of positive energy that Venkat and Shikha exude, we are still feeling fresh and energetic inspite of terrible roads to reach Bilaspur.
Friends like Shikha and Venkat prove that there must be past lives, otherwise this kind of instant connect is really not possible and chemistry doesn’t explain all of it. Thank you Shikha and Venkat .. And we will be back for more :).