Vallal Jothilingam

I have been trying to get in touch with a friend/ex-colleague of mine - Vallal, and then out of the blue I got a promotional mailer from - the game called life, I was about to send the mail to the trash, but the name was Vallal. I clicked opened the link embedded within the mail and was surprised to see his photo.

Apparently Vallal has started a new venture which he calls 'Business Coaching Industry'. Check out his Website

Whenever I think of him I could only think of two words - Persuasive and Organized. Of course he has many more facets to his personality but this seems to be the primary two words which I could attribute to him. I have always found him very persuasive, positive, man of highly energetic encouraging words and highly organized. He handles information very well. Seems to be doing quite an interesting work and doing pretty well too.

I joined HCL way back in 1995 and was immediately sent to Bombay to attend a 'Product Launch' seminar/meeting without being given much information about the Product as it was to be a huge secretive launch in the industry . The product in question is - Beanstalk Home Computers, now not very well known, although exist in the PC industry in form of Beanstalk PC's. I had never travelled to B'bay before that and was given Vallal's name and contact details by the Coimbatore office. I was supposed to get in touch with him as he was to join the training directly from B'bay and then later report to the Coimbatore office.

I learnt from the co-passengers during my travel, that it would be difficult to get in touch with Vallal as the train would reach pretty early in the morning and the telephone number seemed to be some number of a 'Communication Booth' or something of that sort, which would certainly be closed at that hour in the morning. I decided to get down in Dadar, I got into a hotel and called him up little later. First thing I realised was the rich booming voice and learnt from him that, that was a 24/7 centre and he had given instruction to the attender there to take my call, however we then decided to meet directly, later during the day at the HCL Prabhadevi office, instead of meeting earlier.

I landed there and hung around for sometime and was chatting up with someone and there was this huge guy leaning on the other side of the partition. We looked at each other and smiled. We recognised each other immediately although we had never met before. He had this huge grin on him and we kind of became friends immediately.
A huge bear of a man with a huge grin and he always mutters 'Enaa-Daa' as a 'Hi', he now seems to have lost lot of weight.