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The severest punishment anyone could give him was to ask him to wake up early, or just wake up anytime from his deep slumber. He was the last one to reach office, and most of the time his students waited for him in his class.

Extremely sharp in his domain, he was quick witted, philosophical, and loved smoking. Once in a year he had difficulty in keeping away from cigarette for over 13 hours, for 40 days in a row. The first thing he took after breaking his fast was his Marlboro lights!

God forgot to inject the 'urgency' fluid in his body. Anything any situation, he would not get perturbed. That’s another thing that all 'not working' tasks were addressed and fixed satisfactorily. He was the most experienced in the office and often acted as a coach. I think complex scenarios challenged his thinking ability. Though he knew a lot, unlike other teachers he would not dump his students, and me, with too much info.

Once he had found a solution of sending automated emails to different users when some xls file was updated, he was elated and like subai wanted to get back to work and refine it further. And that was the time I was struggling with memorizing HTML tags!

Observing my struggle as a teacher, he once commented that only people who have interest in reasoning and logic should continue in the domain we were part of. I got the hint, and when my assignment was over, I did not accept the next two years extension. He, as much as I, must have been relieved of the torture I went thorough of teaching, and his equal torture of teaching me!

The best times we had with him was while watching 'nice' movies using office projector. His comments on the ongoing acts used to make us just laugh uncontrollably. His running commentaries while watching Egyptian movies were hilarious. There was but little entertainment for 7 bachelors in a villa!

His prized possession was a brand new DELL laptop which he bought for some 600+ dinars. We watched loads of movies on it ignoring the till then the indispensable TV and VCR in the living room.

I realize we all know so little about him: his childhood, schooling, college, other jobs, friends, and family. While he enjoyed listening to whatever crap we told him, he never shared anything with us. Not that he had a terrible past, but because of laziness to talk much J That’s again a guess!

We played table tennis - where I always lost; cricket - of which I knew nothing. He would quiz me on cricketers, and their nationality. He never asked about Kapil Dev, Tendulkar, or Gavaskar. He also encouraged me to play cricket in the living room and also made me practice on catching the cricket ball - yes, I still cannot catch a ball :-) he asked me a simple yet profound question - "didn't your dad play with you catch-catch when you were a kid."

I used to be quite aggressive, not that I have stopped being aggressive. He had lots of patience. But one day he lost it and I learnt a lesson when he said, 'your family may be used to your tantrums and bossing around, we are not your family.' And I was speechless, because that was absolutely true. Thanks for that lesson S.

Money, and importantly contributing, was never a problem for him. We went for bowling at Seef with his student and I am sure he must have liked my performance in at least this sport. Actually, rolling a ball is not a big deal than throwing it or catching it!

He knew I liked music, I never saw him excited about any song, and I assumed I had the best knowledge on western music at least. On one occasion when he came to my room where I was playing some CD, he surprised me by saying the singer was Jim Reeves. I had never thought he would know such a name, let alone the song. I told him it was Pat Boon. He just smiled and said he had been listening to that song since his childhood. He left and I jumped out of my bed and checked the singer. He was right, and I was embarrassed. Two adages knocked my mind – never judge a book by its cover, and still water runs deep! I don’t think I would have played that CD again while he was around!

All in all, he has been a wonderful company, and a good human being. Harm no one types – he is like a bull who mindless of anyone keeps munching – that’s even when you dance in front of him or try to shoo him away! Bad example I know J

Since most of the time we indulged in bachelor’s talk, I have to cut short this piece here. Some things are best to be remembered then documented J

Thanks S for the HTML, Javascript, and VB solutions ;-) actually thanks to AB, AC, and Hari Prasad.