He has left a note: ‘Welcome to my website, my name is GAS’

Like so many news items appearing routinely on our radar, there was this one: ‘‘Two Indian students die in US air crash, Charlotte, Jan 9—Two Indian students of Clemson University were among the 21 killed in a commuter plane in the US city of Charlotte. Sreenivasa Reddy Badam, 24, and Ganeshram Sreenivasan, 23, were graduate students in computer science …’’

To most people reading this article, Badam and Sreenivasan are nothing more than unfamiliar names whose story makes for a sad companion at breakfast. But stray into their cyber legacy as we accidentally did, and suddenly they become living, breathing, laughing young men who—like Martin Luther King whose face graces Badam’s website—had a dream.

That’s the thing about technology. It snatches people away from us. And then it brings them alive.

The cheery greeting on http://people.clemson.edu/~gsreeni/index.htm reads: ‘‘Welcome to my website. My name is GAS, also known as Ganeshram Sreenivasan. I was born in the mad city of the DONs; yeah, Amchi MUMBAI, INDIA on the 29th of May, 1979.’’

By this time, he feels like an old friend. ‘‘I spent my initial life time in the streets of Bandra (West) and received a formal education from St. Stanislaus High School (BORN FOR GREATER THINGS indeed!) which has produced such wonderful alumni as Salman Khan, Remo Fernandez and of course Me!!!’’ he goes on, adding, ‘‘Indeed, Those Were The Best Days Of My Life.’’

Ah, he liked Summer of ’69, this Gas. He also graduated with an MSc (Technology) in Information Systems from BITS, Pilani, where he must have been part of the cool crowd since his friends went by names like P3, Ketchup, Bus and GSat.

Are you reading this guys? Did you know that—as his resume on the website tells us—Gas wanted to ‘‘obtain a full-time position as a software developer in the field of network systems’’? We’ve just learnt that he loved Mohammad Rafi and Kishore Kumar. Did you sing Rafi songs on cool evenings in Pilani as the breeze hummed in the trees and the peacocks on campus danced to your tunes?

From the city where he spent his last days, the Charlotte Observer daily quotes Gas’ teacher John D. McGregor as saying: ‘‘He was very intense about his work.’’ Badam, adds McGregor, ‘‘was a very good student, a very quiet guy.’’

The ‘‘good student’’ bit we can tell from Badam’s website http://people.clemson.edu/~sbadam/ His home page features a watercolour image of trees in pale shades of green with splashes of blue, gold and brown alongside a quote from Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: ‘‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep …’’

But it’s hard to believe that Badam was ‘‘a quiet guy’’ from the photographs of him dancing the dandia posted on the site.

He loved ‘‘the sight of beauty’’, his friends (‘‘and I’m not going to write about them here, cause I don’t want to let them know how much I love and enjoy their company’’.

He enjoyed playing chess, painting, swimming, skating, making kites, sleeping and watching movies—especially the ones made by Ram Gopal Varma. He even provided a link to a site with an article on his favourite director.

On second thoughts, maybe he really was a quiet guy. But this quiet guy clearly had a sense of humour. He wrote: ‘‘My Aim: Alice Walton, Lawrence Ellison, Paul Gardner, Bill Gates, Sreenivasa Badam… …mwahaha’’ with a link to Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires from 2001 following that cyber chuckle.

Then he adds: ‘‘Just want to be Happy Always.’’

When they started off, they were just websites. Did their 20-plus-year-old authors ever dream that they would end up as technobituaries?

Gas winds up his home page with this comment: ‘‘That’s an introduction about me. Hope I haven’t bored you too much.’’ No you haven’t Gas.