Sure was. My involvement with him went all the way from liking and respecting him for his pc world and pc quest articles to what passed for a reasonably close friendship, all the way to an epic three or four hundred email flame war in 2000 where he ended up threatening to get me fired from my job, knew my ceo and all that.
After that, our lives didn't quite move in the same circles, I only saw him once years later at a small open source round table discussing god knows what, and again having, to put it mildly, a difference of opinion. He was still quite a character for whom mark antony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar doesn't quite apply, he will be remembered for both the positive as well as the negative (and in both cases, highly so) interactions that he had with various people here. --srs -------- Original message -------- From: Indrajit Gupta <[email protected]> Date: 06/14/2013 11:51 PM (GMT+05:30) To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [silk] Atul Chitnis RIP Wasn't that the point? bonobashi ----- Original Message ----- > From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]> > To: "mail=silklist@lists. hserus. net" <[email protected]> > Cc: > Sent: Friday, 14 June 2013 8:07 AM > Subject: Re: [silk] Atul Chitnis RIP > > It is amazing how a lot of people get to resemble their fathers even if they > face conflicts with them during their lifetime. > > That last paragraph could actually describe Atul himself to a T > > --srs > > -------- Original message -------- > From: Shoba Narayan <[email protected]> > Date: 06/14/2013 8:03 AM (GMT+05:30) > To: [email protected] > Subject: [silk] Atul Chitnis RIP > >> >> This, by his brother, was also well done: >> http://arun.chitnis.com/2013/06/08/my-brother-atul-chitnis-1962-2013/ >> > > Ingrid, thanks. > This is such a lovely piece, about fathers and sons. > > Love these lines: > Like it or not, sons live their adult lives in a manner which is directly or > indirectly dictated by their fathers. We may either spend our entire life > complying with our father’s wishes or rebelling against them. We may either > do > exactly what the old man taught us to do, or do exactly the opposite. But > either > way, the fathers of sons hold the reins from beyond the grave. > > Throughout the Indian part our childhood, our father was a person to be > feared > and steered clear of. He was a hard and peculiar man – brilliant in his own > way, > but driven by his own demons and completely oblivious of how his ways > affected > others. > > I tackled our father in a very different way – not very original, but > effective. > Atul met him head on – he gave him the middle finger and waited till he could > take charge of his own life. He did that much sooner than I did. But he did > not > walk away a free man. The specter of not being good enough, for not meeting > expectations, haunted both of us. >
