I am working in Japan, at a site owned by TATA industries (Globalized even in my dreams). I take a bullet train to work daily and I sit in the same last row everyday. One day as I walked in I saw a couple of new faces. I walked past them nonchalantly. The train started moving, soon after an older gentleman lifted his phone-like device up and called out my name. I looked in his direction, he said my mom just sent a message to call her back.
The bullet train was owned by TATA group, and they were running a test trial to receive all the messages on a single server and dispense it from there. Hence that phone- like device was the server. All the messages sent to the train were coming to the phone- like server which the gentleman had, so did my Mom's message.
I got curious, I wanted to learn how it functioned and what were the benefits of installing such a system on the train. I asked the elderly gentleman, he told me one of them was that even if you are in a no coverage zombie- zone you'll stay connected because of this device. I also wanted to know if this could be of marketing value, once the train was used for commercial travel to the new sci-fi shopping mall that we were building. I asked him a lot of questions with child-like curiosity, he patiently listened and answered. Somewhere in the conversation we also talked about India's double digit inflation. He started with "Inflation is good and bad, it also affects shareholder value." I said "increase in Whole sale Price Index and good, are you an owner who gets all products and services free and/or some special subsidized rate, we both laughed at the fairy tale win-win".
He said " No I diversify, I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket. I see a challenge in every industry, as if it were a puzzle only I could solve. I recently delivered the One lakh car, it has been a dream to produce an affordable car for the Indian Middle Class. You must have heard about it."
Curiosity changed gears, became wide eyed bewilderment. The man behind it all, Mr. Tata himself, I did not know how to react, him discussing childish economics and technology with me??? I looked around and found people staring at us, listening to what he had to say. Holy Crap!!!! I asked him "Can you give me a letter which says I met you and asked you some questions, you can add "intelligent" as the adjective for the questions". "My ex-boss has a letter from you which he keeps as a souvenir I would love to have one too."
Mr. Tata hand writes the letter and extends it to me. I reach out my hand to take it from him, when my "dearest, ever-loving, sugar and spice and everything nice" husband shook me out of the bullet train in Japan and I fell with a thud onto my queen-size mattress in New York without saying Bye to Mr. Tata. What a happy ending....
I could have asked Mr. Tata to adopt me... well there goes, my economics, marketing, japanese technology and sci-fi mall.
But I loved the Mr. Tata of my dreams, he looked as majestic and refined in my dreams as I see him in the newspaper photos, online images and news clippings. I could see (or imagine) the person was him, but not make out who he is before he talked to me about what he does, Dreams are strange...
If this trend of celebrity encounters continues in my dreams, Wish to see Larry Page & Sergey Brin next.
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