Renaissance

         It had been a tough day at work. ‘When it rains, it pours’; Neil sighed as he drove up the porch and parked his car in the garage. He picked up a sheaf of documents strewn across the back seat and put them in his briefcase. He would have to work through the night to have the presentation ready for the Board of Directors by the morning.

It had been a day when Murphy’s Law worked to perfection. ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong’, as the adage goes, was being proved right again. Sara, Neil’s secretary, had to go home to take her daughter to the doctor. With a deadline fast approaching, Neil had to stop his analytical work and do secretarial work for the Board meeting the next day. Then the printer malfunctioned and the paper jammed. The display panel nonchalantly signaled an error and the problem refused to be solved. The printer was used to the soft touch of Sara’s hands and no other. In the middle of setting up the projector for a rehearsal, there was a fire alarm and a loud announcement to evacuate. Everyone made a beeline for the emergency exist at the same time and in the rush, all the important papers that had been sequentially stacked crashed to the floor. Neil stayed back to pick up the scattered mess and noticed gray boot marks on two critical legal documents. The alarm continued with its staccato electronic wailing, guaranteed to stop everything but its noise.

Neil wiped his forehead and with drooped shoulders he slowly made his way to the fire exit. He was a handsome man in his mid-fifties with a graying beard and a streak of white over his ears. He was certain that the increasing appearance of gray was due to stress at work. These types of days were increasing in frequency. Was he doing something wrong? Did he need to change his style of management? There was a sense of paranoia creeping in, a feeling that the whole universe was somehow working against him. Perhaps he needed some change, or at least a vacation to regain sanity.

By the time the fire brigade arrived and repaired the short circuit, Neil had lost an hour of work time. Neil trudged back to office and continued his work to make a cogent argument to the Board of Directors for funding a new project. He had to go to an adjacent department to have the documents printed and slowly, very slowly, things got back on track as he painstakingly constructed the PowerPoint presentation. Though the analytical work that had gone into the presentation was in support of his central thesis, he wished that he had more data and greater software firepower to do some mathematical predictive analysis. He wasn’t satisfied with his work. Artificial Intelligence and allied algorithms were what he would have liked to use. He did have some great young data analysts working in his team but they too were not up to speed with the latest developments in ‘big data’.

“I must learn how to do it myself”, he said to himself and then sighed again. He had attempted the professional examinations thrice and failed. It had severely dented his self-confidence and self-esteem.

“Too old to get back to mathematics, it’s too hard”, Neil thought to himself though he loved the subject and was passionate about the purest form of logic. Self-doubt came rushing back. That the day hadn’t gone well and that he was going to get an earful from his wife for coming home late, added to his despondency.

It was nine pm by the time he drove into his garage and slowly trudged in. Maya, his daughter, couldn’t hear him through her ear phones as she rushed up the stairs flashing him a bright smile. Rita his wife was waiting for him in the living room and gave him the all-knowing look.

“Bad day at office, was it?” she asked.

“Yes, strange. Nothing went right. I need a strong drink”. Neil poured himself a single malt Scotch and settled down on the sofa. Rita was a good listener and was adept at absorbing his frustrations from work. Neil considered her to be a wonder woman, juggling a career and a home. He marveled at her energy level and passion. He often wondered where it all came from and so effortlessly. He took her very seriously and listened to her well-reasoned advice.

“I think I should take a crack at that exam once again”, he looked at her imploringly while he sipped his drink. “Do you think I should, or, would I look like a fool again?”

Rita sat back and took on the role of a facilitator. She was not a technical person but she was good at the emotional level and people would tell her things that they wouldn’t to others.

“So what is this ‘big data’ that everyone is talking about these days?” she asked Neil. “Finish your drink and I’ll put something on the dinner table”.

“Are you sure you want to listen to the technical stuff, it’s boring”, Neil asked and Rita nodded. You didn’t need to be technical to listen to another human being.

Neil took a sip of whisky and started. “Big data is a term for information and data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them as are traditional analytical tools”.

Neil’s pharmaceutical company operated in thirty two countries in all five continents and he was continuously being bombarded with information. The data sets were so large that it was difficult making sense of it all. The new field of big data analysis could find new patterns and correlations to spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.

“Big data analytics is the process of collecting, organizing and analyzing large sets of data to discover patterns and make some predictions about the future”.

“So just do it”, Rita smiled a nonchalant smile as Neil continued.

“Not so easy. Scientists, business executives, practitioners of medicine, advertising and governments alike regularly meet difficulties with large data-sets. Can you imagine the flow of data from Internet search, fintech, urban-informatics, and business-informatics? I know I’m giving you new buzz words, but it’s really huge these days”.

“What’s stopping you from going further on this? You are obviously interested and passionate about it”.

“At my age…” Neil started and stopped as soon as he saw the look in Rita’s eyes.

“Come and have something to eat”, Rita said walking over to the dinner table. You’ve got a long day ahead.

Later after making gentle love, they lay with each other bodies entwined. The warmth of Rita’s body, her breath and her smell calmed Neil as he alternated between sleep and wakefulness.

“Forget the failures”, Rita softly whispered into his ears, “you’ve surely learned from them, haven’t you?” Her fingers gently stroked his forehead and went through his tousled hair.

“What I need is some kind of sign that I am on the right track”, Neil said half asleep and loving every moment of his wife’s touch.

“Your wife believes in you. What more do you need?” Her fingers brushed his eyelids and stroked the lobes of his ears. She gently massaged his neck, shoulders breast and hips and slowly went deep downwards till Neil was awash with pleasure. All the pain and stress magically drained away and he floated on the clouds of his subconscious, free falling into a state of dreamless deep sleep.

When he woke up in the morning, the soft rays of the sun shone through the window blinds. Suddenly, in his foggy mind it registered. Today was the big day. Today he would have to convince the Board to make an investment of 20 million dollars to acquire a new state-of-the-art data analytics infrastructure. He walked quickly to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Normally his mind worked overtime in the seclusion and calm of the bathroom where he planned out the day ahead. It was a kind of dream state where he did the physical actions mechanically. Normally, he dyed his graying hair and beard in deep brown. He would then spend some thinking time in the shower before dressing himself up for office. Yes, today was going to be a big, earth shattering day and to hell with all his detractors.

Neil walked sat down on the breakfast table and picked up the newspaper to glance through the headlines. Maya came in and sat down and for once she didn’t have her earphones on.

“Dad, you’re looking very cool today, real funky”, Maya’s eyes sparked with mirth.

Neil looked up from his paper and could not understand why his daughter was laughing at him.

“Your blue streaks over your ears and your blue beard are really cool, never seen this one before”, Maya was rolling on the floor laughing.

A sense of dread came over Neil as it dawned on him that he had used the wrong color to dye his hair. Instead of deep brown, he had picked up the wrong pack by mistake. Rita sometimes used blue streaks on her hair with great effect. With his mind wandering elsewhere, he hadn’t realized that he had applied the wrong color. Neil started to panic. There was no way he could dye his hair back to his natural color now. He had to leave for office in minutes.

Rita walked up to the breakfast table and was taking a sip of orange juice when she saw her blue haired and blue bearded husband looking at her sheepishly. Then, Maya started to laugh again.

“I think the universe is trying to tell you something Neil”, Rita said. “You are already thinking outside the box, my blue bearded husband, and the universe is guiding you”.

With some encouragement from wife and daughter, Neil strode up to his car with new found confidence and a sense of purpose. He walked past his neighbors who were too shocked to say good morning, past the neighborhood cat who wouldn’t recognize him and past the security guard who gave him a wink and a knowing smile. He had seen it all before in the vast and quirky kaleidoscope of human behavior.

The last and final ‘sign’ would be the reaction and the approval from the Board but Neil didn’t care anymore. Neil knew he could do the job. The superficiality of his blue hair and beard shouldn’t matter. But as he approached his workplace, the fusion of a sense of dread mixed with anticipation started pumping adrenaline into his blood stream. He went past Sara in quick step while she stood there transfixed at the sight of her boss in blue streaks. As word spread, members of his team trooped in to see for themselves if what they’d heard was true. His detractors came to give him high fives while secretly anticipating a move to oblivion.

And, in the hallowed portals of the Board room, Neil made the perfect presentation. He had managed to intuitively analyse the data from their branches in thirty two countries and present the gaps that a new analytics system could fill. Neil translated this into money that could be saved and earned. At the end of his presentation, the data and the business case was all convincing. No one commented on his hair though there were a few eyebrows raised in the beginning. As the business case for his project was concluded, all the Board members applauded in unison and passed the resolution to grant him the money for the project.

The journey could now begin, the signs were all there. Neil intuitively knew that he was now on a winning streak. He stepped out of the office and looked at the sky offering thanks to the heavens. The sky was the limit now and it was all blue.
         
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Word Count - 1998