Way2Top

There’s so much to say and no right way to say it. It’s been over a week now and most of us are still struggling to come to terms with the tragedy. Sid was so much more than just a quad mate for me. During the one year at ISB, he was a confidante, a mentor and above all a dear friend. Allow me to share with you some of my memories of the man that was SidSin.

Siddharth was a guy who was hard to miss. You could like him or not but you definitely couldn’t ignore him. On first impressions he was a suave, sophisticated, intelligent gentleman with an incredibly rich set of personal and professional experiences. We learned early on in the year of his fierce loyalty towards his friends and he was a binding force for our ‘gang’. I’m reminded of the numerous times people walked away from the dining table completely disgusted by his comments… by the end of the year they could all see through it and he could no longer hide his gentle interior. Ever ready to put forth his opinions and fight for what he thought was right - he was also always the first one to make amends after an argument.

The true life of a party. No one could get a party going like Sid and on most occasions he’d be the last man standing. One day, early on in the year, he woke me up at 6 a.m. and dragged me along with a few others to watch the sunrise from the Roof Garden (His laptop obviously playing ’superstar’ in the background.) The only organized talk he attended all year was the ‘menu display’ meeting with Sarovar when the coupon system was being introduced. He kept everything on his table at right angles at all points of time… he had an excel record of every rupee he spent for the past many years. He was terribly inept at cutting his nails - it was a 45 minute process for him… It’s the idiosyncrasies that we’ll miss the most.

After about 4 weeks into the placement process, when I still hadn’t received a job offer, he stopped wishing me ‘good luck’ before my interviews and started keeping the drawing room lights on all evening (as opposed to the dim setting he preferred). Those were his superstitions. The day I finally got my job offer, 6 weeks into the process, he shed a tear.

The happiest times in his professional career were during the year he took off to teach at his alma mater. It was during this time that he helped a colleague to overcome a drug and alcohol addiction. He told me that that was his life’s biggest achievement.

SidSin hadn’t studied Math since Class X. He loved to crib about quant subjects and swore he wouldn’t study finance after the core terms. One thing his classmates agreed upon is that every time he did CP, you knew that the whole class would be hanging on to his every word. The batch of 06 got a taste of the magic and gave him a standing ovation for his session during their orientation. Many people know that he had been a successful Vice President for an IT start up before he joined ISB but few people know that he persevered through months of unemployment, struggle and true hunger before achieving what he did. When he put his mind to something he could achieve it..getting into St. Stephen’s, a 750 GMAT, perfect scores in strategy projects. Siddharth Sinha was not a quitter.

No one really knows why he did what he did. It’ll take some time to come to terms with this inexplicable act and some more time to overcome the guilt for not having prevented this. What we have come to learn now is that depression is often a medical condition and the ability to rationalize is clouded by the effect of body chemicals. At the same time, this is a grim reminder for all of us that there is a larger purpose to life. Let us all offer a prayer for the departed soul.