Personal Insights
Blog It Forward – Sunil Chandra
Thanks to Nabheet for inviting me to Blog It Forward challenge. It has been 7 years since I blogged last, although I used to browse through SCN silently whenever I get some time. During these years, lots of things changed in integration space and so on my personal front. I am married now and proud father of a kid.
After a long break, got connected back to the community in person this year during SAP Inside Track Chandigarh, a well-managed community event initiated and organized by Nabheet. This is the first time when I met him in person and found him – full of energy and passionate towards the unprecedented change in technology.
Introduction – About Me
I am a native of Patna, capital of Bihar state, northern India. But I always stayed outside most of the time. In fact, it was more kind of a destination for summer vacation while visiting my grandparents during school days. Due to transferable job of my father, we used to shift to a new location every 4 or 5 years. It might appear a bit uncomfortable, but it is a different kind of fun adopting and adjusting in a completely new environment and culture.
My SAP journey started right after college when I got placed in an IT firm in Mumbai. I was privileged enough to have good mentors and one of them was Pratik Srivastava. Been inspired by him, I created my SDN (SCN now) account and gradually started responding to queries and eventually some blogging in the integration space. Also, the frequent blogs from Michal Krawczyk and Shabarish those days always motivated me to contribute and explore more to share back with the community.
For the last few years, we are staying in Singapore and we love this place. It is so clean and well organized. Really inspiring to see how the country has grown in such a short span of just over 50 years.
Fun Fact
My 2-year-old son is super active and keeps his mom busy with all his tantrums most of the time. Really appreciate her patience and energy for handling all this alone while I am away during office hours. In one of the incidents, he threw water on the floor and got scared looking at her angry mom. He immediately turned to Google home and said – hey google, wipe the floor ??
Let me now respond to the questions from Nabheet.
What do you do apart from SAP in your free time?
Being a family man, I love to spend most of my free time playing with my kid. If he is sleeping, then I prefer going out for a long walk or watching a TV series, currently watching The House of cards. Next is catching up with cloud technology specially the innovation in open source – Kubernetas, Istio etc.
How do you balance your life between work and family/personal time?
I believe in work life harmony rather than balance. If I am happy at office, I come home with positive energy. Happy home gets me ready for handling challenges at work with cool head and feel more productive. In that way, it is a circle where professional and personal life complements each other and keeps you going. But the life is not always fair and will have some negative spillover or stressful situation at times. If that continues for long, it is time to reprioritize your priorities and give yourself a break before it starts affecting your health.
What would you choose if given a choice between coffee or tea and why?
Although I am not a fan of either of them, an occasional tea/chai is doable! On a rainy day, deep fried onion pakoras with a cup of hot chai comes as a perfect blessing.
Now I would like to take this opportunity to request Morten Wittrock, Vadim Klimov and Michal Krawczyk to Blog It Forward and share their stories along with below questions.
- What do you enjoy most in your work and why?
- If you were not in your current position, what/where would you be and why?
- What do you do apart from SAP in your free time?
Hi Sunil Ji.
Nice one, Enjoy the free time with kid
Regards
Sriram
Very nice Sunil Chandra, its nice to know about your family and cute son.. I was literally rolling on the floor with "wipe the floor":).
I must appreciate two things about you, one is yours simplicity and a positive attitude. You were vacationing in Chandigarh and still you volunteer to participate as a speaker tells a lot about the passion you have for the community( if i remember correctly it was your birthday that day).
Since you have started now, I must say you should do this knowledge sharing via posts more often now.. All the best and keep up the great work man!
Thank you for your kind words. Knowledge sharing is one of my resolution for 2020 🙂
Great post, Sunil - and thank you for the challenge 🙂
Hi Sunil, and welcome to the #BlogItForward family!
I love your viewpoint on work/family balance. For me, there are times when work is really busy (during an upgrade) and I need some extra time for work. Then there are times when the home life requires more time and energy, and I need to be able to give that. So 'harmony' really works better than balance.
Thank you for sharing the beautiful pictures of you and your family too <3
Sue
Thanks for your comment. Agree that work or home might demand more attention at times, so absolute balance is hard to achieve. Harmony is the way out 🙂
Nice one Sunil Chandra, I am pretty sure that your kid is giving you cues about his interest in Machine Learning and Deep Learning there 😛 😀
Agree with you on the work life balance, being happy at work has a huge impact in your life. Else like my mentor used say, Forget about work outside office and don't bring work to home 😀 😀 , True that.
Thanks Mahesh Kumar Palavalli. You never know, schools might start teaching machine learning by the time he grows up ?