May 3, 2013 | Awake & Dreaming

Have you ever had a random encounter or fleeting moment with a stranger that stuck with you?

Quite a few actually. I’ve posted about a couple here and there but I realized that I haven’t posted about this one girl, or I should say woman as she was about 28 or 29 at the time when I met her, that I met & spoke to for just about 2 hours and yet her memory has stuck in my mind all these years later. This was back in 2007 and I still remember what she looked like, her smile, eyes and almost everything about her. That’s some impression I’d say!

Her name is Meher and she told me that she was a Parsi who grew up in Mangalore and moved to Bangalore with her cousin and couple of their girlfriends for work. She had been in Bangalore working in a couple of the call centers and got promoted to the post of a trainer. She then joined a company that focused solely on training and provided training for various other companies & corporates, from an entry level employee to managers, DGMs, & even GMs & VPs on various non-product and non-technical aspects & topics. Like communications, soft skills, office/business etiquette, various other HR related stuff as well. Her company had been hired for a few weeks to provide a 30 day soft skills & communication training for the first batches of entry level call center associates at our BPO (we were providing the customer care for a large international mobile service provider for their Kerala operations).

Anyways, me & a fellow colleague were asked to go and visit with the trainers from Meher’s company and sit with them for a couple of hours and observe their training sessions, go through their modules and in short see their work. My employers wanted to know if we coupe replicate the same training within our own organization hence cutting costs. So this is how I met Meher as she was one of the trainers there. I spent a few hours talking her & her colleagues and she made quite an impression on me. She was smart, bright, eloquent, vivacious – not to mention elegant, classy and extremely gorgeous. She had a smile that could light up a large stadium, including the parking lot! She has these beautiful eyes and a cute nose. All in all the perfect package. I managed to communicate with her via email for a few weeks but then lost touch (didn’t get her phone number)!

It is a sad day indeed for the metal community as news of the death of guitarist & founding member of trash metal icons Slayer comes in. Just 49 years old, Jeff died Thursday (May 2) of liver failure. Hanneman, a huge fan of punk initially and who comes from a family which has a lot of war veterans in them, and Kerry King founded the group in 1981 after King was trying out for another band. Kerry soon introduced Jeff to drummer Dave Lombardo and recruited Chilean-born bassist and vocalist Tom Araya, who had played with King before in the band Quits (previously known as Tradewinds).

Initially the band started out playing covers of Iron Maiden & Judas Priest, going for a Satanic image which featured pentagrams, make-up, spikes, and inverted crosses. Over the years since their 1983 debut, the band went on to produce 11 studio albums and toured the world many times. Jeff has won 2 Grammies and been nominated another 3 more times with Slayer in the category “Best metal performance”.

Jeff was born in Oakland, California to a German family. His father father fought in Normandy on the side of the Allied Forced during World War II and his brothers in Vietnam, making warfare a common conversation topic at the dinner table. His interest would be spurred by a love for war movies and he also collected war memorabilia and medals. Hanneman and Slayer vocalist/bassist Tom Araya were reformed cocaine and pill abusers. In early 2011, Hanneman contracted necrotizing fasciitis, which doctors say most likely originated from a spider bite. He withdrew from touring at the same time due to the debilitating skin disorder. Although he recovered from the disease in 2012, Kerry revealed continuing health problems that kept him from working with Slayer. It is not know if the skin ailment is connected to his liver failure that led to his death.

RIP Jeff Hanneman (January 31, 1964 – May 2, 2013