I am Aravind Valloor Mana.
The most common Avatars I take are
I was born to a middle class family. My father is a practicing psychiatrist, and my mother used to be a sanskrit lecturer in a college. I was born in the hospital my father was practicing in, in a village named Kolenchery, in Ernakulam district, Kerala state.
Education: I did my schooling from St Peters English Medium High School. This is still one of the most successful schools in that area. I did my schooling from lower primary kinder garden to 10th standard in that school.
I then did my pre-degree from St Peters College, Kolenchery, which was at a walkable distance from my house. Out of the four groups available - I had simultaneously taken two groups because I had still not decided whether I should go for medicine or engineering. I was sure that I will not join the third group which focused on Humanities, and the fourth group which was more about finance.
After pre-degree I tried cracking various engineering and medical entrance examinations. I got admission in a few engineering colleges, but my father advised me to try the medical entrance once again. So I joined for BSc Chemistry in St Peters college, and in parallel did some entrance coaching. The entrance coaching was done by Brilliants Institute - an institute which sent home study materials with which you can practice at your own pace. The next year, I got a very good rank in Engineering (598), and a good rank in Medicine (2041). But the medical rank was no enough for getting me an MBBS seat. So I decided to join for engineering.
I joined M A College of Engineering, Kothamangalam in Electronics and Communication branch. This was one of the most sought after branches, and I really liked electronics. Even though I was a day scholar there, I thoroughly enjoyed my engineering college days. I got a job offer from NeST, Trivandrum as a software engineer while I was in my 7th semester through campus placement.
While in my job, I took a PGCBM (Post Graduate Certificate in Business Management) from the esteemed XLRI University, Jamshedpur. This college (and infact the whole town of Jamshedpur) is maintained by the Tatas.
Career: I joined NeST on June 20th, 2000. They asked me to sign a 4 year bond wit them. They had not mentioned about this until then. Since I did not have another job offer, I had to sign it. I learned a lot in NeST, and still I beileve that the best software work I had done until now was at NeST. Since NeST was a services company, I got an opportunity to work on different platyforms and with different languages, depending on the type of projects we got from the customer. While in NeST, I got an opportunity to work with Hitachi in Japan. I stayed in NeST for 4 years, and soon after the bond period was over, I started looking out, and got offers from IBM, iFlex and Siebel Systems. I decided to join Siebel which was a leading CRM solution provider in it's Bangalore office, and they had just started their operations in Bangalore. The life in Siebel was cool, until Oracle took over. Soon, I got a job offer from Emulex Communications and I joined them in Nov 2007. Emulex, then, had a startup culture where each employee knew each other personally, and they had a great family like feeling. I enjoyed working here. In 2015, Emulex was taken over by Avago Technologies. Avago took over a bigger company than itself in 2016 and renamed itself as Broadcom. I still work with Broadcom Inc as an Engineering Manager, and I try to help my colleagues have a great work environment.
Family: On November 25, 2006, I got married to Manjusha Damodaran Mannanikkad. That put an end to my bachelor life in Bangalore. My wife was still doing her Masters in commerce. She had one more year to complete her course, and so she stayed back at Kerala to complete it. I was blessed with a son, Devadathan, on March 11th 2009. I was blessed again with a second son, Sreedathan, on Jan 9th 2017.