The Mentor Who Made No Sense - Until He Was Gone
Status: Declassified — File Archive 15 | Mentorship, Confusion, Legacy
In my last dispatch, I talked about parking trophies in the garage after you’ve earned them.
This one goes deeper. Into the person who taught me how to earn them in the first place.
Let me confuse you. 🎯
📌 The Dot: The Confusing Mentor
Indra Nooyi, in My Life in Full, writes about her mentor Roger Enrico:
“I learned a lot from Roger; he was intuitive and courageous. He took to very few people — his standards were ‘interesting,’ to say the least — but he took to me. He mentored me and, to others, that showed I was destined for bigger things. Even though Roger’s style was confusing and annoying at times, I admired him enormously and we understood each other. His savvy and friendship propelled me.”
When I read this, I didn’t think of Roger.
I thought of Sam Prasad.
The Field Reality:
No one in my career has confused me, annoyed me, and triggered my thought process more than Sam.
He was unpredictable. You couldn’t read him. For one situation, Sam would suggest a strategy — and in another similar situation, he would suggest the exact opposite. No warning. No explanation. No pattern I could decode.
And the puzzles. My God, the puzzles. 🧩
There were many times he knew the direction. He had the solution pointer. But he wouldn’t reveal it. His logic? “That will restrict your thought process to that perimeter. I want to see how you approach it yourself.”
Annoying? Absolutely.
But here’s where it gets strange.
At some point, I started getting bored when he gave me a normal task. I felt restless when he agreed with me early. I became impatient — like my learning was going to stop if he acknowledged me too soon.
I had become addicted to the confusion. 🔥
The Twist:
Most people want clarity from their mentors.
I started craving chaos — because I learned that’s where growth lives.
Sam didn’t just tolerate my confusion. He engineered it. He dropped me in the centre of the rough sea, not to punish me, but to see what I was made of.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped drowning. I started swimming.
The dot: Nooyi called Roger “confusing and annoying.” I call Sam the same. But here’s how the dot connects — the mentor who makes no sense in the moment is often the one shaping you the most.
Remember in Avengers: Endgame, when Tony Stark finally cracks time travel? For years, he resisted. Refused to help. But the puzzle wouldn’t leave him alone. He couldn’t sleep until he solved it. That’s what Sam did to me — planted puzzles that wouldn’t let me rest until I cracked them. 🛸
📌 The Dot: The QA Pilot That Changed Everything
Here’s a specific mission that explains Sam’s madness.
I was a Lead Developer at RediSolve. And to be frank — I hated QA. Thought it was beneath me. Classic Alpha Geek energy.
One fine day, Sam says: “We’re going to run a pilot QA project for a US eCommerce company. You’re leading it.”
My team?
⚡ Two developers
⚡ And a lawyer
Yes. A lawyer — who had joined for a KPO pilot.
How weird can it get?! 🤯
The Field Reality:
I had no idea what I was doing. No QA background. No interest in QA. A team that made no sense on paper.
But Sam believed I could crack it. So somewhere in me, I told myself — there must be something in me that he sees. I just have to bring it out.
Six days later, we cracked the code. ✊
That one mission made me see QA from a completely different perspective. It eventually led me to manage Dev, QA, and Systems teams — and by 2013, I pivoted fully into DevOps Transformation.
The dot connects: The career I have today traces back to a mission I didn’t want, with a team I didn’t choose, given by a man who refused to explain why.
The Twist:
Here’s what I didn’t understand then.
Sam wasn’t throwing me into chaos because he didn’t care. He was throwing me into chaos because he did care — about who I could become.
He saw capabilities in me that I didn’t see in myself. And the only way to surface them was to put me in situations where I had no choice but to discover them.
That’s the confusing mentor paradox: The person who annoyed me most shaped me most. 🎯
Like Nick Fury assembling the Avengers. He didn’t explain the full picture. He dropped heroes into situations they didn’t sign up for. Stark didn’t want to be a team player. Cap didn’t trust Fury’s methods. But Fury saw what they could become together — even when they couldn’t see it themselves. 🛡️
📌 The Dot: The Guilt I Carry
Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots forward. You can only connect them backwards.”
I lived this. Painfully.
A lot of the dots I collected with Sam only connected after he left this world in 2010. And many more connected after I left RediSolve.
I never told Sam directly what he meant to me.
Not in the past. And by 2010, the present was taken away too. There’s no future where I can.
I carry that guilt till this day. And I will carry it. 💔
The Field Reality:
Here’s what haunts me.
Every time I progress in my career — a promotion, a win, a breakthrough — there’s a moment where I think: How much would this have meant to Sam if I could give this progress to him?
Not just thank him. Show him.
Show him that the crazy missions worked. Show him that the confusion led somewhere. Show him that the seed he planted grew into something real.
But I can’t. That door closed in 2010.
The Twist:
But you know what? He wouldn’t have expected it.
For Sam, mentorship wasn’t about receiving gratitude. He saw something in me and believed that if he invested in me, I would go on to mentor others.
The dot connects: I can’t give my progress to Sam. But I can give it forward — to the people I mentor now.
And I guess I’ve done that. In all these years. And I’ll continue to do it.
That’s how I repay a debt I can never repay directly.
Remember in Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark records that message for his daughter before the final battle? He knows he might not come back. But he’s at peace — because he knows the legacy continues. Morgan will carry it. Peter will carry it. The next generation inherits what he built.
Sam didn’t get to see my message. But I’m recording it anyway — through the people I mentor. 🛸
📌 The Dot: The Gandhi in My Head
There’s a scene in Lage Raho Munna Bhai that explains this better than I can.
Murli Prasad Sharma — a lovable goon — spends five days in a library reading about Gandhi. And then something strange happens.
Gandhi starts appearing to him.
Not as a ghost. As a hallucination. A conscience keeper. A guide who shows up in moments of decision and whispers: “What would I do?”
Oogway left. Shifu carries. The Five inherit. The cycle continues.
The Field Reality:
Sam is my Gandhi.
He’s no longer here. But he shows up.
⚡ In my decisions
⚡ In my strategies
⚡ In my instincts
⚡ In the way I read people
⚡ In the way I deliberately confuse my own team to force their growth
I don’t copy him. I don’t clone him. But his influence runs deep in everything I do.
The dot: Nooyi says about Roger — “we understood each other.” I understood Sam only after he was gone. But now he lives in my head. And that understanding guides me daily.
The Twist:
Here’s the part that will confuse you. Stay with me. 🎯
In the same movie, there’s an antagonist — Lucky Singh. A villain. A bad guy.
By the end of the film, he also ends up in that same library. He immerses himself in Gandhi’s writings. And guess what?
Gandhi appears to him too.
The hero and the villain both get the imprint.
The dot connects: Gandhi doesn’t discriminate. Whoever immerses, transforms. The philosophy doesn’t care if you’re the protagonist or the antagonist — it infects whoever is willing to absorb it. 🔥
📌 The Dot: The Slow Poison Spreads
Now let me bring this home.
My team members and leads — past, present, and future — they never met Sam.
⚡ Noordeen never met Sam
⚡ Aravindhan never met Sam
⚡ Santhosh never met Sam
⚡ Akshaya never met Sam
⚡ The leads and team members who worked with me before Kissflow — they never met Sam
⚡ The ones who will work with me in the future — they will never meet Sam
But they all carry him. 🧬
The Field Reality:
Slowly, slowly. Softly, softly. Like a slow poison.
Through me.
Through the culture we’ve built. Through the rough seas I drop them into. Through the puzzles I refuse to solve for them. Through the confusion I engineer on purpose. Through the opposite strategies I give for similar situations — just like Sam did to me.
They don’t know they’re absorbing Sam’s philosophy. But they are.
And when they go on their own adventures — to other teams, other companies, other roles — they’ll pass it on further. To people who will never know Sam existed.
The Twist:
That’s the legacy of a confusing mentor.
You don’t understand them while they’re here. You resent the chaos. You question the madness. You wonder why they can’t just give you a straight answer.
But years later — sometimes decades later — you realize:
They weren’t confusing you. They were building you.
And now it’s your turn to confuse someone else.
Remember how the Avengers Initiative started? Fury had a vision no one else could see. The World Security Council thought he was reckless. Even Coulson had doubts. But Fury kept planting seeds — in Stark, in Rogers, in Romanoff — knowing that one day, those seeds would save the world.
Sam was my Fury. I didn’t understand his methods. I questioned his madness. But he kept planting seeds in me — knowing that one day, I would plant them in others.
The dots connect:
Fury → Avengers → Next Generation.
Sam → Me → My Team → Their Teams → Infinity. 🛸
🎯 The Debrief
⚡ The mentor who confused you most shaped you most
⚡ Dots connect backwards, never forward — accept this
⚡ The guilt of unsaid thanks becomes fuel for paying it forward
⚡ Legacy doesn’t need the source to survive — it travels through carriers
⚡ Your job now: be someone else’s confusing mentor
⚡ Slow poison spreads across people, generations, and destinations
Sam Prasad left this world in 2010. But his philosophy spreads — slowly, slowly, softly, softly — through people who never knew his name.
I couldn’t give my progress to Sam. So I give it forward. That’s the only receipt he would have accepted anyway.
Class dismissed. ✊
