Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded

A nostalgic, big-hearted memoir of a Hyderabad colony in the 80s–90s—and the unwritten code of community that became a foundation for a life of software engineering and leadership.

Hyderabad Days is a tender, humorous, and deeply nostalgic memoir of childhood in 1980s–90s middle-class India, told through the eyes of a boy growing up in a Panjagutta colony. With vivid storytelling and a cast of unforgettable characters — from cricketing legends of the lane to sari-clad sisters who led in silence — this collection of slice-of-life chapters paints a world of shared TVs, Gold Spot bottles, kirana-store diplomacy, and friendships that defied caste, class, and religion.

But this is more than just a return to dusty lanes and colony cricket. It is also the story of how those chaotic, joy-soaked years forged the instincts of an engineer and, later, the perspective of a leader. The resourcefulness of stretching ten rupees for a cricket ball became the foundation for innovation. The diplomacy of settling gully cricket disputes became a lesson in mediation. The solidarity of colony life became the bedrock of resilience and humanity that guided a career spanning global teams and glass-walled conference rooms.

Written by a senior technology executive looking back on the roots that shaped both his childhood and his leadership, Hyderabad Days is a heartfelt tribute to a way of life that has all but vanished — a time when childhood was local, laughter was communal, and every setback or success carried the quiet lessons of character.

For fans of: R.K. Narayan, Ruskin Bond, Sudha Murty — and, in its own way, The Soul of a New Machine — blending nostalgia with the blueprint of how engineers and leaders are made.

Ravi Vedula is a lifelong engineer, storyteller at heart, and a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where he has spent over 25 years building systems, services, and data platforms that quietly power the modern world. But long before the meetings, the metrics, and the cloud infrastructure, Ravi was a barefoot boy chasing cricket balls down the dusty lanes of Panjagutta, Hyderabad. 
 
Raised in a middle-class colony brimming with flavor, noise, and unlikely friendships, Ravi’s earliest lessons came not from textbooks, but from paan-stained walls, shared festival sweets, and late-night chats under flickering streetlamps. These experience of inclusion, innocence, mischief, and memory form the heart of Hyderabad Days, his deeply personal debut. 
 
Ravi, a heart-transplant survivor, now lives in Seattle with his wife, navigating a different kind of weather but still holding close the rhythms of the monsoon, the echoes of colony loudspeakers, and the wisdom of elders who never needed PowerPoint to be heard. When he's not solving complex engineering problems, he loves to travel, reflect, and chase stories that connect the past to the present. 
 
This book is a return home—for him, and perhaps for anyone who remembers a simpler world that shaped who they became.