vblog series: meet ritesh

Here's Ritesh... as you can tell from this video, Ritesh is the comedian of the group.  He is just hilarious and likes to say blatantly false things with a straight face, making you question whether he's telling the truth or not.  Usually not.  I quickly decided making stuff up is his default.  Ritesh and Stephan hit it off pretty thoroughly, meaning that the two of them were a mountain of (thoroughly comedic) trouble.   He's also a really nice guy who talked about his beautiful wife of 1 year daily.  He shared some lovely photos of their 4-day (yes, FOUR DAY) wedding, with both of them wearing incredibly ornate traditional costumes.  While we were there, he carefully planned a lovely week with his wife in the UAE after our project ended and got more and more excited over the month for her to arrive. 

I didn't get to spend a ton of time with Ritesh since he was on the *other* project team.  Nonetheless, I was really touched one night when I was running upstairs to get my laptop back from a teammate and found him in our hotel meeting room, pacing around the table at 10:30pm.  When I asked him what in the world he was doing, he shared that he was getting ready to help Kana prepare for a presentation to their client the next day.  He told me he wanted her to feel confident since she had written in her profile before arriving that she was nervous because she had never presented to a client before.  Then he asked if I would like to join.  How in the world could I say no to that??  So, Ritesh, me, Stephan, Kana and Karen stayed up until midnight helping her practice the client presentation.  It was really inspiring to be a part of it. 

Namaste, Ritesh...