Remembering Shashank Dubey AKA Delhi Gateway

On Wednesday, I received extremely sad news of the passing away of my good friend Shashank Dubey. We worked together in my previous job at Spectra (AS10029) and had both good and bad times as we navigated various challenges. Shashank was part of the NOC team when I joined the Network Planning & Ops team. We would often chat about networking whenever I worked out of Spectra’s Delhi office. This was my first job of working on JunOS, and I remember how I used to be afraid of changes and Shashank would chill out as we would go around making bulk changes. He used to work so much on one of the core routers in Delhi (Delhi gateway) that’s why we used to call him “Delhi Gateway”.

Later, I left for Hurricane Electric, and Shashank stayed for a few more years and left for Extreme IX. We used to have long calls in the evening once in a few months, and also tried meeting once in a while. He told me a few times that he wanted to start an ISP back at home but eventually gave up due to market conditions as Airtel/Jio were selling super cheap FTTH and it didn’t made any financial sense for him to enter the market at that stage. Earlier this year, after spending some time at Extreme IX and some consulting, he joined Spectra. Last month he wanted to talk, but I was busy and thought to had a call after returning to India from APNIC 60. I missed calling him back and lost the opportunity to ever speak to him. 😟

Will always be in my thoughts as a good friend. Om Shanti.