Infosys pro goes missing in Sydney after flash tide

A shaken Infosys Technologies refuses to give up: “He is still on the missing list. We have to wait and see,” a senior Infosys official at the firm’s Hyderabad office told The Indian Express.

Everyone, from Tarafder’s colleagues in Hyderabad, to Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, is grappling with how Infosys’ first real brush with a crisis of this nature could have come to pass, an official with the firm said.

Another official at the Hyderabad office said, “We are extremely concerned about what happened. We are approaching it very sensitively and cautiously. Everyone up to the CEO knows about this incident and we and our Kolkata office are in constant touch with Tarafder’s family.”

The Indian High Commission has made no comment, saying the “boy is still officially missing.” The Australian High Commission here said privacy laws did not permit it to comment on such incidents.

Tarafder was sent to Melbourne in October last year on a client servicing assignment by Infosys. At the end of March this year, he travelled to Sydney for the Easter break, where he stayed with his childhood friend from Kolkata Erka Basu and two other Indian friends.

On March 27, according to sources, Tarafder and his three friends, all in their 20s, decided to spend the day at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. About an hour after the four got into the water, Bondi was churned by a freak oceanic phenomenon called a flash rip tide, which produced massive undertow, dragging the four Indians and eight others within seconds almost 60 metres into the Pacific.

A few hours later, 11 of them were brought to shore, coughing and spluttering. It has been two weeks now, but Manish Tarafder has not shown up.