Dear Arvind, it is a great pleasure to write a few words on this  occasion of your birthday and the Dataflow to Synthesis  Retrospective! We met first at the unforgettable Workshop on  Reduction Machines in Ustica, organized by Corrado Bohm and sponsored  by Silvio Berlusconi. As Ronan Sleep phrased it, the conference was a  'serendipity thing'.
For me meeting you and your family was indeed a serendipity thing,  both for friendship and for work. As to friendship, we maintained  ever after contact, and I hope this will continue forever. As to  work, I owe a lot to our contact then and later and the stimulus you  gave to work on rewriting systems, making their relevance for  practice manifest to me for the first time really. The two pictures  included here are almost self-explaining, but not quite. The one  where you are swimming in the red swimming garment, has a story to  it. One day at our serendipity week, we all made a tour around the  island in a motorized fisherman's boat with powerful engines.  Sometimes we stopped for a swim into one of the grotto's, the grotto  verde, azuro and others. Their names (blue, green, golden) referred  to the color of the water in front due to shape of the grotto and the  angle of the sunlight. When we went further to the next grotto, the  captain mistakenly thought that everybody was aboard, started the  engines and
accelerated the boat. But Arvind was still swimming towards the boat,  see picture. Suddenly there was a dangerous moment, maybe due to  stress, or exhaustion from the hurry, and I heard, standing at his  side of the boat, Arvind shouting in alarm: '"Stop! Help! I'm not  going to make it!" I warned the captain who stopped the boat, and  remained alert while watching Arvind swim the remaining distance, but  poised to jump back in the water for assistance. But Arvind made it  alone, and came with a helping hand safely aboard. The rest is history.

Arvind, Gita, have a nice day!

Jan Willem, Marianne