Thank you @jetison yes found that I had a mistake in the flow as I was chaining multiple requests (8) requests based on the response of prev request), figured the problem. Your snippet helped in revisiting each line in my scripts again.
Sigh! working with these counters and variables together is damn messy, hence now after making setNextRequest work, I find sendRequest is much more readable 
Not sure if the sessions will bring any relief in this regard.