Life at SP

Plain way to travel

2006-01-25T03:38:00.000-08:00

So, I landed in Bangalore yesterday and to my chagrin the bloody weather was almost the same as that of Mumbai +- a degree here and there. I however reconciled with the fact since I was not here for the weather but to see my dear family (yeah right). Stepping out of the aircraft I couldn’t help thinking yet again of what I always no in an airport and the one thing that still amazes me till today - the concept of flying. I mean what were the Wright brothers thinking to have been able to conceive this amazing invention? Beats me, but then so do all the other things – who invented corn flakes, why do only the same species get attracted to each other (at least in most cases, so all those who’ve watched pink movies please ignore), or for that matter of fact why is “what” in the English dictionary mean what it does and not “who”? I mean now a simple statement like “What are you doing there?” might seem quite mundane. But then what if all the “What” were actually “Who”. Now that would not only be something to think about but also a tad revealing for quite a few of us. Anyways not to drift away from what I was actually talking about earlier – flying.

With the number of airlines that have made inroads (fly paths) in India, air travel has become so much more affordable. There however still exist some segmentation here and being a marketing student I consider it an obligation to meander away a little again. There exist the following categories of flyers nowadays

The shifters - These guys typically were the early 1990’s second class sleeper travellers who later migrated onto the third AC sleepers towards the end of that decade. They are now content with travelling in the Spicejet’s and the Air Deccan kinds and it is not surprising to see them carrying their Tiffins and water bottles in jute handbags or Potli’s and ravenously devouring the entire thing before takeoff. There are of course the occasional students (the poor dears) who can’t afford more elaborate means of travel (For contributions please send me an email)
The users - These are government officials or the people who get tickets on easy fare. The LTA availing civil servant and his family in tow to another holiday in the past 3 months block an entire row of seats on the craft. Adjacent to them are the miserly wealthy people who have searched all over the internet and exhausted their phone bills in calling up all their travel agents to select the best price for the ticket, and have finally procured one of the throw away tickets from somewhere. Indian Airlines is a very realistic fit into this category
The maintainers - The businessman and the executive who wouldn’t be caught dead in any other flight and the middle class fellow who in an emergency couldn’t get any other flight all end up on flights such as that of Jet Airways. The foods good, the service is excellent and the flights are never delayed. Although I do suspect that the male attendants are a little too metro sexual for their own good. “Why, of course sir”, “I don’t see why not”, “It would hardly be of any problem sir”. All these statements harmless as they seem, when enunciated in a pansy accent can make quite a few of the hair on the back of your neck stand.
The cult - The King of good times and hence for all the people who rock.

These airlines by the way are also not in ascending order of the “quality” of the air-hostesses they house. (My apologies to all the fairer sex who took offence to that line and now brandish me as an MCP for referring to them as objects. To placate them I’m just clarifying that when I say air-hostesses I also mean stewards). But talking about air-hostesses (yes, yes and stewards), I do feel that their “quality” is inversely proportional to the age of the airline. Whoever said as good as old wine, pretty much wanted that phrase to remain only for the spirits and not for extrapolating it to something as fine as women.

Obviously since Microsoft had pitched in for the tickets I could now travel and rather gleefully may I add in Jet Airways (I have travelled in these before but to lend credulity to the premise of this article of Jet being the business people’s airlines, I need to talk of this with enthusiasm), which in turn meant that I needn’t carry my food and a small water bottle for the flight. But on the flip side this also meant that my 9 year old backpack wouldn’t do. After a quick wash, my poor dilapidated bag was looking as good as new and after stuffing it till the brim with clothes (so that the creases of the bag were hidden) I was now in tune with being a Jet traveller. At the airport, giving scornful looks to the small peddlers travelling in the cheap airlines, I was now in queue for getting onto the plane where I would be inundated statements such as “Sir, cold tower for you?”, “Sir, some sweets?”, “Sir, would you like a massage?” etc. Ok, so I made the last one up, but wouldn’t it be great if they did actually offer that on flight and while they are at it why not Malaysian massages?

The flight was fairly uneventful (and thank god for that), except for the kid who kept screaming, but only briefly. Now see, this is where I appreciate airlines like Jet which house enough candies to stuff down a crying kid’s face, unlike other planes where the pests keep jumping up and down like wailing banshees and thus understandably scare the shit out of the other passengers as well. Over the last couple of years I have been avoiding one thing when I fly and that is to check in baggage. I think that is the single most irritating thing of the entire flying process. I mean out of 100 travellers, 90 don’t mind checking in 1 hour earlier, 70 don’t mind if they get the centre seat, 50 don’t mind no good looking air-hostesses (obviously these 50 have no male in them) and 30 don’t mind if they get poor service. But waiting for baggage at the conveyor belt line, now that’s frustrating. You can clearly make out the people who have checked in the baggage from those who haven’t. The former have beads of sweat on their foreheads within the AC confines of the plane, wondering if their baggage will reach the same destination, would it have the lock on place, would it picked by someone else before they get there etc. At the conveyor a dash is made for the starting of the line where people with trolleys hang with bated breath for the baggages to start rolling in. The tension can be cut with a knife with all of the poor blokes trying to maintain a calm demeanour while all their apprehensions are eating them up inside. And finally the first bag rolls onto the belt and one lucky man is the owner of that. The claimer breaks into a smile and you can see the others watching him with a mix of envy and admiration. He has just won the lottery, and “sir for your prize, your luggage will be the first to be rolled out”. Elated, he can hardly hold back the tears as he hauls the heavy suitcase out of the queue. Luggage by luggage, people get their worst fears to rest and they move out of the line. But have you noticed how Murphy managed to make its way into the context of airports as well – I mean how many times has the only bombshell on the plane sat next to you during a flight? How many times have you got a window seat not overlooking the bloody wing? And how many times have you been that lucky bastard to get your luggage first on the belt? It’s always at the end, isn’t it? The bloody bags take eternity to come out and just when you feel that you’re going to suffer a stroke from all the anticipation, they show their ugly mugs and smirk at you as if they were avoiding you on purpose.

The trip ended, you have reached your destination, you’re safe, your bags are safe and all’s well that ends well. Just one thought still remains in my mind - how much ever I crib about the perils of flying, two things are for sure – one, train travel now sucks and two, I still can’t imagine what those Wright brothers were thinking.

PP"oh"

2006-01-03T05:40:00.000-08:00

‘This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last’ – Oscar Wilde. They got the vowels wrong - It’s not ‘I’ or ‘O’. It could have been ‘A’ for Agony, ‘E’ for entropy or ‘U’ for Ulcer. That’s what should ideally follow the PP in the words PPO or PPI. Two months gone by in the autumn project. The one thing SP rests heavily on for getting its junta out and able to work is this hallowed bi-monthly period. These are the statistics so far (PLACOM please forgive me in case I’m not up to date) – 6 people confirmed with 5 in the middle of interview proceedings and the rest have either rejected their offers as they believe that their dream companies will consider THEM as their dream candidates. The grass on the other side is indeed greener (pun intended for the colour of money). That is, at least till you come back to campus and realise that it was autumn’s in the true sense of the world and the greenery (like that of the leaves) has paled by the end of this period.
But what’s wrong with a little ambition, a little hope? Everyone comes here with the intention of getting the big bucks money don’t they? True, but there’s no end to the expectations held by everyone. The economy’s booming – increase the pay by 1 Lac, your company rolled out a tremendous oversubscribed IPO – give me 2 Lacs more, I saw the CEO shopping at SPAR the other day – I want HIS bloody salary. Although salary is the overwhelming factor to why people want certain companies it becomes an inherent art to clarify their stance on worshipping these companies as they offer “amazing roles” or since the management growth paths are totally in line with “my career goals”. Utter hogwash – not one person who walks out after being brainwashed for two years has any clue about what his career goals are.
What beats the entire thing is that before the internship he thinks that he has got it all figured out; but there is definitive pattern to this anomaly. Let me offer an illustration with that of an IT guy – (since every third person in a top ten b-schools is from Infosys, so this makes for an apt example. Obviously my intention here is to talk about the rigorous recruitment criteria of the behemoth where it houses brains which crack into the premier leagues of management institutions). Anyway the protagonist typically starts off with announcing to one and all that care to listen that he is only considering consulting or BDM (Business Development Manager) roles. Any self-respecting company which considers him for anything below that ought to be dissected mercilessly at Dalal Street and thrown to the stock market dogs.
Of course there’s an overhauling of his career plan done daily. He focuses on the vertical he is “passionate” to work in. This will more often than not be some sort of fallout from his prior work experience. Otherwise all he has to do is understand the kind of sectors that are featured mostly in the news. Our man then goes about his promulgations as if they were part of his daily ablutions. “Dude, the banking sector looks hot man. As a future consultant, I see immense opportunities for technology here.” The next day he’s back after browsing Rediff for 15 minutes with “Man, my experience in the manufacturing vertical makes me to believe that as a business development professional I can really make a mark in this exponentially growing area”. This goes on for a while and before you can say “MBA rulez”, our poor bloke is flustered beyond repair about the meaning of his worthless existence and he is then mostly christened a saint or some sort of baba. (Please note fellow SP jainers, this is no indication towards our very own baba)
Placement time comes along and then the omnipresent bandwagon theorem takes over, where you now see the tech savvy, IT passionate B-scholar applying to all and sundry companies “to expand his horizon” or as it would “help him leverage this experience later on”. So, off he gets packed off to an HLL, ITC or an ICICI, Citibank etc. Back after frolicking around totally unrelated fields our hero is now still as confused only this time with a broader circumlocutory mystification in his head. His dreams vanquished, he is still stuck up on the big bucks and gets his feet firmly placed for the (as he hopes) inevitable PPO or pre placement offer. This is where it all goes wrong.
The HR people who had nursed and pampered you while you were elusively passing the two months in their organization suddenly turn hostile. The starting point in most cases is the interview or the PPI. It’s back to basics for you with regard to answering the most baseless and useless questions describing in intimate detail your goals, your feelings, your bloody anatomy and god knows what not. After some more senseless interrogation by a couple of other blokes you’re so rushed you’re made to believe that in case selected you would need to start working from tomorrow come hell or high water. So it does come as a surprise when three weeks after the PPI you are still sitting at the edge of your seat awaiting some sort of response from the company. Not for the love for the same, but more for the mental peace of having this entire placement trauma done with. Getting back to what I started with, this suspense is indeed terrible and at the end of the day it may lead to failure or glory. So for all those who need to move past this milestone whether elated or with a heavy heart, do so judiciously and do so with hope and trust in what the future holds for you. What one needs to realize is that all this is short lived and that there are opportunities galore, ones that will catapult you far beyond your expectations. So rest back and let life take over where there is constant flux and a constant state of suspense. With this very thought I conclude with the words of Mary McCarthy who said – ‘We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story’

A Spanish curse - El Aichi?

2005-11-20T04:13:00.000-08:00

I know I haven’t been blogging for quite some time. I have received my fair share of flak from all the readers of the blog for the same. Both of them were unhappy with me not having written anything for over a month now. As I recently read in Dilbert I could have made that number sound large by saying that the number of readers was between 1 and 2 billion and technically I would still be correct. So why am I here? What exactly is it that causes me to blog? What do I generally blog about? I’ll tell you what it is – when I come across something that is either so alluring or just so despicable so as to have some trace left of it in my memory cells (which I must say, is quite an achievement considering my academic track record), I get this impending turmoil in my head that can only be dispensed off by penning it, or in this case typing it.

So my precious dual benefactors, this blog is for you about something that I hold dear to my heart and as far away from my stomach. It was just another day at work (obviously you can guess that work has not been endearing enough for me to have written about it) and when a man sits down to eat at dusk after slogging the entire day he expects a good hearty meal from his wife or mother or as in my case the anna (brother) at the mess. How good or hearty the meal was, is another point of contention but nevertheless I was hungry and I could eat anything that could make even a golliwog puke. So here I was stuffing down some – (tastier looking than it actually was) red gravy, (reminds you of what you ate last night) yellow dal, some (less white than a bears teeth) white rice and some bits of half cooked brown chapattis. While chewing a mouthful and summarizing the day’s events to the people who cared to listen, I bit into this humongous piece of – yes the one and only Elaichi

Now here is one condiment that has got me so enthralled by it’s acceptance in the modern world and atrociously wonderstruck at people’s taste buds in putting this no-do-gooder condiment in each and everyone of their dishes. I mean like seriously – chicken biryani, let’s put some Elaichi, palak paneer oo oooo let’s stuff it with big horrendous pieces of Elaichi which people can bite into and orgasm at its taste. Even kheer is not left out. Every time we had kheer being made at home and I would get the faintest hint of the dammed spice’s essence finding its poisonous way into the desert, it would be like slow motion. Me coming running from the bedroom towards the kitchen shouting “NOooooooooooooooo MOooooooooooooooommmmm….NOT THE ELAICHIIiiiiiiiiiiiii” and I would see these little drops edging their way from the stomach of the bottle tilted over the bowl till the rim and defying surface tension to give in to gravity and mix homogenously with my would be desert. I remember once pouncing from the couch of the living room onto the dining table and grasping the bowl of kheer from the evil grip of the Elaichi ridden hands of my mom’s.

People who consider these natural faeces wrapped in a green suit to add a distinct flavor to their food preparation have definitely got it right (These very people have also often been found using the phrase - “Elaichi rocks”). A distinct flavor it definitely adds, but one that brings with it vile and contemptuous shouts of protests from the opponents of the pro-Elaichi community. People garnishing their sweets with Elaichi essence I can still comprehend. But what beats me is that why someone would put in a rock solid piece of this revolting piece of “food” into each and every dish they prepare. Sometimes I get the feeling that these are just sadistic people who get their laughs by watching their guest eating their food very closely. And every time the poor fellow chews on a piece of this pesky seasoning, they smirk with the same intensity as the grimace of the guest who is now in the process of swallowing the small pesky little seedlings that have erupted from their skin.

I guess this seasoning has been so deeply engrained in the Indian cooking that it would take generations of mass brain-erasing, to not only get Indians to stop using these in their recipes but also to subsequently stop a whole bunch of people from eating it as well. In the meantime I don’t think I can ever get used to the taste. So that leaves with only two choices for when I feel a piece of Elaichi in my mouth – either to swallow it whole, or not give a damn about the ambience and just spit it out as far as I can. Somehow and as far as evidence from the other night goes, it’s always been the latter, and I don’t think it’s ever going to change.

"Major Hard" Work as "Micro Soft"

2005-11-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

I was on my way to Worli by Bus today ambivalently pondering about the early settlers at a town later called Bombay and now Mumbai. It’s got a lot to it’s credit, the financial capital, Bollywood, night life (at least for SP guys), friendly people (did I speak to soon?) etc. The reason I was also simultaneously cussing our poor naïve ancestors, who underestimated the Libido of Indian’s to give rise to 17 million inhabitants here (refer wikipedia.com), was the fact that three wholesome parallel roads running from north to south are totally inept at maintaining a comfortable journey. The solution is the dilapidated local railways, on which I shall elaborate later. I was tapped on the shoulder by a friendly gentleman wondering why I looked so harassed and randomly asking people for where Centruy bazaar was. I explained that I was from Microsoft going to meet Kotak Securities, who work at this hallowed place. “Microsoft? Engineer Hoge?”. “Ummm..true, but I am an MBA from SP Jain doing my project there in Sales and Marketing”, I said in a tone which made me wonder whether it was inlaid by a pronounced sense of regret. “Oh Windows na?” he said rather enthusiastically. “Yes sir”, pat the reply with a little bit of pride. “So you sell windows to people?” ……and I forgot all about century bazaar.

Understandably for the benefit for my ego not to mention that of Vishnu, Surabhi and Madhusmita, I spent the better part of the next 20 minutes explaining our projects and how we are a little more qualified than Eureka Forbes sales people. The man thanking his stars as his stop approached graciously also told me where to go in return for letting him go. That was my ninth day into Microsoft and things are far from what I had expected them to be on August 17^th.

On October 5^th while others were packing their bags to go home, I was pressing F5 on Outlook for any news of my project details or location. Finally the news was out and the four of us were in Mumbai with very vague projects carefully worded to maintain the suspense even further. Basically we had no clue what they were talking about. D-day approaches and by October 10^th we have not been able to get through to anyone of the project managers, as they always seem to be traveling (which generally entails leaving the country or at the least the city). In fact that word is used so frequently nowadays that I was in the local the other day and some HDFC credit card person called up and I ended up using “Could you call me back, I’m traveling now”

After our unpleasant experiences with dealing with the HR (which we hoped was on account of MS being a newbie in the campus hiring scene and thus the processes were not in place. However this reasoning as Gan would say is a perfect example of CYA, so essentially MS for us till this point sucked) we reached Nariman point. In a way I’m glad that that’s where the office is….(fine fine, no more CYA. _|_ to you Gan). Ok, so the office is atrociously far and after getting (barely) into a Borivali fast we wondered why people go to Kerela for massages, but south Mumbai so rocks.

By the time we reached the office we evolved a motto of “Zero expectations”. So assiduously did we adhere to it, that the MS office located on the 8^th, 11^th and 12^th floors, giving a beautiful view of the southern peninsular tip of Mumbai impressed us beyond words. The cafeteria housing free drinks (relax Ankur, just soft drinks), cans, juices, biscuits (Achaa wala) and my personal favorite flavored milk proved to be a bonus. So, we were now on a roll. MS was beginning to look great after all. “Screw the orientation, what would we get for lunch?” – the one question lingered on in our minds. Buffet lunch, four non-veg dishes, followed by a pastry cart with coffee to wash it down? Rambling into the cafeteria at sharp 12:30 we were treated to two bearers holding out two Thalis each with our food neatly laid out. The dejeuner made mess food look royal and worse still we have to pay Rs. 20 per thali. Crestfallen we have decided to eat lunch around the office premises. Remember – south Mumbai rocks? We do get good FREE snacks in the evening as well as the weekly Friday buffet breakfast, however, I still squirm every time Arun comes back at night having spent only Rs. 8 on a sumptuous lunch buffet, or when Farhan recounts tales of his meals at Rs. 20…..per month. By the way not being able to eat anything this month, Farhan bhai has resolved to gaining at least 10 Kilos next month. While I’m talking about the company being a novice in handling interns (This is NOT a CYA) let me also elaborate on the fact that we have no access badges, no email id’s and no access to the intranet. Internet speed on the other hand is blazing (yeah, I know small pleasures in life). The good things about the projects are that they’re pretty interesting and we get to interact with the sales teams of one of the leading product companies of the world. So after all that hullabaloo I emphasized about before I guess the prime reason we are still thankful for being here is the fact that we get to be associated with the brand “Microsoft”.

At the same time however, I’ve heard this famous quote – “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare. But then some others contend that if this statement were true then why pray tell would Mr. Shakespeare sign off with his name?

GRrrrrrrrrrrrrr - Net down

2005-09-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

Today i discovered that our institute has blocked all downloads of upto 2Mb. While one may question as to what the hell is the need for such heavy downloads, i question the basic right of using the internet, a facility for which we pay good money. This net regulation falls in line with another one of the ridiculous policies, this hallowed place betows us with. Something as basic as a yahoo messenger is not being allowed to be downloaded and i call this plain and simple absurd.
I therefore recommend that we call our 13 (because it's a lucky number) representatives
and ask for a senate, where our honorary dean might consent on his presence
we can then systematically put down our case forward and ____ (beg/grovel/lick ass - fit in one) to have the net regulations removed. Of course it would not be totally considered. After the next faculty meeting it would be decided that according to their records 4 people were found to be downloading yahoo messenger (one among them being Veda) and so a suitable punishment must be dealt to these 4 "Participants" found to have commited this henious crime. It would be dealt out in the following manner
1. if he/she belongs to IM major it'sa straight F in any subject he was getting more than B in
2. Any other major, would get a grade down grade in all subjects. (and yes this is MULTIPLE subjects across majors and minors)

Net regulations of course now would be relaxed and we may now be allowed to download files of upto 2.0001 MB. Considering all 147 participants were standing in unison for this just cause, this achievement would then be conferred upon as an urban legend and remembered for time immemorial.

HAIL SP JAIN..

Anger Management

2005-09-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

I remember reading a quote somewhere down memory lane about anger. I thus logged onto my favourite search engine. Yes that’s right msn.search.com (from Microsoft) now since I believe Google is for the masses. Please note that this shift in preferences has nothing to do whatsoever with my getting an internship with Microsoft. I managed to get a translation of the quote we had imbibed in Sanskrit in the sixth standard. It’s from the scriptures of Buddha and translates to "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned." I think this is one of the biggest reasons I don’t keep anything to myself, and at times am considered very tactless and blunt. But my theory is, hey if you’re ugly, someone ought to tell you before you go and participate in Ms.

India

I have however been reminded recently of my tendency to be a little uptight and impulsive as far as talking to near and dear ones goes. It’s true as much as my calm and patient demeanour might tend to mislead people (Please refer picture – I mean can you actually imagine me flying off the handle??). But I have done this very often. I have done some research on this and luckily there are other idiots on the net who are jobless enough to document such aspects of their lives. The problem it seems arises when we take the people we love or are close to, for granted. Angries out (Man this author Lynne Namka has got some issues) claims that anger stems typically from a feeling of threat to something and a typical situation occurs as

Threatening Event---> Perceived Meaning---> Body Reaction---> Self Talk---> Feeling--> Anger Reaction-> Evaluation

Ok by now I’m guessing two types of people are still reading this - one, those wondering what the hell I am talking about and what’s with all this jargon. And the likely second, who feel that I’m responsible for 75% of the hate/anger crimes in this country. I appreciate your concerns but well, it’s not that bad at all. As my girlfriend can easily testify I have not beaten her up in quite a few days now. (Yeah, she bloody well testifies that). I decided to map some infamous event of my unappreciative ness towards someone, with the flow I discussed above. I have for the faint hearted reader chosen an event which elicits my anger towards creating an air of non-violence and non goriness. By the way just to dishevel any misconceptions about Chani and I, and to dash some people’s hopes who claim to see eye to eye (ICI2I), we both have never fought (so far) and I don’t think we’re capable of it either.

The event I was referring to was that of my credit card not getting terminated after a request and the lousy bast***s (bet you couldn’t guess this word) kept charging me for the renewal. Ah-ha, I’m sure I evoked some amount of sympathy moment I said charge and “not wanted”. I’ve outlined the following according to the framework

Well as you can imagine the threatening event in this case was my bank account in a deficit (it just takes 2K to do that).
The perceived meaning was me broke and having to survive on mess food.
The Body reaction was inordinate sweating, greasy palms and some motions. Once I had relieved the tension and was less horny enough I was engulfed with a feeling of doom
Self talk I did and a lot of it, since I didn’t realize that the customer service representative had cut the line 10 minutes back.
Feeling – wasn’t this the one that had led me to the body reaction in the first place.
My Anger Reaction was bellowing at the customer service representative and…ahhhh that’s why he cut the line
I did do a careful evaluation of the way I handled this situation and I think I could have definitely done a much better job by being a little more tactful. I mean there was no need to drag his family into it.

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret” - Ambrose Bierce. I was recalling the movie Anger management and thus logged onto Wikipedia to try and see what the curatives are. Apparently typical anger management "techniques" are the use of deep breathing and meditation as a mean to relaxation. There goes any hope of even trying to go ahead and try to fix this problem that was plaguing me. Deep breathing? Yeah right, you try that in Mumbai and guaranteed by evening you are dead by inhaling some bug or getting chocked on some plastic caught in your nostril. As far as meditation and relaxation, apparently these solutions weren’t recommended for people doing their MBA. There are no such things in the Webster’s dictionary for Management students.

So at square one in the end and my problem with anger remains the same, I do have to try and overcome it someway or the other. I strongly urge anyone who faces such impulse rash moods to embrace some anger management practices and aid me as well. Life’s too short to be angry at things, at people, at situations. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson who said - "For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness." Go ahead spread the joy.

The Private Eye - Van der Merwe

2005-09-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

This is not mine, just what someone forwarded, but it's awesome so i'm putting it here. :)

(With that low monotonous Detective voice)
I was sitting in my office when a case came in. So I finished two bottles from it.
I was tough, so tough I wore my clothes out from the inside.
Suddenly a tall blonde walked past my window. I knew she was tall because I was on the second floor.
The phone rang and I knew something was wrong. I didn't have a phone.
It was a girl and she was in trouble. I knew she was, 'cause she said so.
I raced down the stairs and called a cab. The cab stopped with a jerk.
Then the jerk got out and I got in.
We took the corner at hundred kilometres per hour, but a cop stopped
Us and told us to put the corner back.
We kept on the pavement, because there was a sign that said:"Keep Death Off Our Roads".
Then we were out of the city. I knew it, because we were not hitting so many pedestrians.
As we came to her house, she greeted me with a burning kiss.
Then she Took the cigarette out and kissed me again.
She pointed two thirty-eights at me. She also had a gun.
She had the most beautiful blonde hair I have ever seen - hanging from her left nostril.
She had teeth like the ten commandments - all broken.
She also had the most beautiful eyes - so beautiful that the one eye could not stop looking at the other one.
There was a man on the floor. He had stab wounds in his heart, bullet wounds in his head and his wrists were slashed.
He was dead.
I said: "Lady, if this man was alive, he sure would be ill".
So I took her for a drive to calm her nerves.
Suddenly a brick came flying through the window and hit her on the left breast - breaking three of my fingers.
We had a flat tyre, so I pumped and she pumped and I pumped.
Then we got out and fixed the flat tyre.
Then I took her home and as I was kissing her goodnight, her father opened the door and stepped on my back, almost breaking it.
As I was giving her a final good-night kiss, she closed her legs and broke my nose.
Now I am more careful on my assignments.

Love me do

2005-08-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

“I know that somewhere in the Universe exists my perfect soulmate -- but looking for her is much more difficult than just staying at home and ordering another pizza” - Alf Whit. I was never one to get bogged down with the matters of the heart, not that I was amorous as well, but still I never really thought about going around with some girl and then falling in love etc. I was young (barely 24) and knew that something would happen sometime at around 27-28. Enough time I should think. With these few preconceived notions I entered SP in June first week 2004.

By 27^th August 2004, exactly one year ago, I was a troubled man. The reason was an SMS I had got from Chani at 01:50 am in the night. It said –“Hey, I think I gave u the wrng defn of div yield ratio it is DPS/MPS ie div per share upon mkt price per share”. I know what you are thinking.

A) Say whaaa?

B) I can understand why some piece of jargon most probably received as spam at 2 in the night should get you irritated, but why the hell should it get someone troubled.

I still don’t know what that SMS means. But it did get me thinking about Chani. I remember lying down and thinking – “hmm hey what about Chani? She’s smart, funny, pretty, listens to the same music (a big factor in relationships nowadays) and pretty much hates what I couldn’t care less for e.g. BSB, Mark Anthony etc (see I told you music is what defines it).” (I was to come to know later that we both also liked Steve Martin, get scared of “the ring” and hate SRK.

One of my first few conversations with Chani Krishna in SP Jain over the much beloved IP Messenger

=====================================

Tue Jul 20 23:42:55 2004

-------------------------------------

Me: we found the damn place after such a long time..but the non-veg pizzas were really worth it..veg though sucked...and was no place to eat..so took the pizzas with coke purchased outside to barista and ate there :-)...was a good evening..u should have come!!

Chani: nobody invited me :((((((

Me: hmm i've become nobody now...wokay...i'm hurt :-(

Chani: excuse me...i dont remember u inviting me!!

Me: hullo.... at the table i said..u wanna come? u said no, nay, non or something to that extent!!

Chani: :O why wud i say no to pizza!!!!!! so what've u learnt today:im such a zombie that u shud always mention critical matters at least twice!! :)))) arre yaar main aadhe time neend mein hoti hoon to jab bhi main kisi imp cheez ke liye mana kar doon to give me the benefit of doubt Me: ok...point noted..so what u upto now? I came back 10 mins back...wasting time as usual!!

Chani: of course...birds of the same feather flock together.i've been killing time for the past half hour looking for one stupid song on the net!!

Me: name it and it shall be yours...then u will have 2 wishes left.use them wisely !!

Chani: ok,wish 1:"where have all the cowboys gone"-paula cole

wish 2:the brains to comprehend mktg and qm

wish 3:three more wishes :))))))

Me: This is just to announce that the position of the Genie is now open...people interested may apply now......hmm paula cole..give me some time!!!

Chani: ok,so all i have to do is rub the ip lamp....

Me: dunno..last i heard the gennie dissapeared after a client mentioned the words "QM"..he's nowhere to be found..but i'm sure the IP lamp should result in something or the other

Chani: IP lamp ghis ghis ke dilapidated ho gaya hai....ok ok no qm but at least hot and fresh 30 mins pizza to provide kar sakta tha genie... :((

Me: ya bloody useless genie...actually genie a little broke now...gotta go and sell my guitar or something (obv since no one will pay to hear me play it...hmm maybe to stop playing it)...but promise ek pizza udhar ruha!!

Chani: hey can i borrow ur guitar for a couple of days sometime,really feel like playing again.maybe i'll trade that pizza for guitar lessons....

Me: netime..we'll try to call a music club meet soon..let's generally jam someday!!

Well, what about her? 365 days ago I remember thinking this. I thought from 2 all the way till 6 in the morning. Got up at 6, went for a walk. Tried to think clearly but couldn’t. Lot of things swamped my mind and to tell you the truth I was just scared that I was falling for one of my best friends. They say Love is the answer to everything. Hell, I knew that. I just didn’t know the questions.

We had a test on 27^th (the one Chani was helping me for the previous day and hence the ostensibly jarred SMS from her). Needless to say I fared miserably. Later I took into confidence my friend Issac and blurted out what was transpiring through my head (considering the amount of vacuum in there this talk took some time). Isy was happy for me but was inept at handling such situations. (He was to later become one of the most responsible and mature individuals I was to see during the placements). Together we both peeked into the other division and solicited the help of our Guru, Rajesh or RB as we call him.

The trio met outside the Institute and weighed out the pros and cons of the situation. The only con being that I was in the danger of loosing a friend if I were to ask out Chani. (The Pros are too large in number to fit here). After 30 minutes, the meeting was adjourned and the verdict was that I was to ask her out that day. I obliged and humbly went on my mission. Was it just my imagination or had Chani suddenly become the most popular girl in college. From 12 noon till 7 in the evening, I did not get an opportune time to ask her out. Alright who am I kidding…I was just chicken.

That night we were having our customary talk over IP and for some reason I could not hold back. This resulted in this infamous asking out dialogue of mine.

=====================================

To: Chani[pgp-04-032] (Ullus@5am/PGP-04-032/172.16.4.32)

at Fri Aug 27 23:55:51 2004 (RSA)

-------------------------------------

uhhh lissen...

totally unrelated and to give u more tension on your already "plain vanilla" life now...

i wanted to ask you today but could not get the right moment.....

would you like to go out with me sometime?

(u know u did get promoted to no:1 long time back)

I know I know…very, very lame. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Anyways all well that doesn’t have me writing here about how I got rejected last year. Although we had our first date on 1^st September, this was the day that marked the beginning of our relationship. Now one year down the line, I’m a little preoccupied with my ambivalent thoughts.

With the good comes the bad. Well first the good. This has been the best year of my life, with going for movies, hanging out and cracking jokes, being on IP and talking the entire night (this has some elements of sadness as well, but rules are rules), staying as far away from the mess food as possible and enjoying each others company over dinner, sympathising with each others hill-driving sickness in the two months at Almora for DOCC and above all just being there for each other come rain or shine. Through the times I got the D’s and was begging the admin for grant of a retest, when I was upset with my performance over the trimesters, MBA pressure, placements etc. When the going gets tough, my Chani gets tougher. And I feel I pulled through this academically lowest point in my life all because of her. Without any biases she’s one of the smartest, dignified, mature and most wonderful human beings I have had the privilege of meeting in my life. And while it may astonish me to the degree I’m crazy about her, the dumbfounding thing is that she loves me as well.

Now for the bad – I read a quote somewhere which said “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by” Over the stupid deadlines at SP for assignment, tests, presentations etc one year of our lives zipped by so quickly that I now wonder is all of it was for real. I’m 25 years down. Considering average life expectancy of an Indian individual to be around 70 years, I have 45 years give or take a few. With every woosh I hear, with every night I say good night to her, I fear the loss of one more day from the bouquets of days I have left with her. It’s scary and I know this thought plagues the both of us, that someday one of us would be left without the other. I wish I could soothe these notions from both our minds but some things are inevitable and no amount of placating will stop destiny from taking control. I can however promise one thing. Every day, every minute we spend together, it would be as if there is no tomorrow, it would be such that we don’t regret any moment spent and every instance shared. I don’t think I have ever felt this way about anyone before and I don’t think I ever will. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I want to live every moment with her.

Going back to the quote with which I started, I feel I’m truly one lucky bast***. I just got one thing to say to Mr. Alf Whit –“I got my perfect soulmate AND just yesterday I stayed at home and ordered a pizza”

The idiot’s box

2005-08-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

I’m sure everyone living in hostels reminisces the time they spend at home. The good food, the lovely bed, and the comfort of home…ah…it is indeed blissful. Coupled with this however are deadlines (when are you getting back home), the post-two day syndrome (Please make the bed and put the clothes properly) and the back to home comfort levels (We’ll have fresh food at night, right now all we have are leftovers). Oh, come on, it’s not that bad. I’m just exaggerating here. Home, after all, is where the heart is.

I’ve just taken a break from the gruelling curriculum, not to mention the post-placement relief and been stretching at home for the last 4 days. Man, time sure flies by when you sleep during it don’t it? Well, that’s not all that I’ve been doing. Met some friends, drove a little, went and bought some vests (somehow the washing machines at the hostel are not very kind to them and I’m left with rather large gaping holes in all my undergarments) and the other 20 hours per day, been catching up on TV. There is so much crap nowadays on the idiot box, its enough to clog the drainage systems of the most sophisticated planned out city in the world. 81 channels with 34 showing Hindi dramas about how some guy in a blue shirt and pink tie is having a discussion on morals with some heavily make up ridden female who epitomises the exact opposite of the virtues she discusses. In 20 of these channels the woman in question is generally the same (or at least looks like) and makes you marvel at the concept of reusability of modules that is so prominent in the IT industry. Just take a dialogue in MS word, right click on three words, choose synonyms, and select any of the six that appear and bam you got it made for episode 345 in channel 23.

4 channels dedicated to sports (read cricket). Channel 1, whoa…the latest match between India and Pakistan. India has 1 run to draw in 12 balls. Last man, Ashish Nehra comes in and delicately swings his bat. Mid stump flies like there is no tomorrow. Pakistan wins by 1 run. Damn, that hurts. Channel 2, hmm…last years match between India and Pakistan. 1 run in 6 balls. All 6 balled and that one run remains elusive. This entails the dismissal of 3 of the Indian men as well. Oh well, life’s like that, shit happens. Channel 3, sigh…last world cup’s India vs. Pakistan. Ok, this is getting a little tiring. Last 3 balls, 6 runs. First ball and Kumble swings for a 4. 2 balls 2 runs. Two minutes pass and Pakistan walks off, winning by 2 runs. Channel 4, damn…the Sharjah cup. Dude, give me a break. I’m not running you through this one. It’s pretty evident what happened. What’s with this nation whose national sport is Hockey (we sure know how great they are in that don’t we?)? Why is every tom’s dick and Harry obsessed with this god forsaken game.

I might get branded for witchcraft for saying all this and get lynched in public, but the game does get on my nerves. 22 jobless guys on a field all day long, first hitting and then running behind one stupid ball. 5 even more jobless people actually talking about the prior 22 so called national heroes. And last but definitely the least the 1 billion odd blokes dumb enough to watch the 22 idiots and listen to the 5 jabber mouths and then correlate the two and come up with their own theories of what exactly is going wrong and what must be done to put the situation in our favour. However I believe this game definitely must be propagated in a place like India. Not because of any love not lost for cricket or for sympathy for my lethargic brothers of India. It’s because I propose a theory. Indians do two things. Either watch cricket or try and do their bit by contributing to the future working force of India. With the population crossing far over 1 billion, and the increasing scarcity of resources, the government needs to take stringent measures of increasing the penetration of cricket into at least 90% of the homes, with re-runs being shown at least for 23.8 hours a day. This will leave only the very quick and may I add the very premature to accomplish task number 2.

Movies of course are what define the Indian mindset. So we have an entire gamut of channels, starting with of course those catering to the first benchers with Mithunda being aired as a protagonist in some movie that looks like a cross between an Indian version of Rambo and a Mr. India remake. Then there are the regional channel movies, which though invigorating for the colloquial mortals, leaves me with very little choice. I mean apart from the post 12 movies on Sun TV on a Saturday night, there is very little I understand in these channels. The Hindi movie channels are just hilarious. “Close up blockbuster movie of the month – Jwalamukhi” only on Sony movie channel. Need I say more? You take the worst movie in its genre (that is if it can be classified into one, else by method of elimination it is the only one in its unique genre), slot it during an afternoon time so mundane that the entertainment starved middle class couple will rollover on their couches on a hot Sunday afternoon and try and catch glimpses to see why the movie has now been branded a blockbuster movie of the month. Even more intriguing for this fulfilled family is to ponder upon how they were sacrilegious enough to have missed the movie way back in 1973 when it was released. The only decent movie channels of yesteryear – HBO and star movies have now started presenting obscure movies released around two years back, which one was either too lazy or too repulsed from going to a theatre and splurge money to watch.

What I do like about the TV is the travel, discovery, Nat Geo channels. The programs airing on these have moved away from conventional TV programming and have started targeting the places which range from the bizarre to the unreachable. These give me insights on regions I will never visit due to either sheer ignorance, disinterest or the new evoked apathy to the customs of the place which not only make them seem strange but extraordinarily disgusting. I saw 30 minute episodes on how one can choose a live rat outside a restaurant in some village in China (sounding like a noise made by a falling kitchen utensil) and then have it served to you with choices of poached, grilled, smoked and deep fried. The only thing appetising in this is the ginger garlic sauce they serve it with. Another one of these channels was carrying a documentary on the delicacy of Indonesian being boiled half-born chicks, such that the eggs when pealed have a mixture of boiled chicken and the egg in tact.This episode almost made me a vegetarian. Thankfully my mother’s preparation of stir fried chicken in garlic sauce for dinner saved me from committing this horrendous crime and restored my faith in the religious pursuits of the tasty chicken. P.S – Vegetarians, I apologize for anything said above which may have caused you discomfort. In case you want to reach me, I would be available as either Hyderabad Biryani House or Raafi’s Kebab Paradise.

The king of all entertainment channels is undoubtedly AXN. Here the world’s most foolish people unite in the pursuit of their dreams, which vary from acquiring $50, 000 by eating a heard of live cockroaches to stuffing their faces with swords to up the record of the previous sword eater (who died of leaky kidneys by the way) for having their name written among 1 million other in a large red book which they themselves will never bother going through in their lives. Entertainment reaches new levels on this bizarre channel which evokes the dark side of all humans and restores the faith of people in Satan. Despite all the criticism it receives I again admire this channel for their flagship offerings of candid camera encounters of nude celebrities, spring break parties, boob jobs of famous and not so famous people and other related quality reality shows which stimulate the latent senses in the most sterile of beings.

Ah…the idiot box, how much it has evolved. Providing us with more than 80 excuses, 24 hours a day for stopping our daily activities, putting all chores on hold and making use of the expensive sofa sets we purchased in case of such eventualities. In conclusion all I can say about this marvellous invention that still fascinates mankind to this day is this quote from Alfred Hitchcock who rightly said - "Television has done much for psychiatry, by spreading information about it as well as contributing to the need for it."

A Place Me(a)nt to be

2005-08-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been over a month since I last blogged and it’s not since I had received a death threat from Suchi promising me dire consequences if I were to overshadow the previous article (obviously eulogising her) with another one of my concoctions. There were a host of reasons ranging from the entire gamut of assignments and presentations we had to cover up in the fag month of the trimester to me falling ill for over a fortnight with still no respite in sight. I suppose the biggest reason I strayed away from maintaining this online journal was the dreaded yet expectant ‘placement time’. Although these were just the internship placements, as any B-Schooler will confess, this is a period when lives come to a grinding halt, egos clash, people cry and hug each other, people laugh and hug each other, people congratulate and hug each other, people sympathise and hug each other…Err…so basically this is a time when people hug each other.

Placements, I was reminded time and time again was all about luck. So I’m a little unsure how to react when I get a theory on the evolution of the premise of this urban legend as foretold by Jean Cocturan - “We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?” There are hence two aspects to this as my friend Amitesh would say. The external perspective comes into light as soon as someone (read NOT you) bags the company and then there is a self-placating “Man, placements are just 90% luck” statement repeated iteratively every 10 seconds in your head. The internal perspective would be borne by you in case you are greeted by the company HR person with a spot offer in his hand (let us discount the fact that they also took 13 others for the same role). Now this would not have been possible sans your dedication, commitment, hard work, sound analytical reasoning and any of the other 14 adjectives commonly used to describe us before we join the hallowed B-schools. Mind you, luck had no hand in this, but for someone else who was vying the same spot you just became the luckiest a**h*** in history.

What happens in an interview? Well based on hearsay I believe one needs to sell himself. How do you go about doing this? If you go to a career counselor he will guide you on preparation for the most seemingly simple questions – What are your strengths and weaknesses, your one most difficult situation you have faced etc. However, if you are facing the B-school interview you will need to remember all the jargons starting from the moment you joined college, right from the words strategy, holistic, business model all the way to the vague terms coined by the likes of Kotler e.g. Prosumers (proactive consumers). Kotler incidentally I believe has a strategic tie up with Webster’s to supply them with one new term plus definition every month. So, you take all these terms like nukes, pretend you are US and bombard the shit out of the interviewer Saddam. But the single most important thing, I feel, for any interview, is confidence. It will get you anywhere, which also includes out of the interview, so try not to go overboard on this aspect. While we are talking about how to sell oneself during an interview, the best piece of advice comes from Jack Marshall who said “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”

Placement time is also filled with the biggest ironies of life. With questions weighing on minds about whether one is cut out for a particular industry, of how the brand is great but the role is not all that good etc, everyone wants to plunge head-in into the sea of companies, while at the same time wondering if he has enough air locked up in his lungs before he latches onto the company supplying the most attractive oxygen mask. It’s the same old thing - Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Be it for the good or for the bad, placements does change the way everything is looked at in a B-school. Suddenly you realize that this is the one moment you had joined the college in the first place, the 5%, 10% weightages tests become irrelevant, your ranking in class goes unnoticed, everyone is terrified of everyone else as they know that they want exactly what you want. Networking is what I believe is the biggest gain from a B-school, and I was a little apprehensive of how much networking I will actually retain after 147 of us are put in one big coliseum with instead of us being eaten alive by the predators, we fight amongst ourselves for the companies we’re preying upon. The winner survives. Boy was I wrong. Sometimes in life you need to step back. But step back too far and you aren’t fighting at all. People at SP sure know when to draw that line. The professionalism, camaraderie, encouragement, knowledge and even collusions (for the good) that transpired on our campus in this last one week over the course of all the group discussions, case studies, presentations and personal interviews, have truly and surely left me spell bound. It seems those much hated group works did work out after all. At the end of the day a lot of us got what we thought we wanted, some didn’t get what they want, some others got what they thought they didn’t want but on careful inspection are pleased with the results and finally some who just got what they didn’t want. Two months is a much shorter time than we fathom it to be. This is just the beginning. Lives will change, perspectives will change and inevitable so will the companies. I think anytime we face problems during the course of our lives always remember this quote by Weinberg – “If you can't see the bright side of life, polish the dull side.”

Such (i)s the one

2005-07-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

“BRA BRA”!!!! Not a soft sarcastic mutter, not a leg pulling phrase embedded in a sentence, but a horrendously loud noun from her vernacular which can in no way bolster the tenacity the young lady portrays. Yes that’s how Suchitra Ramesh refers to me, as we’ve adopted each other as siblings. To illustrate our conversations, what follows below is something we spoke about just last night (this has been retrieved from ipmsg.log, a log file for our IP messenger – the life line of SP).

Jul 11 00:07:21 2005
Suchi: I am sory bra bra....how can i apologize??? some lingerie for u???? lol lol! ok fine i wont be mean...u are damn sweet..honest,....i louuuuu you!!
Me: ahh much better..lingerie? u got those with the side pocket thingy..u know from where the little fireman can peak to pee....and i don't want itchy material…last thing i want is a rash there...what material do u wear?
Suchi: @$@$#@#.....oh goD!! u know think we were really meant to be siblings...u outdo even me sometimes

And despite what you see up there, it is still very difficult to outdo dear old sista (she is older to me hee hee). Her stupid characteristic sense of humor

Wed Sep 22 15:56:57 2004
Suchi: did u know that exactly 100 years ago on the day of 22nd september, 1904, a sturdy man was lost in the wilderness of bombay and eaten alive by 1027 red ants??
i cant find aniruddha....find him for me

Her amazing determination
Sun Aug 01 13:07:56 2004 (I sent her a url to a friend’s page of photographs from when he had been to Ladakh)
Me: one friend of mine who had been to ladkh
Suchi: whoa!! awesome....one lucky guy, ur frnd...why'd he go therE?
Me: generally..psycho, that too he went alone!!
Suchi: seriously amazing...like the butter making one...
Me: yep, we're planning DOCC in leh/ladakh!
Suchi: not if i get there first..:)

And seven months later she went there…came back with a broken foot but that’s a different story.

The exasperation in talking to her and explaining things to her
Fri Aug 20 19:47:34 2004
Me: hello Ms. R....do me a favor....u in college?
Suchi: tell me the favour first and the ROT and ROI!!
Me: u first tell me if ur in college, and then we'll haggle...:))......
Suchi: technically i am in college!

And to quote you from a mail you wrote to me and Chani on January 23, 2005 2:46 AM
Suchi: Plz don tell anyone about this because it will instantaneously tarnish my well constructed "meanie" façade

By the way, all those wanting to know what exactly she’s talking about in the mail, please send in Rs. 100 by tomorrow night either to me or Chani, cheques accepted. Getting back to the claim you made above Suchi, sorry to tell you this but that mean demeanour of yours is exactly what you said it is – a façade. You are one of the sweetest most genuine persons I have seen, and that façade of yours doesn’t fool anyone for a second.

My dear Sista, on this auspicious 12^th of July when you cross off one more mark on the walls of the prison of life, it really doesn’t matter than you are ageing, or that you’re the first one to find the bathroom wherever you go. What matters are the people you influence with the way you live your life, the way you can do no wrong, the way you can uphold no lie and not do things just for the sake of “fitting in”. I guess what matters most for me is the fact that despite the vast number of people who care for you and love you I get to be a significant part of your life. I’m grateful for that and hope that I always remain so.

In all jests and the ritual of ending off with some leg-pulling, dedicated to you Suchi this great quote by Patrick Moore - "At my age I do what Mark Twain did. I get my daily paper, look at the obituaries page and if I'm not there I carry on as usual."

Chani's Dedication (This is characteristic Suchi and what chani has done here is just replicate the latter's style)

This poem is for wonderful Suchi, an extremely special girl
A heart like hers is hard to find, just like a precious pearl
She’s smart and she’s beautiful; the kind that makes heads turn
And the way she writes is magical, she can make even Keats burn
She’s unforgettable even if met only once, she touches every soul
Her charm you just cannot resist, her passion you simply cannot control
She listens when you talk and even when you don’t and when you hurt, she cries
Her feelings are true, her words unfeigned, you can see it in her eyes
She laughs, she squeals, with mighty peals; she’s always so much fun
And when you look for signs of pain, it seems that there are none
But I know that my darling Suchi has had her share of tears
I know that she has fought with life, for all those smiles and cheers
If only, sweet Suchi, I could wish away all strife and get you the joy you deserve
I guess I don’t need to, for you possess perfection with that spirit and that verve
So on this day that you turn twenty five, I pray in the Almighty’s name
That you just continue being wonderful you, you always stay the same
And I on my part, undeservingly lucky, to be blessed with a friend like you
Promise that just as you are there for me, I’ll always be there for you too…
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUCHI, I LOUUUUU YOU!!

Crystal Clear

2005-06-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

I keep getting reports from my cousin on how her boy friend is one of a kind. He’s got the looks, comes from a rich family (drives around a lancer), is part of the cricket team, plays the leads of the guitar and is a “sweet” boy as apparently conceived by her mom. My cousin being quite pleasing to the eye (by popular opinion), obviously felt and was told by friends, family etc that they belonged together. Now I don’t know if it’s me or just the 14 months in a B-school talking but somehow I tend to get critical of any circumstance that fits into the book of perfection. And what made me even more irate was the fact that this couple was just in class 12^th, a stage of my life when I thought the guitar was what Shah Rukh Khan modelled in DDLJ and the only vehicle I drove around was a Vijay Super scooter.

So I made it a point to request her for this dude’s photo. Upon receiving the same, I let out a little guffaw as my hypothesis proved correct (within the confidence interval of 95% obviously). With all objectivity thrown in, the guy looked like a cross between Mr. Bean and Abhishek Bachchan. With due apologies to 2% of our population comprising of the fairer sex who think the latter is Adonis reborn, I’m sure that is one lethal combination in the department of looks. At the risk of sounding mean, the only saving grace was the Mr. Bean part of his face. The point of writing this is not to defame the young lad, but to get to what is vastly studied and practised in B-Schools - the idea of Perception (results aligned with the former are purely coincidental and unintentional)

Perception for something is formed keeping in mind the beliefs, value system and preconceived notions about the same. That made me wonder as to what it was that made this perfectly fallible man in the looks department according to me, to be touted as the next best thing to Tom Cruise back home. The most obvious answer to me was that my opinions of all things beautiful were obfuscated by 14 months of watching a lard-filled midget sized creature prancing around mercilessly flaunting its authority over one and all. Armed with what I now thought of the man, I started surmising of what he must be in actuality and for that I took down by a notch all the qualities/characteristics of his (as described by his proponents). My most precise description of the man give or take a few would now come down to him driving around a Reva, being the water boy in the school cricket team, knowing the C, D and G chords on the Guitar and most conceivably being a hormonally driven conniving young fellow.

After all the maligned articulation of the protagonist of the story above, I’m sure there must be something in him that my cousin saw, to eulogise him to all and sundry - if not one broad aspect maybe a mixture of a few. As Nilesh (our first trimester Economics professor would say) – “Accepted, Accepted”. So what I’m trying to say is that, what is a good thing for one person maybe a horrendous entity for the other. The same thing translates onto life as well, as Walter Ertson said – “Accept that some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue.”

All this is very similar to the perception of all the ancillary things we carry around all day. True they simplify life, but don’t carry around a look of helplessness when your cell-phone battery dies, when there is no Auto so that now you have to walk a mile, when it drizzles and you are not carrying around your umbrella, when a mosquito troubles you at night and the All Out’s run out. Try and remember the days not too long ago when people would eat dinner and talk to each other instead of talking to supplementary folks on their respective cells, when you would walk back home along with your mom carrying all the shopping bags from the nearest shopping center (which was 1 Km away), the exhilaration of running in the rain and feeling the lungs fill up with oxygen in those large gasps of air, and the smell of Odomos in the air when you would sleep outside on the porch when you visited your grandparents. The following quote by Chris Ruffle can aptly put in a sentence what I’m trying to say here – “Tell me what you need and I'll tell you how to get along without it.”

Shaken but not stirred

2005-06-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

This is a mail i sent to my batch mates a couple of days back. Just thought of posting it up.

Hey Guys,

Disclaimer: Before you begin reading, this is to warn you that these are entirely my notions and thus request you to please not lynch me for the views expressed.

This is dedicated to the brave men and women of S.P Jain who would want to pursue their careers in the IT sector, although others are more than welcome to read it and shudder in apprehension. During my little jaunt to Bangalore, I happened to meet a senior of ours working with IBM. Now our man has two years of work experience in a well known IT company before he came to S.P. The IBM offer letter had placed him in Bangalore with no designation specified. However upon joining and undergoing the training, the group (which has recently been formulated) he has been placed with has no clue what to do with MBAs. As a result he and 74 other MBAs are designated ‘Developer’ and for the next six months will be involved with coding, ultimately leading them to a project management role.

The man in question also had many stories to relate on how his batch mates are faring. Most of the IT people are warming the bench, with very few actually being hopeful of starting work on what was promised. One of them has been shifted to an HR role and there’s no telling what consultants do.

These are the grim realities what we will face once we’re out of here. Apart from the lucky few who start work on what’s promised to them, most of us are going to come crashing down. Forget about changing the world we don’t change the company or the department as a matter of fact. Shaken but not stirred? Allow me:

Selection procedure of Wipro (as got from a source in corporate human resources)

Mailer sent to departments asking for MBA requirements for the year
Consolidated number of MBA required this year
Targeted number is 10% more
Selection procedure common across B-Schools (IIM’s, SP, Symbi etc)
Selected candidates inducted
Randomly allotted to the departments with no heed to the specialization or the past experience (apparently recruitment should already have taken care of that)
So what we have is a guy offered Sales in the finance vertical getting a technical role in the energy sector.

While at the airport I met one more senior currently with HP. After my experiences I felt that HP had put him in charge of escorting guests from the airport to the hotels. But, apparently it is not all as bad as that. He’s in the financial vertical (don’t bother asking what they had offered him in campus), so he’s not so bad off. Earning 6.5 Lacs he told me quote-unquote “Yaar, it’s not that I’m frustrated, but it’s definitely nothing challenging. Very monotonous job and it gets to you after some time. But then I guess no job in IT is challenging enough, so am living with it”

The IBM senior needless to say now has 4 good offers on hand, most of them by a simple forwarding of his resume. So what the hell am I trying to do by telling you all this? A couple of points

· Take time off, go on leave, trek down to Juhu, whatever; just make sure of what you want to get into before you say yes to a company. Placom is doing an amazing job and when they ask ‘what’s your preference in terms of role, location, brand and pay’; the onus is on you to make sure of the same. You got to do this if you want to avoid getting back to coding

· Companies are notorious for shuffling around MBA’s primarily because as of now we are trained in general management, so unless you stress on what exactly it is that you want from the company, there’s no way you are going to get it.

· At least as far as I’m concerned even if you get what you want I guess it takes a year or two before you actually start doing some meaningful. So don’t get too disheartened if / when you do get something that you find uninteresting.

Has the MBA been absolutely useless then? Not really:

· Firstly, SP brand equity is enough to get us a job out there, now, one year later, whenever. So that is one good point of being from a top 10 B-School (at least according to recent rankings)

· Although initially the calamities being faced could be a little tragic, the acceleration later on is much faster than had you not been an MBA.

· MBA does broaden your horizons, not only in terms of jobs you want to pursue but also your understanding of the business aspect of the industry (this I got from a senior, personally I too gave him a quizzical look at this point)

· Some senior posts are open just for people with an MBA, so it will help later on in life

Ok after all that Gyan before you conclude that I’ve got it all figured out, let me reassure you that all this is much tougher than it sounds, and as a result I’m still at status quo i.e. a flustered MBA student biting his nails for a decent job. Two months and counting…I hope we all end up getting what we want….provided we know what it is.

Regards

Anurag.S

A boy named Hardicky

2005-05-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

This has long been overdue and although have been wanting to put it down for quite some time, never really got down to doing it, much to the anguish of the poor mortal in question I’m sure (since it’s the threat rather than the actual act that makes a person uneasy and for more details look up nuclear wars between India and Pakistan). I can already picture him pointing a finger at my frame at 20 degrees and yelling out something about a score he needs to settle.

A popular twenty first century spjainite with prior experience in oh this and oh dit, under the influence of one of her colleagues (currently having a movie playing on her name and also notorious for compiling naughty limericks) has this to say about a startling incident that took place in our midst last week

There was a boy named hardicky
Who had too many a hickey
I hope for his sake
That his manhood isn't fake
Else his girl must have a pricky

By now I’m sure you can decipher what it is that I’m trying to say. Romanceclass.com defines a hickey as “broken blood vessels beneath the skin sort of like a bruise, if you got hit with a baseball and the impact broke the blood vessels. But instead of being caused by a foul ball, it's caused by the other person's mouth”. The protagonist in question under the influence of a breezer or two was apparently overpowered and this severe form of social stigma was inflicted upon him, not once, not twice but all over the sides of the neck. The shy guy he is, running helter-skelter to try and obtain a polo neck sweat shirt in the sweltering month on May in Mumbai, did not bear any fruit. He thus resigned to the fact of having to bear the wrath of his ‘friends’, after all he had been where no man has gone before and lived (suicide did not cross his mind in this extremely embarrassing situation) to talk about it.

Now getting noticed in that fragile state of mind, not to mention neck, our pal was just unfortunate to get noticed by yours truly. As many of my colleagues will bear witness to the fact of me indeed knowing what a hickey looks like, it did not take long to see the slight shifts in colour along his neck. Now a normal friend would poke and tease the poor unfortunate soul in his state of misery (which I’m sure was preceded by a state of equal non-misery), but if a person who writes regular Blog entries was to get hold of such a scoop, I tell you, do you actually think that this moment shall pass any moment too soon.

As you can see from the description of my blog, “sticks and stones can break your bones but words on the internet can ruin you forever”. However at the same time I also quote some more interesting tit-bits from the informative website referred to above –
“Who gives a hickey, the Boy or the Girl?
That's like asking who kisses who! Hickeys aren't a male or female thing. They're an "I was here!" thing, sort of like a mark of pride. So either the girl or the guy can give it to each other. It's sort of a primitive way of saying "This boy is mine!" or "This girl belongs to me!"

So if the man (earlier a boy), has been declared as prohibited property and is not essentially bothered by the black (or red) marks left on him, I can only be too happy for him (as I’m sure are all the other girls he was pursuing). I’m sure in the last puja he attended he got not only the blessings but also the aarti. I like happy endings, and after seeing some footage of our man’s birthday video, I’m sure of a lot a love transpiring in that zone. God bless you dude and may you always be happy. As far as I’m concerned, I can only give my two pence advice to the poor little rich boy, by modifying the words of my illustrious friend talked about earlier.

There was a boy named hardicky
A car came along and put him in the dicky
A hickey on his side
Must surely hurt his pride
Well, as long as he at least got a quicky

Say VAT?

2005-05-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

Value Added Tax or Vastly Atrophied Time? Me thinks the latter. What do you do when you have a class from 9 in the morning continuously till 1 in the afternoon, followed by an equally vague test on what was taught and the subject in question being tax? What do you do Jack? What do you do?

Pretty elementary I should say, you do what any (still) sane person in the Batch of 2004-05 does. You open your laptop, execute all the messengers the nerds in Silicon Valley have conjured and then you party, praying constantly that the prof does not turn around and jam the button to the network shut. Tax planning starts and down goes the button. To quote a dialogue from fight club – “I am Jack’s painful throbbing ulcer.”

Why on earth would I want to know how and why the sales tax or vat is levied or as a matter of fact whom does it go to - the state or the central government? If you think these questions are too mundane to brood about, well you just hit the jackpot. I would think that everyone would be in favor of doing away with these taxes rather than to try and understand as to why exactly they are being imposed on us hapless souls. As I recall someone once said – “It would be nice if we could all pay our taxes with a smile, but normally cash is required.”

Ok so we had the test - 30 odd questions to be answered in 20 minutes. As luck would have it, it was an objective type. Now this is something I can relate to, these are no-brainer questions, unlike subjective tests where we end up writing the same crap preceded by a ‘hence’ or ‘therefore’ or eventually an ‘in conclusion’. But as luck would have it, and apparently I don’t (which is why luck and I don’t get along well), the questions I don’t definitely know the answer to and might go the ‘inkie pinkie ponky’ route, inevitable turn out to be incorrect for me. It’s uncanny - Murphy is rolling around in his grave giggling in delight at the practical demonstration of his theories.

To illustrate there was a question today that inquired as to where the Maharashtra VAT law was passed - the choices being State assembly, Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha. Now before I start rambling on the answer, let me please urge the reader to spend at least 5 seconds more on the question. It is the law of objectives.

You never go in for the obvious answer
When in doubt always go in for the middle choice, and in case the number of choices present are even, then depending upon the question number go in for the corresponding choice e.g. if there are 4 choices present in question number 28 and you are lost, it is but obvious to choose answer number 2 since it is even, whereas if this was the 29^th question, naturally you would have marked the answer as 3

Now contrary to this was founded another law which actually was borne as a corollary to this law and it is called the perverse law of objectives

You always go for the obvious answer.
You never choose the middle answer, but feel content with the extremes. Here we assume that no question ever has more than 3-4 options. Under blight circumstances it may occur that more than 4 choices are present, in which case one simply employs the ‘close eyes mark the checkbox’ routine (this will be elaborated on maybe in later articles). Choosing one of the two extreme options is done using the same experiences of Rule 2 of the law of objectives.

Now the problem arises when we have to make a call between the two infamous laws described above. What does poor old Jack do? This again cannot go wrong as the mechanism of choosing this too is a legend. In case the date of the test happens to be odd numbered you simply choose the first law and apply the rules thereof, whereas if the inauspicious day happens to be even numbered, you simply choose the perverse law of objectives. Well considering today was the 17^th I aptly choose the law of objectives.

By now everyone must have understood that the answer to the question was indeed the bloody state assembly and not, I repeat, not the Loksabha. So that was that for me, one more day down, one more question down, one more test down and with people going ‘say VAT???’ after the exam, I can only but remember Albert Einstein who exclaimed once – “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the Income Tax.”

Round 24 and still jabbing

2005-05-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

The bell rings “ting, ting, ting, ting” and marks the end of the 23^rd round. The two opponents retire to the ropes to rest for a while. On the right hand corner, wearing navy blue shorts and weighing in a puny 130 pounds, is yours truly. On the left hand corner, wearing a black robe, weighing off the scale and sucking the blood of his own cut wounds, is LIFE. That’s right folks the match of the century - Life versus me.

The end of the 23^rd round marked a significant stepping stone for me. Over this one eventful round, I toiled, struggled, learnt from my mistakes and if nothing else survived the grueling schedule of the fight. They say that you make plans and then life hits you. That is so true – he started off with a defensive strategy, but soon the evolved flank attack was cut off to a more direct approach and by this previous round, life was pretty much jabbing, punching, hooking, undercutting and throwing whatever it had at me. I would not say that he had me pinned under, but the fight had definitely become tougher, and would only become more so as the rounds increased and fatigue set in me.

But while life was getting all encompassing and powerful, I too was getting my spirits bolstered as every time I was knocked onto a knee or on my back, I would glance at the first few seats around the ring. Seated there amidst the hoarse booing of the audience was a faction who felt what I felt, whose eyes expressed my joy when I celebrated, the pain when I was down, the anxiety and anguish when the fight was getting evenly matched and the love that they held for me. My parents and my friends had cheered me on through the time the fight started and while some friends defected over to life’s side, at the risk of sounding clichéd, my parents had been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement.

Till the last round however there was this sense of emptiness that I had been experiencing, primarily borne out of the glaringly central empty seat at the box side of the ring. The 23^rd round had nonetheless started and I was going down but badly - cut and bleeding from the punishments inflicted on me by the maniacal life. That’s when the door to the entrance threw open and with the breath of fresh air, she entered and blew me away. Sitting by the ringside she started understanding me more, feeling what I felt and over the course of the fight, we grew closer together. I fell and she was there to cushion the fall, I retaliated to the concerted efforts of my worthy opponent and she cheered me on.

The break is over and the babe in the blue bikini takes a round of the ring flashing a placard claiming that the 24^th round is about to start. The referee’s back and so is my menacing opponent, baring his teeth and growling. Oh man, this is getting tiring. So I look over to my left, see the same familiar encouraging smile I love so much. That’s all I need to leap into the fray with my sprained foot and the recently contacted Diarrhea, enamored by the smile that works better than a concoction of glucose, Electral and the strongest analgesic one can conjure.

Another round, another year, more jabbing and giving and receiving of punches, going through the ups and downs of my battle with life – all taken in stride as long as I have my Chani (She’s not Czechoslovakian, just has a weird name). She is my strength, my friend, my soul mate and although I know that life would be impossible to beat after some round or the other, I wish and hope and pray that she be there sitting at the ringside still supporting and cheering me on.

A foot in time

2005-05-10T00:53:00.000-07:00

All work and no play make jack a dull boy. But at least he gets to live. Sports, you would imagine are recommended to make people healthier, to get in touch with ones free spirit, to live. So you grab hold of a racket if you play tennis, squash or badminton, your clubs if its golf that you enjoy, the football if you just want to kick around for a while etc etc. Everyone has to stay in shape. And nothing can qualify this statement more than Ellen DeGeneris who claims – “My grandmother is an exercise maniac, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is.”
But with every sport comes the occasional, nay, the obvious injuries. More often than not - you play tennis and you get an elbow disorder named after the glorious game, you try your hand at squash and you get admitted due to dehydration, you run around in badminton and end up hurting your back and let me not get started about football. The blasted game is enough to keep a doctor busy by understanding a live example of how to fix different bones of the body.

Golf, people thought, was a relaxing sport. Well, think again. If you don’t get skin cancer by being exposed to the sun all day long, there’s a long list of what goes wrong with this elitist sport. Lightening does strike on golf courses (Lightening strikes).Golf cart collisions, explosions, running off the course, trees and branches falling and people injured or drowned or killed. It’s all here at Accident Search

Golf research says – “Researchers reviewed the records of more than 2,500 children seen by neurosurgeons over a six-year period at the Medical College of Georgia. They found that golf accidents ranked second behind bicycle accidents with a total of fifteen injuries.”

Now that your perception of sports has been altered just a wee bit, let me recount my unfortunate twist (literally) of events while playing a sport a little rougher than Golf – Basketball. These are a little lax times at SP we live in and I was facing a lot of brunt by very inarticulate colleagues of mine for my very distinguishably protruding abdomen. Fat guidelines claims that 18-20% of the body as fat is acceptable. Considering I was now around 35%, I decided it was time to do something about it. So armed with my shining white new DMX Reebok shoes, my ever enthusiastic demeanor towards sports and a vision of a trim and slim me, I headed over to the Basketball court. The rest as they say is history, and so to keep a long story short – a tussle on the court, two opponents going in different direction, legs locking, and the net result is depicted in Figure 1, only a little worse.

Figure 1

Mckinley describes an ankle sprain as a twisting injury to the ankle. This stretches or tears the ligaments that hold the ankle and foot bones together and can lead to instability and re-injury

Figure 2

However the pain I experienced was nowhere close to that of a sprain. So suspecting a fracture or at the very least a ligament tear, we headed over to the nearest X-ray clinic. After an hour of tests and checkups, I was told much to my relief that it was indeed a sprain. Now if we revisit Figure 2, we see that “just a sprain” is a little uncomfortable by itself.

So down I am for 4 days, not to mention at least a week till when I can at least sprint to the classes I am perpetually late for. But if its weight loss I’m concerned with I’m pretty sure that sports is not the way to go. With such rave reviews about the benefits of swimming for a good figure, how does one explain whales? No sir, I think for the time being I’m through with exercising and the lot and have decided to follow the advice of the famous Carol Leifer who said – “I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain.”

Second day and apocalypse now

2005-05-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

Schindler’s list, an Oscar winning movie by Steven Spielberg, depicts the tortures done to the Jewish community by the Nazis towards the end of the world war in the 1940’s. Some say they were taking vengeance, some say it was justice while other just brandish the Nazis as inhuman sadists. Fast forward by 50 odd years to a small entity in the suburbs of a relatively insignificant (at least it ought to be) city in a still more inconsequential nation in this glorious planet of ours.

Sadism has taken over a new avatar with a mental more than a physical form of battle. One day, just one day after I was a little relieved to be back from our project break, my faith was restored, in this institute to be serving as the haven for demons. Before one can say “SPJAIN sucks”, the mark lists for the comprehensive exams and the TRIM 3 end terms were released today amid great fanfare and relish. The celebrations were not on account of the fantastic marks everyone had received, rather by the suspense that was over so that participants could now put away the exact amount of cash (for the retests) from their savings. Among the hordes of people lined up for this oh so invigorating process, is yours truly.

My trim 3 was quite good but in the comprehensive examinations out of the 5 subjects released I have somehow managed to secure 1B, 3C’s and 1 D. Now considering that I had put in some amount of hard work for these tests, one would feel that I should be crestfallen. However, surprising as it is, I am not. I spent a great deal of time today to try and figure out as to why it is that I never really cried tears of pain and remorse when I first witnessed the rank lists. I have therefore drawn the following inferences from this (forgive the Victorian language – it is on account of a limp (the leg, what else?) friend of mine who’s birthright is to converse in this manner and of course on account of submission of the reports of the projects we just completed).

I have become so used to terrible marks that immunity has set in and I am now numb to the pain of topping from the bottom
Earlier on I would get bad marks without studying and I would blame the same for it. But now after studying (and subsequently running out of that excuse) and still getting the same marks, I feel that at least I tried my best and the rest was on luck and my fate.
I have redefined the meaning of “bad”. And the more I though about it, the more convinced I am that this is the answer to my dilemma.

I don’t really know what the exact agenda for our DOCC programme is, but to get ones perspectives in place seemed to be the most important takeaway for me. The village women of the final village we visited – Billekh, have no weekends, no means of entertainment, no benchmarks for a good or a bad day, nothing. On Hilly terrains, they walk 8Km daily to fetch fuel wood and fodder and 6 Km to fetch water apart from doing all the household chores and looking after the family. And what did they do to deserve this? Simple, get born in a village called Billekh.

Robert Collier once said – “All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck - who keeps right on going - is the man who is there when the good luck comes - and is ready to receive it.” I think I might tend to disagree with Mr. Collier, and to illustrate I give you the women I talked about up there. They are born to do what they do and they die doing that. And if you call that luck, I can assure you there is nothing good about it. So what is it that I’m undergoing now? I’ve been told it’s nothing but a bad phase that shall die off soon, leaving behind a large garden of sunshine, happiness and all the good luck that can be mustered and prayed for. In the meantime I have learnt to take things at face value and neither wait nor blame luck for anything. At the incipience of this landmark stage of my outlook on life, I shall start anew with this famous quote by R. E. Shay – “Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.”

Welcome to the jungle

2005-05-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

May 2^nd has been a historical day indeed. Coming from Uttaranchal and landing at Dadar station in Mumbai has been a carefully structured acclimatization process. Moving out of the fresh airy hill state, into the plains of CNG filtered exhausts and finally into the arms of the 3 S’s cosmopolitan city - Smog, Stench and Sea. With the first year behind us the anticipation of DOCC was great, not so much as for the process itself, but for the relief it would bestow upon us from the tyranny of the subjects we endured in the god almighty year. Boy, were we wrong.

Life is a sinusoidal wave of crests and troughs someone told me, the crests implying the joys and troughs – the sorrows. However for me it has been more of a square wave function (non-engineers please no pelting of stones allowed, just look it up on Google). The high points being before I joined SP and thereafter I’ve had a constant low. Paul Merton once said – “My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years”. Although I cannot reiterate the same time frame as our inured gentleman, but with a slight substitution of twenty-five with one I can definitely say Amen to that dear Paul.

Only DOCC had the potential of being the BOP’s of my life’s cardiac monitor (the heart monitor that goes BIP BOP BIP BOP…BOP being the high point) and for this reason it was chosen with meticulous reasoning so as to grant us a little sabbatical. However this too was thrown to the wolves by the seven day weeks we endured there. Nonetheless we learnt a lot and experienced a lot by practical exposure to the rural problems that are very real.

Now back in Mumbai, taking deep breaths of the breezy wind (and the occasionally spasms of choking thereafter), it does feel great to be back to the restless city. However with the good come the bad and the ugly. There are many instances in SP where we feel that these seemingly mutually exclusive entities converge into forming one being, who is universally loathed. The extent of misery wreathed on me by the protagonist of the real life drama at SP, the coroner of sorts, is so immense that at times I feel that one of the questions in the SP application form should have been – “What do you see yourself doing in five years if you pass the course.” Ah! Woe is me. But I do not bemoan fate; I have learnt to accept it as I have learnt to accept the ROI of my 4Lac to be a paltry sum handed out to me in even smaller denominations every month after passing out of here.

In the meantime, the second year beckons and along with it a baggage of writing reports and making presentations (copying some else’s), studying for the tests (preparing a strategy for cheating) and many sleepless nights (watching porn but of course). The room overflowing with first year books and the straining sounds of the racks lend an enhanced aureole around the din created by the swarming of abbreviations, terminologies, strategies, concepts and the lot from the first year. Hopefully the dawn of this New Year will bring in some justice for me, a pacifier for my misdeeds in the carefree time I had earlier. While I do want to do my bit and prove my worth, I have no intention in trying to steal the wreaths from the supposedly intellectual lot. An intellectual is a person who uses his mind creatively, a person that an MBA is supposed to chisel you into. While this maybe true for most participants, I can only pray and hope that the words of Edgar Wallace are true who said that – "An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex."

The Long and Short of it

2005-03-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

Agreed, it is indeed our term break now, and this is one article that I should have completed eons ago, but owing to the last month being a killer, I am going to persist with the usage of present tense in the following memoirs.

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose gave many memorable speeches during his lifetime, like the one calling upon the Indians to 'Tum mujhe khoon do, mein tumhe azadi doonga' (You give me blood, and I promise you freedom). Being of Orissa origin and brought up in Bengal, the only thing that saved him from a bad Hindi speaking syndrome was the fact that he was educated in an eclectic mix of elitist schools commencing with the Protestant European School and making a grand finale at the University of Cambridge. With all due respects to the great leader and a revered personality instrumental in the freedom of India, imagine him saying something like ‘Tum muje koon karo, mein tumko aaj aadhi doonga’ (loosely translated as - ‘You kill me, and I will give you half of everything today’)

The art of public speaking – so archaic yet redefined in the present state to being so utterly complicated. What this sacrosanct institute tries (whether or not it succeeds is entirely a different issue), to instill in all the 147 participants right from day one, is the art of effective presentation skills. Marketing being my major, I have consciously tried to refine this talent time and time again, from volunteering to speak on behalf of my group to trying to imitate renowned speakers who visit the campus. With over 9 months spent in this hopeless endeavor, the last straw came today in the form of the second presentations for the Third trimester in Marketing.

With the kind of hectic schedule MBA conjoins with, it is little wonder that there is any time away from the syllabus reading material, to get some extra reading to mentally masturbate, or as a matter of fact to engage oneself in any variants of the same. It should be therefore of no surprise to comprehend an Osho Ashramite bestowing us with a sympathetic coup d'oeil. For putting it in a nutshell for the people who got lost up there in the carefully worded maze of words - the MBA crowd is one sexually frustrated lot.

I cannot hence blame the audience to my presentation for the kind of reactions my speech warranted. What kind of a company would call itself InterCos? I mean seriously just say the following “Lakme has tied up internationally with InterCos”. “ ….um….ahem…*blush*…yeah actually that’s right…InterCos”. 76 stunned students and an equally taken aback professor not to mention the RA, who was previously half insane thanks to repeated corrections of the Marketing papers, today crossed the chasm to do a full conversion. Moreover for the same reasons cited in the previous paragraph, for some reason the ‘Cos’ after the initial faux pas, would keep coming out of my lisp ridden mouth as ‘Course’. Amidst the helpless giggles by the now recovered compatriots and my mind ablaze with images concerned with the o-so-wicked word, I struggled desperately to grapple with the situation. In retrospect I guess what helped was the look I was getting from the perplexed and certainly not amused professor (who for obvious reasons I have been avoiding ever since).

Not a newbie to public performance mishaps, or one to get easily embarrassed, I can confidently look back and smirk at myself. When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane is what I always say. Such escapades are therefore a way of life and are what adds the extra spice to ones existence, not to mention to the repeated amusement of others. So whenever I feel a little down I remember the words by Robert Frost, who incidentally also seems to have plagiarized a part of the same from an inspiration for the SP. Jain Batch of 2004 T-shirt. For Mr. Frost aptly said – ‘Cheer up….the worst is yet to come.’

A Fiend Indeed

2005-03-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

A friend is someone with whom you can be yourself. Who knows you, and loves you despite of that and of course who will be the reason why you don’t need to exaggerate your faults, since they take care of that. There are two kinds of friends in this world. A friend who is someone you can be alone with and have nothing to do and not be able to think of anything to say and be comfortable in the silence. Then there are friends who cry when you cry, laugh when you laugh and if you jump out of the window, they look down and then laugh again. Somehow I have always ended up with the latter. Not that I minded that, since I would assume that they too got a fair deal in return.

“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget” - so says G. Randolf. I avidly concur with our friend here in conceding that indeed true friends are tougher to find then that nagging mathematics problem you get acquainted to once you realize that the answer is wrong and one plus somewhere has been taken as a minus. I have never really spent considerable time in my life looking for true friends, they just happen. Before you know it, it dawns upon you that you’ve spending a lot more time with each other, enjoying each others company etc. Now at this point if the person in context happens to be of the same sex, then you have a slight problem, unless of course you happen to be a wee bit deviated yourself. But if it’s a person of a different sex, then party on (Someone please email me and let me know what this case feels like). However, in retrospect it always seems like – wow what were the chances of us meeting and ending up as such good buddies.

However Mr. Randolf’s hypothesis on his second premonition is vastly negated by my experiences with friends. Coming from a defense background does not really help either. Apparently if those light lines jutting out of the inner side of your life line run down towards the wrist, then one is supposed to be able to recover fast from problems. So entrenched are these lines in my teguments that they conjure up images of an embedded spider’s abode deep within. In the hope of drawing a comparison between these two considerable disparate subjects I conclude that I have almost never had any trouble in letting go of friends or colleagues. While some might say that this makes me insensitive and not compassionate enough to realize the issues which might be burdening my close ally, I question the trust and frankness that have failed by not letting so called issues come to light. Friends are important; they’re next to your family and partner. Despite Barbie being so popular why do people still buy her friends? This goes to show that Plastic playthings (I strictly mean dolls and the like) need friends as well. My theory in life has always been that of honesty and tactless, brutal openness between friends. “I don't have an attitude problem. You have a perception problem” – is what I always say. If you can prove me otherwise I’m all ears, else you can lump it.

What I can however give due credit to the great Christmas loving philosopher cited above is that friends are undoubtedly impossible to forget. I guess it’s Time to turn the page and Fuel St. Anger yet again. Wherever I may roam I disappear and Nothing else matters but the unforgiven and the one who is Holier than thou. However what is Sad but true is that the memory remains (italicized are all Metallica songs)

At the end of it all, I can just but reminisce this famous quote by Elbert Hubbard / Belgicia Howell (Don’t really know who’s the plagiarist) – “Never explain yourself. Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it.”

Short Sighted – 2

2005-02-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

JAIP (Just Another Idiotic Place) was one of the many natural satellites for the ghastly planet WORK (Warranting Outrageous Remuneration Kids). WORK was filled with MBA’s (Malevolently Boring Anthropoid) who were paid shamelessly for performing menial tasks. However before these beings were eligible to qualify to belong to WORK, they had to be trained – trained to forgo sleep, trained to perform clerical jobs (obviously fashioned to make the other orbiting planets believe that these were exclusive tasks) and trained for other eclectic activities uglier than a golliwog.

WORK was glorified to such an extent that aliens from all over the space came from astronomical miles away just to try and get trained by one of the many moons, so that they may become part of the “glorious” planet. That’s where JAIP came in – being the seventh largest moon for WORK, it acted as one of the feeder systems for the miserable planet. JAIP in conjunction with WORK conjured up brilliant promotional campaigns apart from creating a buzz and complementing it with great PR. Beguiled naive outlanders would flock to try and secure a place at JAIP to try and subsequently create a niche for themselves at WORK.

Hypocritiqueos Varabasha (characteristic traits were outlined in part 1) was in charge of granting the amalgamation of people (oblivious to the realities) seeking to gain entry into JAIP, the right to tread foot in the illustrious place. Belonging to the planet SENA (Screwed Enough Natural Apes), Hypocritiqueos and its trustworthy aides unleashed a fury on JAIP to establish their control on the peaceful planet. The actions of the brat pack was destroying the sanctity and proving to be detrimental to the residences of the beloved moon. How long had Hypocritiqueos been residing in JAIP? How had it risen in the ranks to gain power unparalleled in JAIP? No one really knows. However, what was unprecedented was the unquestionable magnitude of the sheer power Hypocritiqueos was now able to exercise over the general rulings of JAIP.

Capable of camouflaging its satanic incarnation under the veil shrouded by guile and deception, Hypocritiqueos was a master of portraying a docile and harmless demeanor to the foreigners eager to gain entry onto the soils of JAIP. The poor devils selected after a “rigorous” selection mechanism considered they were lucky enough to have actually made it. I have had the opportunity of witnessing first hand, the procedures and processes employed by Hypocritiqueos and its staff (this was during my days as a WORK agent when I was positioned at JAIP for sleuthing; however I was cleverly disguised as the personal clerk for Hypocritiqueos). I can hence safely say that these innocent souls must boil ambivalently at feeling lucky to have scraped it through the “lucky draw” as well as surreptitiously unlucky if they knew what would be in store for them over the next two Earth years they would spend at JAIP.

What was it that was so unearthly about this place JAIP? What would be in store for the 147 serendipitous beings that would eventually land up at the gates of JAIP? Some of the applicants would be from the third world parts of WORK thinking that they would get immigration to the developed places if they could successfully complete two long years in this place. Will they succeed or is their fate as doomed as the other’s are made out to be?

Pensive Thoughts

2005-02-04T10:58:00.000-08:00

My best friend said something very profound today at the beach (and this should be tried out by everyone) - “You see these grains of sands - these are symbolic of the people closest to you. The tighter you hold the sand, the more that tends to slip between the fingers and fly away, whereas, if you hold the grains in a light fist, they stay together unperturbed and unwilling to move.”

That got me a-thinking and soon dawned upon a very hard hitting corollary “With the light fist, if you turn the palm towards the ground, the sand still flies away.” Before some people reading this say, man what the hell is this weirdo rambling on about, let me illustrate.

X is a meek, sensitive character. As a result of this, it (applying my smarts I’m cleverly camouflaging the real identity of this being, laying a rest to all the insinuations I’ve received over the two decades of my existence, about my being a little “off” the mark) is always on the look out for some kind shoulder to bolster its subsistence and wondering when the next lucky break is going to come. As a result of this, it tends to cling onto people, in the illusion of what it thinks is hope, and in the process rubs quite a few people the wrong way.

Y is totally the opposite, it (ah ha the shrewdness is prolonged) tends to take people purely for granted. Don’t get me wrong here - Y is a very nice, affable and affectionate person. However what really lacks in it is the ability to keep people feeling that way. The callous attitude towards its counterparts (as we had seen in the case of X) tends to rubs them off again the wrong way.

So what do we have here – a case of X and Y, both poles apart but one very distinctly common attribute or should I say talent – the ability to piss off people. Ok so what are the lessons for us from this – Not to be on the extremes? Hold the sand in a light fist and with the palm facing skywards? Get better illustrative examples? Teach the parents to not name kids with the letters of the alphabet? What? What?

In the words of Confucius – “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go” and that’s just how the world is. If you are in the categories of where X and Y are, then just remember what Joey (Matt Le Blanc from Friends series) had to say about what begets bad and what gives rise to good – “What goes round – goes round and round”. You are what you are and that’s nothing to get forlorn about, if other cannot deal with it, they can very well go lump it. So my dear reader, please do not be discouraged, life’s a bitch and then you die, and that’s exactly how it always has been and always will be – that’s just the way it is.

Spend your life wisely, prioritize what means important to you and devote your time to that. A friend of mine Z (Doesn’t take a 2 year old to figure out the pattern of my these nomenclatures does it?) today commented about how it (I know I know, the brain at it again) cannot stand stupid couples who just spend endless time with each other from the moment they get up in the morning and meet at 9 am till the time they go back to their hostels at night 11 pm. It is but very logical to contemplate on as to what exactly could it be that transpires between them ALL day?

I know my prioritizing and time slicing theory illustrated above cannot be patented but what is definite is that these couples are the epitomes of such a study. They feel that the 14 hrs that they do spend with each other ALL day is way too short of how much they would actually like to be with each other, they feel that in each other they have their best friends and they feel that it’s not the quantity of what transpires between them each day that’s of the essence but the fact that they have each other right there for those few moments when if at all something does need to come to light, the other would be right there to reciprocate it. I cannot help but pity Z who doesn’t realize the gratitude these couples will express to god when on their deathbeds, they thank him for those 14 hrs and how they were able to spend them with each other.

Short Sighted

2005-02-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

(This is a long story and will take many more posts to put up, please be on the look out for further episodes)

Napoleon and the great evils of Bonapartism are well known

The deification of force and war
The all-powerful centralized state
The use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat
The marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power

Adolf Hitler (who doesn’t know him) left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic historic figure.

In order to keep his power, Mussolini became an absolute ruler and fixed any elections His power is best exemplified by the fact that he was able to create many seemingly ridiculous laws. For example, in July 1926, he declared that

The length of the workday would be increased but salaries would not change
Newspapers could be no more than six pages
Gasoline had to be mixed with alcohol
No more luxurious homes could be built
Nothing could be sold after ten PM
All the bread had to contain at least fifteen percent non-white flour.

Napoleon was 5'2", Hitler 5'6" and Benito Mussolini was 5'5" tall.

Great dictators of their time, and even as predicted by nostradamus, the anti-Christ’s created havoc and war in the new world. Tyrants or revolutionaries – that is a highly debatable topic, however what is not, is the fact that all three were very powerful midgets.

Speaking of powerful dwarfs, I like reminiscing this story I heard, a story of a world far-far away called JAIP (supposedly an acronym for Just Another Idiotic Place), a world where lawlessness is prominent and the lawmaker so prosaic that it gets difficult to comprehend what rule might be violated next. It’s a place where education is not a criterion for designations in the power system (if such a system exists), where discontent prevails among the masses yet not a squeak is heard. Capable of creating great ripples in the seemingly placid sea where the evil ruler of the world – hypocritiqueos varabasha lives, the squealer will entail great wraths of revenge.

Lacking the fortitude to confront the malevolent Tsar and with an average IQ of 96 percentile (as compared to the mother planet inhabiting 1 billion brown skinned beings), 147 JAIP’ians lived under a state of constant terror and resentment. What accounted for their fear? What discouraged them from confrontations? What was stopping these great people of JAIP?

Nothing But Fine Nance

2005-01-30T10:53:00.000-08:00

Intriguing title - what the hell is nance you ask? http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=nance defines it “as offensive terms for an openly homosexual man”. But it is not only offensive to the person who’s a little “deviated”, it is in fact more of a deviation for the normal person.

B-School is tough. However what comes to my mind when I think of the work pressure is that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” - going in the other direction that is. Today was the third trimester mid-term for the financial management II course. The ever observant readers by now must have figured out that, hidden among those technical jargons lies a truth - bold and palpable and I shall now make it apparent to you, if you haven’t already figured it out. Look at the above Italicized words again. See the roman numerical II. Applying common analytical reasoning we can concur that this now obvious sequel entails a part I as well, which in effect we denizens of this traumatic course should have been able to decipher by now. “If wishes were horses beggars would ride, if FM was simpler we’ll all be scorched not fried”

Let’s get down to the basics of this dirty little subject - Money. Those thin, colored leaves, we fight life over limb for; that which sets us in one of the segments in India of the ‘Great Divide’ – either you have it or you’re out. If you have it, you’re still out - out of your homes, your personal lives, out of your mind in a bid to just make some more. It’s the very reason we all came to B-school. Get good jobs, get a good package. Live happily ever after. In fact the only reason we work is to make money. How many retarded men out there would actually get out of their comfy beds in the morning to go to of all places – work, were it not for the money. Robert Orben aptly put it as - "Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work."

Under normal circumstances, understanding the power and effective use of the one thing that defines our lives, would give a person, a sense of pride, a sense of passion, a sense of power. BUZZZzzzz. Wake up to reality; enter the batch of first year MBA’ites. Poor suckers, lured into the land where exams are prehistoric predatory beasts feasting on the brains (or whatever’s left of them) of the brazen and hence subsequently also the foolish. And the most ferocious of all the impediments for getting a successful degree, is that of the Financesauraus.

I’m still yet to come across a book for this demonic subject, which has been indited in something called ‘ENGLISH’. A text called Brealey Myers comes close to this popular earth language; however before one can say ‘Fin is in’, the profundity of the verbose manuscript gets me obscured. I soon start to feel like I have just returned after serving my 14 years of ostracized service from the jungle of the apes. After spending considerable time with the damned (so called) bible yesterday, I was on my way to the quack after taking an appointment with him to check the percentage of dead brain cells in my head. (These cells presumably were not killed but, as later findings reveal, they committed suicide due to peer pressure and the ordeal of enduring the comprehension of this ever so insightful subject). As I nonchalantly flipped the pages to portray that I was indeed absorbing all the complex theories and matter, I stopped short mesmerized by my finding. For, at the end of the 19^th chapter (at this point please do not develop false notions of me having actually read the first 18) in the devilish book a disclaimer reads – ‘If you think you understand all the formulas, assumptions and relationships in the first reading, we suggest psychiatric assistance’.

Upsie daisy. My life was vibrant once again, my hopes revived, my pale complexion got back the original color, and I even felt some movement from some of those departed dear brain cells. Like an excited geologist upon getting the find of the century I pierced the sanctity of the academic smog laden with the reek of finance, with a scream of relief (It is all together a different issue that now half the occupants of the boys hostel are deaf or a little hard of hearing). Wiping the sweat of tension off my countenance and evoking a placid mindset I slept like a log.

Morning came -> test came -> test screwed -> expression of disappointment (perfected over the ages to give an indication of how this underperformance was so out of the norm). The only thing that excluded today from the rest of the test days was that everybody else screwed it as well. Somehow I cannot help but feel a little content with the sequence of events – my concepts improved (by something called the broken record technique but like it matters), my performance remained the same, my efforts remained the same, yet I feel that I have not done too badly. I say conditional relative grading rules (condition being that everyone performs equally badly) but finance management does definitely rock and in the process shakes people off their roots.

People come and people go, however the money remains, the greed remains; the techniques remain and sadly so does this intemperate field called Finance Management. Do not let money or the ways of handling money overpower you, it’s essential but not a prerequisite. In conclusion I would like to ponder on the words of Max Asnas who said- "Money - is something you have to make in case you don't die."

Guru's hair-raising tales

2005-01-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

“Friends, Indians, Countrymen – lend me your hairs; I come to bury the scissor (Caesar), not to praise it.” - A very popular Shakespearean literature misquoted for the benefits for the poor management souls and my counterparts who have been beguiled into believing that there exists a solution for their falling tales of misery. Before one gets misguided here I would just like to state (and I cannot stress this enough) that this article focuses purely on hair, and hair on the head at that.

Wails emanating from the boys hostel like a herd of crying banshees have caused many a wandering soul bold enough to venture into this perilous region to bemoan his fate. Having witnessed ninety odd men barely into their adolescence to have got betrayed by the Indian counterpart of Xuan-Wenhua (the Chinese god of hair), can create a recurring image of abject torture for this nomadic hero.

After hearing some of the Eerie and heart wrenching stories of how my roommate and I are now in a position to start selling carpets of matted hair which have given up support of their honchos on the cranium, many a teary eyed colleagues have expressed deep sympathy with us and confessed as to how they too are part of this next step in evolution.(Is it not obvious? The ape started shedding in order to evolve, so the next logical conclusion is that man now becomes a smooth shiny mass of tegument). Vigorous oil massages at night prove to be a let down when content at night we blissfully doze off into a deep slumber only to wake up the next morn to discover our shiny marbleized floors having taken crisscrossed darkish streaked patterns.

How do we outdo fate? How do we defeat this menace which has inflicted its wrath on us? Is there a cure? Getting the head cleansed by eliminating the pathetic remnants of a glorious past seems to provide itself as an answer to the many people I pose the challenging question to. This also works to my advantage since it’s cost effective. Upon stealthy interrogation of the neighboring barber it came to my knowledge that the charges for a haircut are Rs. 30 while it’s Rs. 15 for a shave. So by getting my head shaved I effectively end up spending half as much.

I have said this time and time again, good things never happen to good men. All the jerks get the hottest chicks, all the slimy get the money and last and let me add the least, all the ugly get the hair. At this point I would like to address all my friends who have got beautiful locks and who are now offended by my previous statement. ‘Dude’ – I would like to say – ‘Dude, you are ugly!!’ Don’t believe me? Cross examine for yourself. Steven Wright (another gentleman who’s long brown curly’s are stricken by the curse) once exclaimed - "If Dracula can't see his reflection in a mirror, how come his hair is always so neatly combed?” That’s right, Dracula, werewolf, Frankenstein, My. Hyde the list is endless. In fact latest reports claim that Dr. Jekyll was actually bald and his portion of evil resulted in the hair rising legend. So all the good, noble, balding people out there, you know what I’m getting at. Feel proud of yourself. God has made you beautiful (At the risk of sounding immodest I have given this statement here a personal tribute).

Swami Ramdev, a very popular yogic guru in the north is now finding loyal supporters growing exponentially and entrenching themselves in the minds of the common man, by their weird acts of self-appreciation and getting in touch with the energy within. So it is not a very unusual sight to witness a friendly colleague askance a mixture of amusement, curiosity and ugliness (this is deduced considering it’s always the bountifully hairy people who express this and as proved above hairy equal’s ugly) at my roommate and I. This generally is a result of observing us rubbing finger nails furiously together in an attempt to evoke and stimulate the long gone dead roots in the hope for a resurrection of the mane that characterized our youths. Two moths into this lost mission, I have left all hope and with all the energy left in me (which is not much considering the effort put in rupturing my already bruised digits) can only muster up the words of Obelix the gaul – “These Guru’s are crazy”

Monetary Ideologies

2005-01-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

“Electra gro lattunum profounde et sattum”. Translation – Anything said in Latin sounds profound. Latin, Greek and People & Performance – do you see what I’m getting at? All apparently very profound subjects in their own might but so vague to any English speaking bloke that at last one can actually relate to “The thinker” and sit in that atrocious pose and brood on the subject for hours. Considering that I endured 3 hours of this “oh so useful” subject today, I shall get a little philosophical.

Dr. Viktor E Frankl, a profound psychiatrist who wrote “Man's search for Meaning”, made a very profound statement –“man can find meaning either in love, or work or in suffering. If man is spending 80 per cent of his wakeful time at work, it is imperative that here that he constantly looks for meaning here”. Ok, as I gather it now, we all got three places of finding meaning in our lives

Love
Work
Suffering

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the first two subsets of the third? So effectively what we end up with is Suffering – 100% with subsets of Work – 90% and Love – 10% (these variables have been averaged out across the entire batch). The choices of where we look for a meaning thus kinda get narrowed and I needn’t try and second guess people. It is indeed suffering that gives people insights into their menial existence, into their being, into their life.

The Dr I referred to above got most of his inspirations when he was in a concentration camp during World War II. Keeping that in mind I guess it is but logical to deduce that what we have here on campus are a bunch of 150 very inspired bumpkins. However so deeply entrenched is this motivation that their multi faceted vagaries and their dedication to what they think they seek, vanishes ever so frequently leaving behind a vestige of fluster and trepidation. Don't let people drive you crazy when you know its walking distance is what I always say.

What’s the inherent problem then? Dare we probe and find out what tops the wish list? Money? Is that what it is all about? If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. (Please take this as an analogy for “hot chicks are not important, look at the jerks that get them”).

Hell, I’m not saying money is useless. In fact one of the prime reasons why we come to endure these two years of torture is primarily the money. But when will it end? Firstly is there an end? Talk of business cycles in economics, talk of round robin queuing systems in Information technology, talk about circular feedback models in marketing, what we fail to see is this vicious cycle that is making us forfeit and diminish the meaning of our very existence. People are in a cut throat life style making money to make more money. For what is this stupidity? As the Wise sage in the Himalayas claims that if you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars. Will it end? There’s got to be a deeper meaning to life then to outdo your colleagues, your compatriots into achieving more riches and amassing wealth.

Values, is what we learn about at SP Jain. Ethics, responsibility, social awareness are just some of the things we are taught and what we try and focus on. Seven months later however I can safely say that, as far as I’m concerned, I totally adhere to the ideologies of Pablo Picasso who said – “I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.”

Quant you see this is a pain?

2005-01-21T04:03:00.000-08:00

All the people in the house, who wanna rock this house, put your hands in the air and say ho o!! Ho o (shouts in unison)!! All the people in the house, who wanna party at B school, put your hands in the air and say ho o o ho!! Ho o ho (shouts in unison)!! All the people in the house who wanna learn and implement QM, put your hands in the air and say Ho o!! (Shattering sounds and then......Utter…and complete…Pin drop silence)

If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you. Let me also say - neither is QM (Quantitative Methods). Allow me to illustrate. What is the first thing that registers in your mind when you hear the word – Homoscedasticity. Before the house gets into an uproar about behavior unbecoming of an MBA student, mouthing profanities and ruining the general ambience of the place, let me try and remove some doubts from your mind. The seemingly vulgar terminology encountered above actually means “that the variance around the regression line is the same for all values of the predictor variable (X)” so says http://www.pfc.forestry.ca/profiles/wulder/mvstats/homosced_e.html.

Autocorrelation, Delphi, Exponential Smoothing, Autoregression, multicollinearity, Koyek Lag, Hetroscedasticity. Ok house, at the count of three – 1, 2, 3….AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!! I will not try and decipher these hieroglyphics for the benefits of the user, especially since I have tried time and time again and fallen right back. All work and no play make jack a very dull boy. In which case, ladies and gentlemen, you are now looking at the brightest thing this side of the Atlantic. It’s not like I haven’t tried. Agreed, that I have faced the wrath of each and every subject in this ill-fated place. Shrieking a war cry and struggling to be the victor I have managed to conquer my fear of all the subjects (this was mostly thanks to my gracious neighbors during the many, many exams and tests). However, this QM is one subject where I am as lost as a nun at mardi gras.

Considering I am an engineer, you may find it surprising that I elude QM to such an extent that I was grappling with what the M in QM was for up there. However no one really understands the perils of being a student of this dreaded subject. In the words of Ka (The holy one) - Before making any judgments about anyone, always put oneself in his shoes and walk a mile - that way even if he gets upset of angry, he will be barefoot and a mile away. However that is a different story. What is important to note is that no non-QM-suffering-propitious-moron is going to get me started on how it is even remotely possible that a subject I have been so accustomed to from high school, a subject that came to mean my bread and butter during engineering, a subject that I actually used to feel offended by if I got anything less than 95% in, has become the bane of my existence.

I decry the use of any sort of mathematics in fields such as marketing, operations, information management or for that matter even finance. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington – “We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are therefore finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and’”.

We must learn to do away with this evil of Quantitative jargons and this analysis crap, and concentrate more on the finer aspects of life. Marketing deals with bullshitting the vendors, operations deals with bullshitting the management, information management deals with bullshitting the customers and finance deals with bullshitting the government. So pray tell where does Mathematics fit into all this? Everything is simple to understand and comprehend until you use some vague term and superimpose Quantitative analysis on it and give it a new alter ego. That is where the underlying problem lies and that is what has blinded mankind from seeing the obvious.

After that vehement disapproval of the use of QM I must concede, that as of now, I am in a B-school, I am in the place where one needs marks to move ahead to the next trimester and I am in dire need of help. So while I go around scouting for some QM guru let me adhere to the words of Johann von Neumann “In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.”

IT was an experience

2005-01-18T10:16:00.001-08:00

Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse can happen to you for the rest of the day. Every day in the last seven months I have spent in this great institute almighty, I have remembered this adage. Threatening to implement this strategy (at the risk of using a ubiquitous MBA jargon), I have come back, time and time again, from the brink of devouring some poor misfortunate toad. The reasons were many

They hop really fast - Those who think toads are slow movers think again. http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-frog_toad.html claims “Rana fascinata are the best jumpers of the frogs and toads. They can hop 14 feet (4.2 meters) in a single bound”. Now that’s really something. (What’s further interesting is that a toad that is horny and a horny toad are different. Horny toads are not really toads, they're lizards). Hmm the things we learn each day.
Man they’re slimy – Which is also the precise reason that frog legs are not prepared at home. You don’t hear any colleague saying “man, I miss the frog legs my mom prepares” (which reminds me man do I miss the meat curry my mom prepares). I thought suicide takes guts, try holding one of those horrendous creatures, let alone have the thought of eating one. No sir, I think I’ll pass. No wonder bravery is such a rare commodity. People bold enough to try dim-witted things are not really alive anymore to become copious in number.

ut today was different. It is natural to wonder what on earth could have transpired on this sacrosanct day that would cause me to be so surreptitious about it. Well, today was presentation day and not just any presentation day. It was special for two reasons

It carried 40% weight age
It was about Information systems in business and conducted by Prof. Lakshmi Mohan. Please see the following link before proceeding any further.

http://www.gsba.ch/index.php?id=mohan&L=0

I am now under the assumption that by now you’ve exclaimed at least more than twice (Survey shows that 70% of the respondents had bellowed “shit” in disbelief and the rest had involuntarily gasped out the acronym for “Fornication Under the Consent of King”. However, this was largely skewed in favor of the latter with not even one person using the word “shit” when the survey was carried out on MBA campuses). For the still uninitiated please do go through the link.

This was the setting. What set it apart was the fact that at the end of our presentation we had her head shaking with awe and her eyes glinting with admiration. She went on to express her adulation by further saying “The presentations so far were not bad. However, this is picture perfect.” Towards the later part of the day, she even rambled on and on about how great our report was etc, etc. As was finally expected towards the end of the session our presentation was adjudged the best among the 15 other teams. Truly a great achievement - or is it?

Why this sudden spate of serendipity? “God favors the prepared mind” I thought. So obviously one of the following was true

There are either some serious exceptions to this rule
God does not exist

Before I get the challengers of the latter theory out there in an uproar, one may expect me to resort to option one by method of elimination. However before people get ahead of themselves, let me also clarify that the amount of work that had gone into the presentation was insurmountable. So obviously my premise itself was wrong.

So was this a change for the better for me now? Is my bad run finally getting over and out with (even if it’s on a sabbatical – a respite is welcome)? Am I actually capable of doing well? Well – Apparently YES. But what if luck had a huge role in it? What is chance had revealed its ugly head and overshadowed all my efforts and hard work? Well I have this theory about luck – “it gets evened out in the long run”. So if I did unceremoniously manage to run into some good weather today, I should bloody well be on the look out from tomorrow onwards. With this note of caution ringing in my head I shall now head to the night canteen.

Creative reasoning

2005-01-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

“Define Creativity” he said – and my stomach churned with the pain reminiscent with very such similar situations I have encountered earlier over my seven months here at SP Jain institute of management and research. “Define strategy”, “Define Management”, “Define Marketing”, “Define …..” (Fill in the blanks) – the list went on and on and on till I was at sea in this ever evading field I had had the foolishness and naivety of entering. The pain I have referred to above is symbolic of the many heart wrenching moments one sitting in Division A of the PGP 2004-06 batch, would have witnessed seeing the amalgamation of frustration, embarrassment, ignorance (for other synonyms please refer www.thesauraus.com) written boldly on my countenance. These regretful moments struck right after I had mustered up the courage to grace the class with one of my valuable insights into the definition of one of the many misleading MBA jargons. As always, my smugness into thinking of my class participation (CP – on this later) as another one of my precocious achievements, was shattered, by getting it thrown right back in my face by the perpetually amused professors. I’m sure most of them have the perfect blend of a smile (in toleration and sympathy thinking – ‘look what the poor fools have gotten themselves into’) and a sneer (at the sadistic thought of how he/she can play havoc with the lives of the miserable wretches unfortunate enough to attend the class). With my screams cumulated over the seven months trapped on campus, and my head twirling like a kaleidoscope (garishly spinning with the bright yellow and red colors) I was jolted back into reality.

“Can you define creativity for me?” In the hope of evoking some kind of response from me or getting some indication of me paying the slight bit of attention to him, he had rephrased the question. The gentleman in question here was here on campus conducting a four hour (yes, that is not a typo) creativity workshop. Being a Sunday he was present in smart casuals. His dress sense (jeans, dirty addidas shoes, folded full sleeve shirt) coupled with his personality (jovial, polished and engaging) immediately let my sensors of ‘uh-oh!! man from IT company’, rip. Having encountered shiploads of IT professionals over my two wasted years in the field in question, I had mastered the art of recognizing and subsequently avoiding them. However here I was once again staring down the barrel of the gun, wielded skillfully by this complete stranger. And there was that smile again.

J. Nowel once said – ‘A bulldog can whip a skunk, but sometimes it's not worth it’. I was determined not to get drawn into a CP brawl (a condition arising out of over enthusiastic MBA students willing to fight it out for class participation). Swallowing my pride and already bruised ego, after some initial stuttering, I managed to come up with a definition obtuse enough to render the sneer proportion in those curled lips even higher. He turned away. So what did we have here – a gent from TCS. What the hell would an IT guy be doing teaching us something as vague as creativity? ‘In the very question lies the answer’ – I remembered a wise old saying. Vagueness is the premise of creativity and what can be vaguer than a field which has a bunch of brown skinned morons running around and working 15 hours a day at a pay a high school kid in the US would mock at. He fit the bill alright.

Strategic Positioning

2005-01-14T07:17:00.000-08:00

Freedom of expression? Is that what they call this now? Blogging I was told is the re-incartion of this art - A lost art that is .Writing, keeping journals and other once-hackneyed activities have just become passé. However with the advent of this very ludicrous age of differentiation, one MBA bloke still suave with this mystic but powerful skill, gets up one morning and is struck on the head enlightened - "what if I were to make a website where I can put down my thoughts, my daily learning’s from life...blah blah, so that other jobless people can come and read through the entire matter and after spending considerable time of perusing would realize that they can neither relate to what I have to say nor have comprehended even a single sentence of the same." - He exclaims. (This was in the age of sound proofing walls where long exclaims where common place and the art of yoga profound enough to assist the rambling words in one go).Armed with his thoughts, entrepreneurship abilities (which he acquired from one of the workshops at Harvard) and other paraphernalia our man trots over to the nearest software engineer and before one can say 'Bill Gates is gay' up comes a website featuring his ideas, all ready to be implemented by other like minded (read jobless) people.

By that evening three such websites have evolved and there is now a craze in the market with people talking about it in hushed whispers as if it were the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. "I heard its a place where you can donate brains to people around the world by just typing a few lines", "the strange part is that I can actually type stuff and look at it after going to my friends house - MAGIC" and so on and so forth. And thus started the revolution.

Why the word blog - you ask? As Sherlock Holmes would say – ‘Elementary my dear Watson’. Considering that this entire concept was started by an MBA, no one could have expected that anything which was ever written on these websites and saved for eternity would actually make any sense to anyone - Barely Logic Obeying Gibberish or BLOG thus came into being.

After such prolific sarcasm on the subject - why must it dawn upon me to create a niche for myself in this ever productive field? Two reasons

Being in an MBA institute I intended to further hone my skills of writing BLOG (for definition please refer above), and in the process convince people that I was born under the peepal tree.
My ever doting mom – for whom this journal is dedicated to. I know it’s not much of a dedication, but I’m broke and for some reasons publishers always seem to be shifting offices (so there goes any dedication I can make on any book of mine – this method being further futile considering this is my first venture at writing)

A bit more about my mom. The most amazing person that existed – when one talks selfless there comes the epitome. Recalling all the great times we’ve had I remember a few

Situation - Me getting lost at Agra, Taj Mahal, Age 4. Scene – mom carrying elder brother in arms running around streets looking for me. Action – a lot of it…on my face
Situation – Me getting lost in numerous supermarkets, Age 4-10. Scene – Mom carrying shopping bags and running around aisles looking for me. Action – a lot of it…on my face
Situation – Me getting lost in Walt Disney World, Age 10. Scene - Mom carrying various foodstuffs, packets and shopping bags and running around lanes and rides looking for me. Action – a lot of it…on my face

Three things must have struck you by now

There exists a pattern of my getting lost in various parts of the world. Pattern is that I get lost a lot
My mom was a compulsive child beater
My dad seems to be consciously absent

Just to allay all your fears I shall handle these issues one at a time

This unfortunately is true. At times I find myself in unknown parts of the common bathroom in the boy’s hostel. Upon frantic shrieking my roommates are ever helpful in guiding me back.
These three incidents might have been the very few times in my life when I have been beaten up by my mom. And here too when I cried she cried louder. That’s my mom.
My dad’s (more about him in the next edition) ability to handle panicky situation in these three scenes has been vastly overshadowed by my mom’s mental and physical condition and hence when 100 is compared to infinity it pales in comparison. That’s my dad.

Ok considering I am late for dinner and have written about two pages worth I shall take leave now. Have to remind myself to come back tomorrow. Bye. Love you mom and dad. Oh as should have been evident above I got me a brother – more about him also later. Ciao J