Stoned Racounteur

Back from the Future

2010-06-20T11:49:00.001+05:30

After more than 3 years since my last post, I am happy to say that most of the aims I had set for myself have been achieved in this time. I have managed to travel to far flung places, continued to strengthen my relationship with those most important to me, and managed to get a feeler of what corporate life is like.

Life goes on, you explore new cities, meet new people, do new work, but the underlying theme doesn't seem to change - a never ending, all persuasive need to break away. The monotony of the path traveled so often seems to gnaw at the fabric of how one defines themselves.

Here is to hope. Hope that the fears of failure can be overridden by the passion for what you really care about.

2008-03-09T16:37:00.000+05:30

Down the drain

2007-04-03T09:55:00.000+05:30

Further proof that the game of cricket has been reduced to shambles.

A Public Relation Disaster

Hotel Blues in the Caribbean

World Cup Problems

Even the world cup has been reduced to a paltry event with hardly 4-5 countries playing genuine world class cricket. Marred by petty politics and crime, ICC needs to do something drastically different to get out of this rut.

Watch it !

2007-04-01T18:17:00.000+05:30

Obscene. Foul Mouthed. Gross. Stupid. Hilarious.

This wannabe white "nigger" takes the cake. Read reviews here.

Watch it to laugh your guts out.

More than BPO

2007-03-27T09:42:00.000+05:30

Citigroup Plans to shed thousands of jobs

This is going to get extremely interesting.

Sawaal Jawab

2007-03-25T23:13:00.000+05:30

OK. Lets try a bit of trivia.

So the 14th of March is known as the Pi celebration day. Reason being 3-14.

Now, the question is , Which day is known as the Approximate Pi celebration day :)

Spoilers behave.

Rewind

2007-01-20T12:55:00.000+05:30

There are times when you think that your life is all figured out and all the pieces fit exactly to make that "lived happily ever after" ending. But alas, life is no insignificant challenge.

Things change.People change.Life changes.

Sometime for better, sometimes for worse. Sometimes you are left despondent, without a clue about where that next moment of happiness will come from.

Here is to hoping that things changes for the better, and for strength when the times are bad.

For those who never could understand me, I have only an apology to offer. For all the misunderstandings, all the sadness caused by me.

Please stop !

2006-12-18T04:47:00.000+05:30

Lack of anything to do has led me to extensively explore orkut. What I have found is amusing, with tinge of gross-ness (sic). While I will try and bring out the best cases of attacks on English grammar that I have observed, it is simply not possible to understand the severity with which some people have molested the queen's language.

This one i found on the profile of a supposed girl, I have severe doubts about the veracity of her sex since the profile pic belongs to an actress. Anyways, the intro goes so :

"ohhhhhhhh. myself a pinkish face (wtf!) girl witha beutifu dimples love to be hang out( wonder how it is to be hang out :O ) with my frends..like to parties and studing tooo....kk ab jada nahi kah saktii....its net"

WTF!!!
ROFLMAO!

Another proposal of a romeo goes this way :

" hie (hie??? , how hard is it to spell hi) actually these dayz i join da orkut and i dnt hve enof friends n orkut thats y i add u ,f u dnt mind can u add me as lyka frind .any way wht do u do and yh we will talk more abt each other after adding me bye cyh"

*barfs*
*again*

Then there are poets :

There are 3 Chambers
in my HEART.
1 for PAPA,1 for MAA,
1 for GOD.
oh! wat about u dear?
Sorry no place for u
in my Heart........
bcoz frendz like u
are my Heartbeat..!
if u like this scrap then reply i m waiting 4.
cu later

Jeeez dood, Get a life for gawd sakes !

I love this one :)

Roses Are Red
Violets are Blue,
I have many friends
but I vant to friendship with you.

Hehe...I vant to laugh my guts out to this one :)

I don't know what to say about this one

do u like tooo be a nice friend ship with me!

Some leave the subtlety aside :|

hi anu,
kya aap mujhe apne upar line maarne ki izzazat dengi.. i will be grateful to u!!

The convincer ;-)

hi swthrt..u r looking awsome..wannan be frand with u.. Seriouly speaking u r too gud
Just wanna see u
\Do reply

Killer Franship offer :

♥ Heyyyyyy Dere Gorgeous ♥ Do U Eat MagiC CharmZ ?! Caz Ur loOkinG sO MaGicallY bEautifUl .. neWaYZ whTzuP ?! ♥

I just haven't laughed so much in a while. Who says Indians don't have a sense of humor, man can they make you laugh or what .

Just to top it all, the one that rules all the franship offers ,

Good Morning. Yes I dont knows you. I admires people who wear flats becuase its looks elegant. I am scracping you becuase its first step in knowing you.I just here to make sum gud frnds.If u r not not typical..n feel comfortable coz every one has diff. intellectual so v can b frnds..other wise take gud care Of urz Regards

Heppy franship !

The official flag of Amsterdam

2006-12-17T12:46:00.000+05:30

Surprised ?

The rude eye opener and other short stories :) - Part 1

2006-12-15T17:52:00.000+05:30

About three months ago, I set out on what was to become the most interesting trip of my life till now. On the 17th of September, with dreams and expectations in my eyes, I boarded the flight from Delhi International Airport to Istanbul, en route to Lyon.

Lo behold! As soon as I descended from the plane to the bust, for the short stop over in Ataturk Airport, the cool air hit me. And like a self fulfilling prophecy, this reinforced the fact that Europe is all about cool breezes, chilled beer and hot babes.

The 2 hour wait and the following 1 hour delay in the flight brought me a little closer to sea level but I was still flying pretty high. Another 3 hours of flying from istabul and hit the destination.

First stop : Lyon, France.

A city whose people are famous for being clique-ishand eating lasge quantities of sausiccon. Not too much fun being the dood trying to understand a weird language when everything sounds like sau-poaun-sisson ( Pity I cant clearly depict the intense nasal tone ). Anyways, I was still determined that the real fun lay in the oft-acclaimed Europe travel, covering countries sounding as exotic as Luxembourg :) to the well known Germanies and Switzerlands of the world.

The first day in Lyon was interesting, to say the least.

Disconnected

2006-07-12T12:14:00.000+05:30

I am.

Equator, OMFG!!!, Mommy,I hit the jackpot!

2006-04-30T18:59:00.000+05:30

The initial part of the title of this post reflects the inability of the author to define whether he is (dis)satisfied with his summer internship.From googling end on to my first ever meeting with a potential client, the experiences have been "interesting", to use a euphimism. While it is hard to digest when someone(especially when that someone is not your boss) says "mazaa nahin aaya" after you have built a humongous spreadsheet after 3 days of continous googling and looking through the nook and crannies of the world wide web, It does not overshadow when you are patted on your back by your boss for doing great work.

So thats been the story till now, troughs and crests. But hey ,atleast i get to work on "Private Equity" deals. Little does the wide eyed world know not all work behind an "LBO"( as some experts like to call 'em) or a rich guy buying part of a company (for the uninitiated) is as glamorous as it is made out to be.Educate yourself here.

The second part of the title represents his emotions on life on the personal front :).While previously I have been sceptical of all things related to cupid-ish properties, I have now come across new and unchartered territories which have pleasantly surprised me to say the least.My fingers are crossed.I am not afraid.

Now,the explanation for the third part of the title.On account of heavy googling I have come across this awesome resource.For anyone and everyone even remotely interested in shares\ stocks\ investments\ economy\ business\ finance\ money,Check these out :).

Equity Research\Industry\ Economy Reports

Investment Instrument Softwares

The biography of an unsung god

This is the goldmine you were always looking for, and yeah believe it or not, It's all free!!!

Lucknow To Lyon

2006-03-27T20:13:00.001+05:30

In Lyon from September to December on student exchange.
Excited Shitless!!!

~

2006-03-09T19:04:00.000+05:30

Crests and Troughs in life at the same time.
Ecstatic and Distressed.
Clueless.

LKO to NDLS

2006-02-19T12:46:00.000+05:30

A step by step recall of the awesome-est trip back home !

-> Got sick of Lucknow
-> Two days without classes approaching
-> Decided to go back home 3 hours before train
-> Paid 1800 bucks for a ticket worth 785 :O
-> Came back home on the 17th, arrived late at night.
-> Rushed off to friends place to meet a childhood friend
-> Came back home at around 2 AM.
-> Out again at 2:30 AM with Neighbourhood junta.
-> Called it a night at some 5 AM in the mornin !
-> Woke up at 10 AM
-> Excited as hell about prospective aish in the next 48 hours.
-> Spent time catching up with folks@home.
-> Time for a massive drinking binge...muahahahaha !
-> Drank
-> Had coffee
-> Drank a lil more
-> OK...Drank a lot more
-> By the way, "Punjabi By nature" is oh-sum !
-> Somehow managed to stand straight
-> Fell asleep
-> Woke up 6 AM.
-> Woke up as many friends as possible.
-> Only one girl woke up :)
-> I did not complain :P
-> Off for breakfast with her to the aptly named "Gole Market".
-> Choley Bhature rock !
-> Lassi rocks even more !
-> Drove back home on smoooooooth 8 laner
-> Press the pedal a little harder.
-> Press the pedal to the floor!
-> Eeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaa !!!
-> Phew!....That awesom-ish feelin again !
-> Back home again for financial rejuvation.
-> Gave sheepish look to mom.
-> Financial revival occured instantaneously !
-> Mum makes paranthas with butter tending to infinity!
-> No complaints from me :)
-> Financial revival now coupled with gastrological revival.
-> Decided to blog about this.
-> Almost done.
-> Now off to CP for an 8 hour drinking marathon
-> Balls to Lucknow !
-> I love you Delhi !

2 days of absolute heaven, this is life at its very best!

Of Bulls, Bears and Cupid

2006-01-21T09:38:00.000+05:30

Back after a long break. Not that I was busy( As is often the case with B-schoolers :P or So i have heard) , but the simple phenomenon called laziness just took on gargantuan proportions.

Participated in the second stock trading competition after coming to IIML, and made some money as well :).Interesting thing though is that so much money is pumped into the markets these days by these competitions, over 1 crore if we consider just the most recent competition, it just seems that the market is not exactly the place to have a game. Though what such games do is that they highlight the positive aspect of stock markets, hardly anyone remebers that there is a bearish face to the markets as well. All of a sudden, junta's interest in careers such as equity research or trading and fancy words like put call parity shoots up !

Indeed, Money can do funny things to people, Yours truly included ;).In fact two researchers at Berkeley have found some interesting results about the correlation between money and happiness.

About the cupid in the title, well what do you get when you combine mush with just the right moment? My philophobia just got kicked to death.

Rohit

P.S: @Vishy: I didn't need tips from Prashant !

Beer Break :)

2006-01-03T00:10:00.000+05:30

Between all the drinking( On all but one day till now ...woohooo!!!)...somehow...god knows how...but I'm reading this.

Brilliant and kinda non-economicky !

Happy new Year

2006-01-01T15:10:00.000+05:30

Hope it's a "happy" year for you :)

Cheers!

The sword of the maggu !

2005-12-22T13:46:00.000+05:30

So i have discovered the hidden power of knowing stuff the day before the exam...QAM end term tomorrow...Am supposed to teach some stuff to cocky...the guy I'm having a chat with below..I need a book and I ask him to do me a favor...

rohit: sun bhai
agarwalaneel: bol
rohit: abe jain ko bol de ki meri book waapis karde abhi mereko lib jaana hai
agarwalaneel: u call him up plz.....me sleeping
rohit: i have no money man...plz tell him
agarwalaneel: fuck u
rohit: theek hai...chal ATB for QAM...Hope u do well
agarwalaneel: calling him...

LalalalalalalaLand

2005-12-13T23:06:00.000+05:30

Wooohooooooo!!
First crush@IIML.Great feeling.
So much better than more-complicated-than-Atrial-Fibrillation relationships.
I'm giddy :P

Mismatch?

2005-12-10T02:20:00.000+05:30

Some interesting happened today. As I was happily chatting with a few friends in the library(Now you know why i go there !), one of my classmates showed me a few of the sketches he had done.

Now, I'm no art expert but i do have eyes.His work was exceptional! Got me thinking why someone with an immense talent like that would end up doing an engineering and then an MBA.

I hate criticizing the system but just can't help doing so right now.Its a joke is what it is.Potential Artists,Musicians,Writers, all doing MBAs.

How wrong can this world get !

Yes Minister

2005-11-30T23:21:00.000+05:30

Finally read a novel! And this one is a real godsent.Witty, inexplicably indian and delightfully funny. This is a must read for any indian.

The perennial struggle between politicians and IAS officers is brought out in a way that really tickles the funny bone. I plead once again, do find time to read any of the book in this series, you won't regret it !

This bugger can write !

2005-11-26T15:06:00.000+05:30

Summers

2005-11-10T12:44:00.000+05:30

Me off to Ernst & Young in M&As next summer.
Happy.
Mid Terms from 12th...Mugga Phase starts in Top Gear.

The other side

2005-11-04T00:05:00.000+05:30

Term 1 grades out .
For once, I am among the respected ones.
Redemption.

Clueless

2005-10-31T04:01:00.000+05:30

Lost somewhere...trying to figure out life,love and lots of cost accounting.

Phisy Phinance

2005-09-26T00:01:00.000+05:30

Take a look at this , these doods are some creative thugs !

I especially like this one

"Apparently WorldCom felt that office pens, pencils, and paper were an investment in the future of the company and therefore capitalized the cost of these items over a number of years"

And how much did these friendly folks from the US of A capitalize ? A meagre $3.8 Billion!!!

Thats $ 3,800,000,000 :).Pretty. Innit?

I can just imagine Cartman's mom saying " Poopiekins, that's not a nice thing to do ! "

@home these days, catching up with friends, getting loads of treats from newly employed batchmates, and of course watching load of movies :)

Finally got a bit of time to read what i've wanted for a long time, finding the going rather slow with me mum trying to stuff food down my throat ad infinitum.No complaints.

Life is good.
Just one void.
God rest the soul of the unsuccessful lover.

Thank You Oh Sweet Lord

2005-09-11T02:44:00.000+05:30

As i look ahead i see

11th Sunday - MANAC Submission +Classes
12th Monday - ITM + VB Quiz
13th Tuesday - BIO submission
14th Wednesday - Wooohooo!!! ( Dunno whats in store here)
15th Thurday - ECO + MANAC presentation + OM Submission
16th Friday - ITM project + presentation
17th Saturday - ECO submission
18th Sunday - Holiday :)
19th Monday - Classes :

And lest i forget

20-23 End Terms

Add to that there is least one more quiz for OM,QAM,MANAC,BIO to be squeezed in somewhere in there.

Ain't I lucky !

Rejoinder

2005-09-03T21:43:00.000+05:30

So here I am back again with a promise not to write a one line post :)

I've just come back from a survey I had to do for my ECO project. Marketing Research is quite obviously out as far as a career in it is concerned.

The last two months have been an amazing journey for me. Not that I have carved a picasso out of a rat's ass, just that I have found what I want to do for the rest of my life and it fels amazingly good to learn about it everyday.

When we joined the campus, we had alumni address us on various issues concerning the program. There awas one underlying theme in it.

FOCUS

Now I know that many might think that this is simply globe and nothing of substance.

Let me try to change your mind.

I went through engineering without giving a shit to studies, going through the motions, passing everytime but never ever making an effort to learn anything.In the end, I sat for any arbit company that would come for placements, not really knowing what I wanted.

I now realize that it is a crime to not even make an effort to find your passion. Life is simply not worth living if you don't know your own aim. While I had an inkling about what I wanted to after an MBA, I spent the quite a bit of time in my first two months here , making sure that i was not mistaken.

Now that am sure, it feels good to know that If I work hard enough to get into that field, I'll be happy all my life.

What is surprising for me is that many of the people i have met here are simply not interested in any such academic pursuits. Forgive me for being a prick , but I think that a post graduate program is not one where you are supposed to just go through the motions.It seems that this view is held by a very small minority of the people I'have met here.

I was part of the ignorant majority in engineering, no way am I joining the herd again.

Anyways, too much about that.

Apart from this , I have now become a full fledged "maggu" as they call us :). Much of this behavior of mine is because of a need of not repeating mistakes I made in engineering.

Mid terms also happened somewhere in the middle of all this. Doing well in the MANAC exam has certainly made the effort I had put in worthwhile.

If I may, I would like to dispel this myth about MANAC being a monster. It is no such thing. It is simply new to engineers, hence requires a commensurate effort in igesting the fundas.I personally have loved MANAC. If you want to get into investing, you have to be comfortable with balance sheets, cash flows et al. and MANAC is the route to that.

I have had to curb down on my reading of non academic books after coming here.

Curently I am reading an amazing book on currency trading.

The numbers involved in the money market are simply mind boggling.The money market comprises of 74% of total trading aggregate of all markets!!!
The kind of decisions that these guys in the market take are real gut wigglers.Hopefully I can finish this book before end terms, which are starting in another 2 weeks.

And before I forget again, about three weeks ago, I became an engineer! An electronics angineer at that. Give me a breadboard and a pice of bread and I won't be able to decide which one is which, but that's another story .

Adios

P.S: I had made the mistake of judging some commerce junta on face value. Now that I have gotten to know them , these chaps aren't too bad .

God on the net !

2005-08-23T18:35:00.000+05:30

Bro starts blogging :)

This is my idol.

Stiff Upper Lip

2005-08-17T14:49:00.000+05:30

Who says the english ain't light hearted, Jeremy Clarkson is English (As much as he may wish that he were an italian )

Sample this lil nugget from 'Top Gear' :

A grandfather is a bloke who is sitting in front of the fire , wondering if he has inadvertently eaten his slippers .

Chotu aka Amwan making noises :P

2005-08-15T03:07:00.000+05:30

Here's one of me hostelmates...fucker is working in Fidelity and the company is sending him to UK next month. Add to that he has become a friggin rock star \m/

Chotu aka Pilla is the one on the extreme right probably gawking at some hot chick

Here's what this article on Sify said about his band JOINT FAMILY :

"...Joint Family the latest band to hit the circuit and Delhi's first Nu Metal act. Why the name? Well, according to the members...the band is a mix of various artists...hence the name-Joint Family.

The band is Akshay,Amwan,Shardul and Sainani from Cyanide and Clarence from Level 9.The band's inspirations run in the lines of Slipknot, Korn, Deftones, Coal Chamber, Mudvayne, Fear Factory and Stone-Sour.

With lack of any nu-metal band in Delhi, Amwan and Sainani formed Joint Family when they met Clarence who got his friend Akshay to do the vocals. With Shardul Cyanide's joining them on the drums... the rest as they say is "history".

Their debut gig was on the 8th of January this year at the Ego Café, where they were received with a good crowd response. Since then they have never looked back playing at A.I.T Gurgaon,Amity Business School's Annual Fest and also played at Aasra with bands like Helgas Funk Castle and Zero.

But the biggest performance would definitely be the NSIT prelims, where their went on to qualify for the finals. As for their future plans, Joint Family will be a band with great originals for their album and be the best nu-metal act in the country..."

Go kick ass at I-rock dood...we're all proud of you.I still remember when you started playing and practising in the hostel with shanky, seems like yesterday, though the sound of the geeeetar has improved a lil bit :P !

Sweet !

2005-08-04T15:58:00.000+05:30

God level Site :)

Whiff

2005-07-27T20:23:00.000+05:30

Stupified

Revelations from Inside

2005-07-23T21:09:00.000+05:30

As a part of my I-won't-repeat-my-mistakes-in-engineering drive I have been trying to study for the past few days.

Something peculiar happened today.We had a QAM quiz .Fairly straightforward quiz and I was rather dissapointed by this fact since I was hoping for a fk-all quiz so that the commerce junta(Not quite my favourite lot, more on this later) would get a feel of what we engineers go through everytime we have a MANAC quiz.

5 minutes into the quiz, I was good and done, feeling satisfied that atleast I didn't mess up in a subject I know I'm good.Then the prof came in and wrote the most important formula on the board.

I was surprised by what i felt then, weird RG psychology crept in.I cursed under my breath.RG, for the uninitiated, is Relative Grading.

This was not something that I could identify with.Having had a don't-give-a-tiny-rat's-ass attitude in four years of engineering had made me impervious to trivialities such as grades, exams et al.Never could I imagine such a response.

This is Weird Shit indeed. Not something I am especially proud of.

Coming back to junta from commerce background.Barring exceptions, I have somehow found the lot to be rather , hmmmmm how do I put it...like they have a pole shoved up their bum.They seem to have a frown on their face all the time and their smirks during the MANAC class make me want to crush their *beep* .

Here's an example :

MANAC Prof : So will the expenditure be capitalized ?

Commerce Asshole : Depends on the how big my head is . Since I have done a B.Com and I am a CA as well, I am superior to all engineers and hence my propensity to act like a bitch.

MANAC Prof : Very nice explanation indeed.

Commerce Asshole : Smirks and places his sorry ass back on the seat.

This is only one of many incidents.

Disclaimer: These are my views and I have met exceptions the same.Just that I have met quite a few who fit the bill.

Have a good day .

Rohit

MANiAC

2005-07-22T02:11:00.000+05:30

For those not familiar with the term "MANAC", its a euphemism for "Wipe that smirk off your face you ignorant fool."

The struggle with MANAC will be a long one with MANAC-1 alredy massive screwing power and more to come in later terms.

Apart from this, am having a ball with COMM, basically a subject on how to read and speak(And yeah ,lest i forget,How to listen) in english.Basically a half credit course which'll end in another 2 weeks.Am readin "Good to Great" as a project.

The book pleasantly surprised me. On hearing the name , I was like "Ugghhhhhhhh another 200 pages filled with refined BS aka Globe", but its a very insightful book backed by some solid research.

Picked up Soros on Soros from the library, yet to start reading it :P .

And yeah.

Recent lessons include :

1.Saying that "I work well in groups" and actually doing it are two completely different things.
2.Finding a girl will be damn hard here.The competition is tougher than CAT :).
3.Sleep is inversely proportional to the time you spend in arbit chit chat.One can manage to sleep 6 hours , given the right time management.
4.CAs are your saviours.

Rohit

I Opener

2005-07-17T13:20:00.000+05:30

Read this.You'll be surprised.

Freedom of Speech

2005-07-08T01:34:00.000+05:30

Rohit Kaul just quit blogging on his public blog.

I am not aware of the exact reasons but do know enough to say that it is amazingly ironic that people who are at the insti to to attend a PG course can be so utterly immature.

I sympathize with Kaul and here is my " Fuck Off! " to everyone who thinks that freedom of speech needs to be restricted.

Its OK if you don't agree with someone, learn to accept it .

Some people just never grow up.

First Impressions

2005-07-06T11:06:00.000+05:30

OK.

I will not write about the routine stuff like how much you get to sleep and how the profs keep you on your toes and all that.

The few things that have struck me the most (not necessarily positive or negative) are :

Coffee is your lifeline.

Stress on CG is massive.When is say massive I mean MASSIVE.

Learning is proportional to how much you want to learn, resources are there and the impetus lies solely on you.

Most people are not "studs".Some are.

Seniors are extremely helpful.

For engineers, the best thing is that pretty much everything is new.Hence its much more interesting than DSP, Digi Comm and the likes.

More Later.

Rohit

Ek vaccine ho jaaye

2005-06-27T11:53:00.000+05:30

Weird title.I know. But hear me out.

First things first.I have reached IIML and got the room and am still trying to get all the stuff in order.The campus seems nice but it is freakishly hot and humid here. The sweat literally pours off the person's forehead and i could see them drops falling.Facilities seem good but i have only been here for some4 hours till now so I haven't really seen much.

But of course, 3 days ago things were not as rosy as they seem today.

As part of the formalities for IIML, I had to get vaccinated for typhoid.As an obedient minion I dragged my ass and did so. Little did I know what was about to follow.After exactly one week I was struck by a massive attack of "Acute Typhoid" as the tests showed later.

I would like to thank Indian drug companies for changing the meaning of the word "Vaccine".

So there i was lying for a length of 10 days with fever ranging from the oh-so-friendly 99 F to balls-shattering 105 F.

I was told that i may have Hepatitis and would not be able to join IIML in that case.I spent quite a few days in disbelief, scared shitless of the possibility of this impending disaster.

Anyways, as they say Alls well that ends well.

I have been recovering, though still heavily dependent on medicines I have been able to join in peace.

God bless.

Rohit

Consumed in the past 24 hours

2005-06-15T18:12:00.000+05:30

Starters

This is for those with a funny bone that goes mad when tickled by four messed up and profusely swearing kids.Absolutely devoid of logic,this is a riot.

Main course

I know.Tis pulp fiction.But fun nonetheless.I loved the 1940s setting :).

Dessert

Nice movie.

Worth the 50 bucks.Not a paisa more, Not a paisa less.Big houses, fascinating cars , good story and some pretty women :).

Adios.

Weather woes

2005-06-11T17:33:00.000+05:30

This sucks !

Cart-orgasmic !

2005-06-05T15:29:00.000+05:30

Well since i was a kid, I've had this fascination for books.It started with the famous five and Hardy boys. Slowly taking the natural course leading to Grisham and the likes. Then came the "Value-add" books phase where i would read only those books which would "help" me in the future.

Now i read whatever i can get my hands on, trying, albeit slightly, to avoid run of the mill books.

While there have been many books that have made me sit up and take notice, there is this one book which is like none other.

I am not sure whether it can be called a "book" in the conventional sense.It is a book which comprises of maps. But wait a second , these are not maps of countries and continents. These are maps of emotions, of feelings, of experinces in life.

Hence the name "The Atlas of Experience"

The Atlas of Experience is a metaphorical thunderclap. This book is beyond anything you’ve ever seen—and that’s seen, not read.

The Atlas is very whimsical, and that is its strength. The airport in the country of Boredom is called Automatic Pilot. Sparksfly is a mountain near the Volcanoes of Passion, in the country of Stream of Ideas. Tip of the Tongue marks the southern-most point on the Isle of Forgetfulness. A ship is sinking in the Bay of Wealth. The place names are full of puns, and full of truth. It’s no mistake that the Mountains of Work are surrounded by the Plains of Solitude.

The largest city is that of Change. The mapmakers even include a map of Change’s subway system. The red line starts at Thesis and ends at Anti-Thesis. The green line starts at Revolution, passes through Risk, and ends at Funeral.

I could find only one map image on the internet.But this should act as an appetizer.

I love this book. I don't read it so much as savor it.

I can't emphasize how good this book is, any reader would fall in love with this book. A case of love-at-first-sight, one might say :) .

Zilch ( I can't think of a title :| )

2005-06-01T15:54:00.000+05:30

With engineering over and IIML joining still about a month away ,I now have plenty of time on my hands.

Hence the prolific book reading.

Just read "Five Point Someone" By Chetan Bhagat

The book is written in very simple language, Chetan Bhagat is not trying to emulate Shakespeare.The story is good, with many threads running in parallel.It is centered around three IIT batchmates and their four years of growing up.

While things are exaggerated to probably a rather high degree at times, All in all the story is free flowing and the book is rather short.A 3 hour sitting will get you through this.

Any engineer would be able to identify with the kind of opinions thats these three kids have about all the mugging and banality about engineering lectures..

The thing i liked the most about the books was the budding romance between one of the three boys and a daughter of a prof. Their encounters are described well and leave one with a dreamy look, making one thin about their own childhood romances.

Don't go for this one if you are looking for literary value.You'll find more than the books share of "damn"s and "fuck"s !

Anyone who has just passed out of engineering is bound to enjoy this, and anyone looking to have a peek into engineering life will find the book a real eye opener.

If i were to rate this book , I'd give it a 5.5/10 .

In addition to the book reading , a lot of other stuff has been keeping me busy.One rather enjoyable tast currently is the choosing of a moile phone.I have decided to rid myslf of the mind-numbingly-boring Reliance handset i have.

I've narrowed down to 2-3 phones.Just can't decide now ,am stuck !

The one phone that is leading right now is the Nokia 3220.Have a look :)

And yes, before i sign off, I gotta mention my experience in the library today.I went in at 11 AM , came out at 6 PM. Just to get one "No Dues" Cerificate. Ahhhh , how i love the pace at which things move in college.

Rohit

Zephyr

2005-05-29T13:04:00.000+05:30

Do you ever feel that you would just give anything to go away to those peaceful mountains for a day or two? Have a piping hot cup of tea sitting on a wooden bench besides a small hut.The cool wind blowing with tiny droplets of water in it, just brushing against your face and you forget all your problems and you can just "be".

Nice scene innit?

Too bad you cant go there.

Here's the next best thing

I recently read this book and i felt like i was sitting in some english county where time had stopped.Life is described to be poetically simple. It is a story of a teaching inspector who goes to different schools and talks to children about their teachers.

The book has some really funny parts describing the inspector's experiences with real imaginative children.Some of the lines really tickle the funny bone and will leave you with a big smile on your face.

You can be sure that everything generally turns out all right in the end, though, and the bad teacher or errant schoolchild sees the error of their ways and becomes a better person.

If you want to feel like a little kid for a while and have an afternoon to spare, this is the book you want.

Rohit

Blown away !

2005-05-25T15:48:00.000+05:30

Without a doubt, one of the most exciting books i have read.I was earlier a little apprehensive about Dan Brown, given the mass hysteria,and was kinda disappointed by "The Da Vinci Code".But "Angels and Demons" has taken me with utter astonishment at the brilliance of the author.Have read some 200 pages only till now but this book is mind blowing.The book is so god damn interesting that it is making me want to go into pure Physics as a career :P

An exotic mix of Physics, Religion and the eternal struggle between Science and Theology.

This one is not to be missed.

WTF

2005-05-20T01:25:00.000+05:30

Why am i hearing news of her gettin' married ?

Why does it take people so friggin' hard to understand simple stuff ?

Why do people pay good money to attend a lecture and then irritate the hell out of the teacher by giggling among themselves?

Why do intelligent people behave in an irresponsible manner ?

Why the f*** does it have to be hot as hell in Delhi ?

Why do I have to implement "The EM algorithm" to complete my B.E. ?

What the hell is an "EM algorithm" anyways ?

Why would anyone like to invent a monster like DSP ?

Why arent there enough movies of Elisha Cuthbert ?

Why has "Laloo has now put on his undie and is proceeding towards the wardrobe" become breaking news on national TV ?

What is with IIML sending a 200 page book on "How to read balance sheets", before joining ?

Who the hell is Mallika Sherawat and why is she getting so much media coverage?

Screw it, I'm goin' 'ome !

Pissed.

Rohit

Almost Done !

2005-05-16T20:58:00.000+05:30

*stretches body for a long post*
*watches people click on the close button :P*

Muahahahahahaha...i just wrote my last engineering exam a couple of days ago.Surprisingly enough the papers seemed like an implicit hint from the teachers that they wanted us to pass just as much as we wanted to.

No more Fourier.
No more Laplace.
No more Transistors.
No more Machines.
No more Filters.
No more Microprocessors.

Damn That sounds nice :)

But it aint over , the techie bastards won't let me go quite yet, the final year project evaluation beckons in another two weeks.

But its only one part of engineering that i have come to abhor.The other part that involves hostels,thassa,friends,DPs, night outs is something that i would never miss for anything.

Made the best friends of my life at college, I'll really miss my hostel.The umpteen trips at 3 in the night for "cha" and sutta.The zillions of "topo"fied assignments and ED sheets.The thrill of college electricity blanking out just before the exam day, nothing beats that fun.

The countless nights spent in max timepass mode with topics ranging from girls(a popular topic for tp) to cricket to religion to life to companies to MBA to sutta to supplies to daru and back to girls :).I think i have gained more gyaan about how people think and behave from these chats than from any other source.

I'll never forget the cribbing that ensued if we'd be chatting endlessly for hours and if anyone would be asked to get the bottle of water filled , all hell would break loose and aruments and counter arguments would follow on why X should go and not Y or Z.If there is one thing the hostle has done it has made a lot us real lazy bums .

Things i will miss the most about college

Hostel mates
Daru parties
Watching max arbit movies in Hostel/Halls
Gaming like crazy on the LAN
Staying awake till 7 in the morning
Placement days
Scaring Juniors
Cribbing about having to study tech
And of course,Hostel mates

The last four years have been a real roller coaster ride.When i joined 4 years ago i was hell bent on an MBA , then wanted to go for MS in the US of A. Then poor acds made me scurry back to an MBA and here i am heading for IIML.

By the grace of god(read teachers :P) i have not had any supplies till now.Only the project evaluation remains.

May the force be with me.

Rohit

Curriculum Vitae

2005-05-01T11:14:00.000+05:30

THE ULTIMATE DIGITAl RESUME

P.S : Don't forget to turn on your speakers :)

Detour

2005-04-26T11:38:00.000+05:30

Make that IIML not IIMK :)

April rain :)

2005-04-24T22:20:00.000+05:30

It rained today in Delhi.Ah that smell of the wet earth, those beatiful drops of rain, i love it!

Just one thing that makes me a 'lil senti about the rain is the thought of not having someone to share it with :)

Ahhh I miss that soooooooooooooooooooooooo much.

It's just the most awesome feeling in the world.

They tell me it rains all the time in Kerala.....god bless the incoming batch :P

I am keeping all my fingers crossed.

ciao

P.S: Oh god,I miss her!

Coming back to me :)

2005-04-13T19:12:00.000+05:30

 Where were you when I was burnt and broken
While the days slipped by from my window watching
Where were you when I was hurt and helpless
Because the things you say and the things you do surround me
While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight into the shining sun


Lines from "Coming back to Life",Pink Floyd

The last week has ,without a doubt, been the best in my life.It wasn't so because of the fact that my dream of finally getting to study a field that i adore is coming true , it is because i have never learnt so much about myself,never been so strong, never been so satisfied and never been happier.

When i finally got to know what my results were( aka IIMK conversion) i was heartbroken to say the least, but held a straight face.The IIMC result brought me to the verge of breakdown but i survived :).

I thought a lot about what went wrong or where i let things slide.I didn't get anywhere for a while and was confused as hell.

Still in denial, i joined the IIMK 2007 Y! group.I learnt a lot about the college and more importantly the people coming there to study.Strangely enough, for a guy like me, I paid little attention to placements. As i got to know more and more people and their profiles, i was beginning to realise that this wasn't quite what i had imagined it to be.

With me being one of the two freshers in the group out of a total of 40, i started to feel better.I feel over the moon about the fact that i will actually have finance as a subject :), vishy and payne will understand.

I have decided to have a whale of a time at K and put in my best for the next two years of my life.

As far regrets go, I got none.

I do have a crib though.Now that we are through with the CAT n all.One of my best friends, my roomie(if he'll let me call myself that:), eh ) did not get through.I believe that few people deserve a seat in the IIMs more than him.Hemnani dude, you will, without a doubt, make it to where u want.

It will surprise many of you that inspite of 4 rejections and one conversion :) I feel i have got what i deserved.I have no complaints, people with better profiles and with more hard work got through where i got rejected.I am besides myself with excitement to go there, just a matter of two months now :).

Best of luck to all and to me :).

Rohit

P.S: This blog will now belong to a B-schooler :)
P.P.S: For some reason i wanted to post this in italic, nothing else :)

Nice!

2005-04-03T14:14:00.000+05:30

Allright, a post from me after a long time n thaat too a copy paste job.Anyways, these are two awesome articles borrowed from the net somewhere.I dont remember the sources 'coz i had done a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V long time back.The first one will make you laugh your guts out and the second one will bring you back to your senses.Both of them are must reads though.Have a look.

WORST EVER INTERVIEW

The liaison team for ICICI consisted of X and Y. They tried, as all liaison teams do, to soothe our frayed nerves. This included telling us possible questions, and we were told that the interview usually started with the question “Tell us something about yourself”
It is a question that I have historically never enjoyed. Responses in the past have included “Could you be clearer?”, “What exactly do you want to know about me?” or, worse still, “What aspect of me do you want to know about?”
But this time, thanks to being warned in advance, I was totally prepared. I marched into the ICICI interview room with an air of confidence. The panel consisted of a pass out and an HR lady.
“So, which are the other companies that you have been short listed for?”
This caught me like a bolt from the blue. It was like Caesar saying “Nice work, dude” instead of “Et tu Brutus”. “Hey, that’s not part of the script” was what I wanted to say.
What I said instead was hardly better. With consummate assurance, I started off: ”HSBC, …”
And then it hit me. I had not even applied to HSBC, which had made a short list a mathematical impossibility. Instead of continuing on, which would have made the gaffe inconspicuous, I silently thought about why I’d blurted out something that was as far removed from the truth as possible. I believe that the sight of bumps being given just before I was called had led to HSBC having, in management lingo, top of the mind recall.
So I paused for a considerable period of time. The chap looked at me and prompted: "Yeah, go on...”
“Oh”, said I, starting a bit, “well, Citibank, StanC, Pepsi …”
“Among these companies, which one would you prefer the most?”
If somebody had asked me about who won the 100 m gold in the 1988 Olympics, I’d almost certainly have given the same answer viz;
“HSBC”
I don’t know why I said that. All I know is that after I said this, panic seized me. At this rate, I didn’t know where I’d end up.
An ICICI guy might not be used to the paeans of HSBC sung with such regularity in an interview. Mildly surprised, he said:”You seem quite interested in HSBC. Tell us something more about it.”
“Well, you see, it’s one of the largest banks in the world”. Global statement, if ever there were one.
“Hmm. Go on.”
Considering my fixation on HSBC, he might have expected me to come up with all the fin ratios and what not. If he did, and he probably did, the answer would have shocked him.
“Well, that’s all that I … er , … remember” (recalling the words of wisdom that remember is always preferable to know since it assumes that you knew and forgot, and hence substituting the former for the latter), said I, sheepishly and abruptly.
There was silence all around for about five seconds. It was the kind of silence that gets on your nerves and can be described as creepily mournful, except that this was an interview going on and not a funeral. In these five seconds, I was rebuking myself for the mess I’d landed myself in and thinking of ways to clean it up. The alumnus might well have been wondering whether he was dreaming and wistfully regretting that somebody had pipped him to the adage “Fact is stranger than fiction”. The HR lady might have been thinking of the most innocuous question possible. The second statement can never be ascertained. What can, however, is that the HR dame did ask the most innocuous question possible.
‘Which are your favorite subjects?”
It was a rope being thrown out to a drowning man.
I could see a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. I replied with more enthusiasm on display that in the entire interview till then: “BIO and QAM.” (Behaviour In Organizations and Quantitative Analysis for Management.)
Most people would (and quite sensibly too) have left it there. The rope would have been eagerly grasped. But here was somebody hell bent on drowning for reasons that are yet to be discovered. They produced possibly the most amazing statement, in the sense that it was completely uncalled for.
“This is very peculiar. For QAM is the concretest of subjects and BIO the most abstract. QAM theories can be verified to be true, BIO theories cannot.”
The addendum, puzzling, dubious and superfluous as it was, might still have been pardonable. Except that HR people, whose bread and butter depend to a certain extent on BIO, do not like cocky youngsters denouncing its foundations. A side of the statement that had entirely escaped me, even as I reflected upon it with horror. But not for long. Making sure of this was the HR person, earlier trying to play the Good Samaritan, who now seemed to change roles rapidly.
“Could you”, she said, and I noticed that there was a disconcerting and unmistakable trace of asperity in her voice “elaborate?” She had, without doubt, fired the opening salvo.
I could, of course. There is always scope for taking things from bad to worse.
“What I’m trying to say is that sometimes BIO theories make the obvious things complicated. In fact, I am sure that some of them are wrong.”
Irrelevance is to be avoided, irreverence even more so. The combination is disastrous.
“Like?” , she countered, red in the face by now.
“Like..."
I stopped in mid sentence. What were the names of those horrid theories that we’d had to cram up? Ah, there was this one..
“... Theory X and Theory Y.”
“Ok, tell me about Theory X and Theory Y and prove that they are wrong.”, said she, leaning back in her chair with a forbidding stare and eagerly awaiting further blunders.
My heart sank. Just a bit. Proofs of abstract theories or their refutation were not exactly up my street. Still, I tried to muster up courage and continued.
“Theory X says that you cannot motivate people.”
“That”, said she, with a sardonic smile and barely concealed glee at winning the battle, if not the war, almost before it had begun” is Theory Y.”
It is doubtful whether four words had ever demoralized me more. This was a chance to finally say something incontrovertible and I’d blown it up. That too when I’d had a 50% chance of getting the name right. The bard’s words “What’s in a name?” seemed the most rotten piece of poetry ever written. To my credit, I brushed that aside as if it were the tiniest flaw.
“Whatever. Then that’s Theory Y. So Theory X says that you can motivate people.”
“That’s right. Okay, let’s hear your rebuttal.”
Then it struck me.
I’d merely been on shaky ground so far, but had ventured into a quagmire now, and there could be no escape. For even in that frame of mind, I saw with crystal clarity that either you could motivate people or you couldn’t. One of the theories had to be right. Of all the darn theories I could have chosen, I had chosen a pair that nobody could ever disprove. I might as well have tried to solve the Rubik cube blindfolded
“Well”, I said quite forlornly, “consider this guy A and consider people trying to motivate him.”
While they were considering that, I was considering what to say next. What I followed this sentence up with nobody will ever know. And a good thing too. I spoke such arrant nonsense continuously for two minutes, about the guy and a billion scenarios and used the words “motivation”, “perhaps” and “maybe” a dozen times, that I stopped only when I ran out of words.
I said with innocence “So you see, they can’t be true.”, as if it were a natural conclusion of whatever had been said.
They didn’t say “Non sequitur.” Obviously they hadn’t understood. Nobody could have.
It is measure of their professionalism that only after this did they give up on me and the interview become more or less a farce. I was asked about the projects I had done, and when I mentioned the movie Apollo 13, they asked me what the management lessons from it were.
I singled out two lessons.
“The first one is to have a calm head in times of crisis.”
(They politely didn’t point out that apparently this lesson had fallen on deaf ears.)
They appreciated that. Was there still a miraculous recovery around the corner? The answer came sooner than I thought.
“And the second one is to plan for any unforeseen events.”
Dash! Immediately, I knew what was coming.
“Hang on, how is that possible?”
Another impossibility had to be explained away. Having already done this once a short time before and debating mentally whether to take up proving the improvable as an avocation, I stammered something about the past events could help us to forecast unforeseen events.
I don’t remember the questions asked after that. Not that it matters. They possibly wanted to bring the interview to some kind of sensible and sober conclusion. Since I was struggling to give a sane answer to the most common place of questions, it would have seemed a difficult task. They should have considered themselves lucky that after two minutes of mundane questions, it was over.
I came out, my head still spinning a bit when I thought about what had transpired for the past twenty minutes. I couldn’t help smiling at the crazy aspects, which in fact formed almost the entire interview.
“You’re all smiles! Cracked it, eh?" , said Y
“Not exactly”, said I, “They asked me about my favourite company and I said HSBC ...”
“Oh, that’s ok. Don’t worry too much about that. They might even like your frankness.”
“Hey, look here…”
How little did he know! Should I tell him the whole story? I felt sure that it’d take more time than he or I had, for another liaison team guy was waiting for me.

Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on defining success. July 2nd 2004

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep – so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not ‘his jeep’ but the government’s jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep – we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance – a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed – I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother’s chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition – delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, “You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it”. That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios – we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios – alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, “We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses”. His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant.

My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”. That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term “Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan” and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”. Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him – he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts – the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, “Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity – was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

Holi Mubarak Ho!

2005-03-26T19:45:00.001+05:30

Happy Holi Guys!

Hope you all have a helluva time!

P.S: Am having to deal with hell getting these colours off :)

Steven McCurry

2005-03-19T21:46:00.000+05:30

Mid sems goin on...IIML interview over...was very average...neways you can read it here

I was just looking at this site....its a truly awesome collection of stupendous photography...i really liked some of the pics and included the best ones on India on the blog.

I found the holi pic to be the most beautiful one of all of them....something bout the colours maybe...anwyayz if u liked these pics you can see more here.

Rohit

PS Edit: Apparently the site seems to have blocked my links...maybe they are copyrighted.Anywayz do visit the site for the pics.

IIMC interview done !

2005-03-16T00:45:00.001+05:30

Hey guys...

for IIMC interview click here

am too lazy to even copy-paste the whole thing and gotta prep for IIML tomorrow

ciao

Rohit

Get Real!

2005-03-11T02:45:00.000+05:30

Just watched a fascinating episode of “The contender” on AXN. It’s a reality show based on boxers. They’ve grouped up 16 boxers into two teams and the contenders from the groups fight each other on the basis of sudden death. The boxer left in the end wins a cool $ 1,000,000.00, ain’t that nice!

After switching channels I got HBO which had this nasty movie on flies or something just as gross so I flipped channels and finally got to Star world and a rather imaginatively named program called “Outback Jack” was on. This, again, was a reality show. The plot revolves around a man”Jack” from down under (Which would explain outback) and many beautiful women who are in a race to woo him. Since I watched only like half an episode I cant really say if there is any money involved or not!

Other shows that I can recall which were similar to the one above are

For love or money: 1 guy, many girls and in the end the girl who is left is given a choice between 1 million dollars and the guy. Just for the record the girl chose the million dollars and dumped the guy!

For love or Money 2: The girl mentioned above was given a choice to go for the money or take a shot at 12 guys to find “true love” but forfeit the money.The guy she chose, rejected the money(2 million dollars this time) and chose her!

(P.S.: They got to keep the 2 million dollars in the end too)

Temptation island: Many couples on the brink of marriage, taken to an island with hot chickas and greek gods to test the participants faith! These are the kind of programs that give TVs gonorrhea!

“The apprentice” is another show of the same genre (i.e. reality TV not sleazy reality TV).It is produced by that bastard (Donald Trump!) and revolves around “managing” events. Here is the plot, there is a group of young and talented professionals from all walks of life, and they are given opportunities to show their organizing skills and team skills by way of managing big events like Concerts or Openings or sometimes with something as simple as a pet care clinic. I am fairly sure that the prize in this one is monetary; correct me if I am wrong guys.A friend of mine from IITD seems to think that this show is the best thing that happenend to him during engineering.

There are others like who dares wins, fear factor, Indian idol (the Americans started it and many Indians seemed to have liked the Indian version) and of course the one that started it all….The Survivor!

So what makes these shows so successful? Why do we love to see reality TV? Maybe its because it’s a lot of fun to watch an normal person respond to abnormal situations or maybe its because of the “real” emotions of the participants or maybe just the vicarious thrill!

Whatever it is , reality TV is here to stay!

P.S: Amazingly enough, I have still not started prepping for IIMC on 15th.

'K'ool interview @ K

2005-03-09T17:35:00.000+05:30

I've been a bit of a lazy arse for the last few dayz...too much sleeping and no work...anywayz, my IIMK interview was on 6th March @ 9 Am @ IMI Delhi....here's the transcript...

GD: well I had a gr8 GD this time, not a vague wun like IIMA...

The PI:

M- Me P- Stud prof S- Silent prof M- good mornin Sir!
P- Mornin ,morning!
P- which companies have ya been placed in?
M- TCS n Mindtree…
P- which wun r ya gone choose?
M- Mindtree
P- Why
M- talks bout smaller company, higher growth, more interaction wid seniors, involved in social welfare programs
P- how do u define growth?(why am I asked such global questions )
M- revenues, employees arbit chit chat….
P- how does revenue growth affect u as an employee?
M- If the mgt is willing, benefits passed on to employees….
.S - is that the only criteria then? Money?
M- No sir, one of the criteria, but an imp one
S- what else?
M- learnin opportunities
P- howz Mindtree better than TCS in those terms?
M- sir it has a flatter hierarchy and open culture….even at the lowest rung of chain I can go upto seniors n talk to ‘em…get to learn a lot more…
P- So has mindtree done justice to what it planned?
M-ya sir one of the fastest growing companies n USP was a stud mgt team, still there…somewhere mentioned bout work culture…
P- relate work culture to the term culture…
M- globe………
P- so what are these employer rating agencies?
M- rates on basis of diff parameters…employee satisfaction…etc
P- name one
M- Hewitt associates
P- which companies at the top?
M—Fedex and TI…positions 1 and 2 reversed this year
P – so tell me…relate revenue growth to employee satisfaction…
M- relates…
P- so we have a kind of a circle dun we/
M- yes sir…
P- so who loses if I pay the employees more
M- sir since the co has fixed resources…less capital left to invest back into the company…
P- ok suppose if I own a shop, there’s a shop floor guy n a manager…the manager decides to give him more money on the basis of better performance…dun I lose then?
M- sir if the revenue has gone up means the floor guy has done a gd job, hence rewarding him is fair since he is the reason that sales going up…while u might get less profit in short term, in the end u will benefit…
P- relate this to dividends(me had written stock mkts in interests )
M- u pay div, have less to invest in company left but retain suitable investors..blah blah
P- which companies tend not to pay dividends…
M- depends both on company policay as well as market culture…in UK there is a culture of giving dividends come wht may, while In India a company which is new and needs capital to invest back may not issue dividends
P- which company gives div?
M- Infy did+ bonus shares…
P- which dun?
M- dunno any specific company but like I told before based on capital requirements
P- c’mon u r close to the answer..stretch ur mind a lil…so would a company like L & T give div?
M- possible coz it’s a large company with adequate resources n wud like to retain faithful investors…
P- do u invest?
M- only by proxy, dun earn meself so if I convince my pop then he invests..
P- which company?
M- Dena bank…IPO…globe
P- u’ve mentioned abt case studies …u organize?
M- take part as well as organize…both @ coll n outside….
P- recent?
M- globe abt case study contest thread I saw on an online forum
P- which forum?
M- PG
P- when did it start?
M- ‘02
P- we have a student here, he is also part of this forum, ravi
M- yes yes, know him
S(Now silent guy wakes up to kick my ass using the tool called “acads”)
S- so communication engineer huh?
M- yes sirrrrrrrrrrr (plz dun do this to me man!)
S- so I see u’ve done a course on antennaes
M- Yes( Now way man! Anything but antennas (plz stop plz…)
S- so whats this DTH
M- tells lil bit…
S- howz it diff frm erlier…
M- talks abt AM FM QAM
S- modulation haan?M- yes sir…
S- where dus it take place? Set top box?
M- no sir demodulation on set top box modulation at source…
S- draws dish antenna n dipole antenna…now @ wt height is the dish @?
M- no idea sir
S- frequency?
M- GHz
S- earlier?
M- not sure but mebbe 900 Mhz but not sure…
S- so u mentioned in the GD bout regulatory authorities….can u name any?
M- TRAI
P- but that’s for a specific sector…
M- yes sir telecom…
S- any authority for all bureaus?
M- dunno
S- CVC?
M- ya sirr…chief vigilance commission
S- dya know that they’ve some out wid ratings for IAS?
M- no sir…
S- its on their website…
M- haven’t visited it sir
P- ok, any other calls?
M- all except I
P- had any interviews yet?
M- yes, IIMA
P- hmmm, allright then All the best!( Man why me , why do they wish me this in all the intws )
P- thank you Rohit
M – thanks sir…n walks out

It lasted about 20-25 minutes…Aprrt from the acads part I think the interview went well…I have a gud feeling bout this but gawd only knows what the people frm IIMs are looking for….waiting for feedback…Ciao

Rohit

P.S: the guy after me was also wished “ATB” but he had a fantabulous PI…so I’m not worried bout it

I am me !

2005-03-04T01:57:00.000+05:30

If there was ever an ironical statement, this is it: We are all unique, just like everyone else.

Yes, as obvious as the title sounds sometimes in life we try so hard not to be ourselves that it’s silly. I have noticed this particular thing especially in the past one month with the blog and interview preparations being the main harbingers of this realization.

Now if I talk about the interview part first. I am a guy who is not the hardest worker in the world, period! I can’t cram stuff simply because it’ll get me better grades, I will rather read a book that really interests me rather than one that’ll add more “value”, I’d rather hang out at my beloved hostel than read another chapter of Digital communication. I would choose having a beer binge followed by a rocking JAM session (aka Thursday) than a session spent on studying my B.Tech. Project. I’d rather work on something that works my grey cells crazy and doesn’t fetch me anything rather than working on mind- numbing crap which gets me closer to some material goal.

I know that all this will sound amazingly irresponsible to many of you reading this but that’s who I am! Irresponsible, yeah, if you think so, but I really don’t give a shit if you ask me. I am tired of trying to become a “ghissu” (aka bookworm) , sorry that just ain’t me!

I have been trying so hard for the past few days to fight the urge and not to have fun and study things that I have studied before and cram them up just that little bit better but I have now realized that there is no point fretting over what is not my nature. I can study things only once, period!

I have wondered throughout my four years in college about what it is that makes people study so damn hard and what drives them into such cramming sessions. Now I realize that they are just like that. Half of them don’t know what they are doing and 99% don’t know why they are doing whatever it is that they are doing!

This particular thing is not just with regards to studying. I had posted while ago about a girl I have had a soft spot for since the last 10 years. Now at least 10 people (including her!) Since then have told me that why is it that I cling to the past and why don’t I embrace new relationships. I thought a lot about what everyone told me and was confused as to why I had these unending thoughts about the same person for a whole decade while others seem to fall in love faster than they can learn the other person’s name!

The answer was simple, I am me.

Interview @ IIMA

2005-02-24T17:39:00.000+05:30

Well I am back after the IIMA interview followed by two days of lazing around in the hostel. So let’s get to the ahd interview. Here is the whole story from the time I woke up at 6 in the morn….

Woke up, shivered in the damned Delhi cold, was amused at the fact that I could wake up at 6, never thought I could do that. Took bath and groomed myself likei was going for a marriage proposal. Read the newspaper and tried to cram up as much of it as I could.

Got to IIFT some 1 hour before the interview….first interview you see, dun think me a geek :P. Talked to some people who had reached before me even, damned geeks :P! Chatted a lil bit with the junta and found out that EVERYONE was an engineer, five from my college itself. The process started exactly at 9 Am sharp and we were taken upstairs to be butchered by hungry IIMA profs.

Names were called out and I was in a batch wid 3 other peeps from my college.So we went in for the case study and were introduce to IIMA by a prof and the case study started.It was absolute globe all the way with people bullshitting excessively.Overall me thinks I did not create any mess at all, tried to keep the group under control a couple of times and tried to earn brownie points by creating a chance to speak for a guy who had a good point but coudnt get a chance.

Out of the room, everyone seemed to agree that case was average at best and group was the same.

Now the all important PI,

I- me , A- acads heavy guy, M- Middle guy, O- Old dood

I enter the room and put my file a lil close to the panel.

M- do u want us to see your file?

I- yes sir

M- why, nething special in it?

I- Sir, since his is a short span of time you may not be able to see all facets of me , this is a glimpse of it.

A- gimme the file.

M- so what were the people outside talking about?

I- arbit chit chat, asking the ppl who’ve alredy had the interview about wats goin on.

M- so what did they say?

I- sirrrr the interview are acads heavy(me smiles and interviewer smiles too, seems he knows that I am one of those engineers who have no idea what they did in the last 4 years.)

M- so what do you expect?

I- Stress interview…

M- what is a stress interview?

I- tells

M- is it a good way?

I- one way of testing pros and cons.

M- ok so how did you prepare for the CAT

I- test series..

M- how did it help

I- helped me in knowing where I stand with respect to others and also got an idea about the paper…

M- what practice for GD ?

I- none sir, we used o do a lot of GDs in the hostel so did not feel any need to do more.

M- but this is the real thing..

I –yes sirrrrr

M- what about interview how did u prepare for that?

I- brushed up acads, reread some of fav books..

M- what kinda books?

I- sir Toffler, biraphies by studs in business

M- Toffler doesn’t write about business…

I- but about society sir and that includes economy

M- what business books?

I – fav is liar’s poker

M- tell me abt it..

I – Sit its about and art history major who goes on to work at salomon brothers, book is on I-banking in the 80s and why salomon brothers fell.

M- which other books?

I- Sculley, Iacocca..

M- who is Iacocca?

I- tell him

M- whats he doin now?

I- dunno bout hium, tho know bout sculley, jobs etc

M- tell me abt sculley

I- talked about the book “From Pepsi to apple”, and about Apple’s culture and quotes the line when steve jobs asked sculley “Do you want to keep selling sugared water or change the world?”

A(Finally waking up)- whoa!dude! dun u think thats arrogant?

I- Sir I think it simply shows his belief in what he is doing and sums up what was going on at apple at that point of time…

A- look at what is happening to apple now!

I- sir apple has now started doing very well after the introduction and massive success of the i-pod and earlier the I-mac

A- what was so special that was happening at Apple at that point of time?

I- sir in the 40 pages or so that have described the environ ment at apple, it is amazing to see the kind of enthusiasm that people like wozniack, Hertzberg had shown.Sometimes we don’t realize what a big part apple has played and how it has touched us.the mouse was designed by wozniack, the drag bar by Hertzberg, its not hard to see how important these thinga re today.Another thing about the apple office then was that it was much like a hostel than a corporate office. No restrictions and total focus on innovation.

A- how do u measure innovation?

M- originality of the idea and its practicality in real life.

A- who judges these parameters?

M- sir since u have asked me about my opinion so I would be the judge.

(somehow the conversation came back to apple and I mentioned how apple had been the first company to be in constant touch with the developer community)

A- so what if tomorrow a company is in contact with the janitors, would that become significant?

M- Sir here the developer community was an integral part of the computer industry and the knew what was going on. Even apart from that apple was the first company to tell the ordinary man that the computer was something that he could use be it for business or for enjoyment and all that at a reasonable price with models like lisa and macintosh.

A- ok, tell me about you final year project

M – sir it is on developing non gaming applications of gaming devices, lemme give u a background on this…..(I go on for some time and end at FFT, which is Fast fourier transform, for the unitiated)

A- wats FFT

M- told and led him to DFT

A- wats DFT

M – told and led to FT

A- wats FT

M- told

A- write the formula

M- writes and forgets the dt in the integral

A- corrects and asks me to draw FT of electricity supply

M- draws and convinces A

A- what are drichlets conditions

M- (happy that he knows the answer) goes on and tells him everything

(Now old guy wakes up)

O- so Rohit, what is this FMCG?

M- fast moving consumer goods

O- name a few companies

M- P&G, HLL, Dabur, Nestle

O- ok so can u tell me what are white goods?

M- sir I am not aware of that.

O- now Rohit something has been bothering me, I see that companies come out with offers such as buy 2 get one free, buy 3 get one free tell me why doesn’t something like this happen with people selling jewelry

M- can I get a second to think sir?

O- sure sure

M(thinks abt question, suddenly Carmen electra pops up in my head and I tellmy self to concentrate on the luxury goods industry)

M- Sir the luxury goods industry caters to a different market segment which is more quality conscious than price, secondly it may not be cost effective in such an industry and third the Indian society ha an affinity for the yellow metal and such giimicks aren’t really necessary

O- Anything else Rohit?

M- that’s all I can think of at the moment sir

The panel indicate that the interview is over and asks me to take a toffee, I take one and thank the panel and walk out of the door, not knowing what just happened.

My interview went on for about 30 minutes and the panel was very nice and put me at ease.I haven’t really been able to judge much of it till now. Do give me you feedback guyz.

Whos I am tired like hell, that’s probably the longest post I have ever written.

Now off to a sumptuous lunch and then prepping towards IIMK on 6^th March.

*Yawns and stretches his body*

ciao

rohit

Bum hoon main !

2005-02-18T13:09:00.000+05:30

While others work hard for their interviews, I have just come back home after spending two dayz of aish in the hostel. I had deluded myself by thinking that I would go and study there, that’s a laugh, anyway In the end I played flash aka I gambled for almost 12 outta the 48 hours, slept another 12, another 12 spent in bakchodi and add another 6 for food, that’s 42 outta 48 hours, and the rest I studied. I mean, how can one study when you have the most lazy bums in the world as your friends. In fact I would say that when we join the industry one day, people will be astonished at how little work we can do while sounding excessively exhausted.

Apart from the BS, read Liar’s poker, a book on investment banking by Philip Lewis. Its about the experiences of a guy working at Salomon brothers. Cool book. Me really want to work in an I-bank some day, max fun career, that one is.

Anyways, due to lack of time and a being a lazy bum, me will get back to reading a project that moi will claim as mine in the IIMA interview :D. My own project is on some speech recognition using neural networks which sounds like “abakukumelupoporakokuko” to me.

Wish me luck guys, I need it here. I will be back after my II….nono lemme write the whole thing, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad interview on the 22^nd of February.

Damn those bastards, I am taking a gun wid me and I will not be shy of taking it out if they dare to ask me about analog electronics.

Dholakia Dood , Your days are numbered.

Adios

Rohit

Aaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhh!!!!!

2005-02-14T21:38:00.000+05:30

Slept some 15 hours in the last 4 days, dammit!

Am back after a while...Cant believe that i am having to work my ass off....this is not what i am made for, lol.
Still neck deep in interview preparations.Just wrote my IIMB SOP...guys have a look and give me
some honest feedback...i need it ASAP...have to send it tomorrow.

Here goes,

“The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become” these words by Harold Taylor define my philosophy in life. I believe that for me to achieve my potential, I must pursue a field that excites me. My interactions with the field of management, in the form of case studies, business plan competitions and literature, have been thoroughly stimulating and have strengthened my conviction to pursue a career in the same.

An avid blogger and a voracious reader, my belief in the power of ideas stems from my upbringing, particularly because of my brother, whom I see as my idol. Coming from a family having strong belief in the values of humility and altruism I have tried to contribute my bit to society as a teacher and mentor to homeless children.

My experiences in organizing various competitions in college and being part of the editorial team of the college magazine have given me useful insights into managing diverse teams and have hardened me as a manager.

With a stress on Global as well as Local, Current as well as emerging, conceptual as well as Analytical, IIMB will equip me with all the essential ingredients for effective management.

When cupid struck !

2005-02-07T01:00:00.000+05:30

“Aag ka kya hai pal do pal mein lagti hai ,
Bujhte bujhte ek zamaana lagta hai”

No lines carry more truth than these.

1995

I was in 7th when I first saw her, my friend had forced me to come and see the “new” girl he had discovered. I didn’t think much of it and went back to class when the lunch break ended.

1996-2001

We had all the sections in our school reshuffled; she was a classmate of mine after that. We became friends. We used to sit together and she would shout at me endlessly for not sitting properly and what not.I can still remember those fights. I loved to talk to her, just look at her and used to get that tingling feeling you read about in books.

I was in love. Pure and simple. Never ever wanted to do anything but look at her. Didn’t even want to talk, just look. I would smile if I saw her smiling. I would feel sad if she was sad. I would dream about us being together. Innumerable times I thought that I should go upto her and tell her everything I felt about her.Finally gathered the strength to somehow tell her. I sent my friend with card that said I loved her. She threw it in the bin and told my friend that she would never talk to me again. I was devastated. But I knew I couldn’t stand the fact that I wouldn’t talk to her. I told my friend to go tell her that it was all a big joke. Ironic that it has become just that now, a joke.

After that things moved on, we remained friends on and off, sometimes not talking for months. She started acting aloof and I knew it would never happen.

2001- present

College came and went. Girlfriends came and went.
She’s been in a relationship for 6 years. She wants to get married to the guy.
I have had 7 girlfriends since then.
I still look at her pic.
I still dream about her.
I still feel my eyes getting moist when I read my diary from school.
I miss her voice.
I miss her eyes.
I still love her.
I met her when I was 11, I turned 21 two days ago.

I can’t imagine my life if I hadn’t met her. She doesn’t know what she meant to me or what changes she brought in me.I know it is stupid but I still want remain in love with her forever. I know now that it will never happen and I will never tell her because that would make things even worse. I just can’t help feeling like a kid when I think about her. I love the feeling of dreaming when the sun is out. I feel alive when I think about her smile, her voice, her.

Lemme just sign off now lest someone thinks that I’ve gone nuts.

Ciao

Rohit

Slog Season Starts

2005-02-02T22:37:00.000+05:30

Have been really busy for the last few days. Working hard for the Interviews, Finally! Enjoying it thoroughly, be it the incessant reading of new books, articles, keeping in touch with stock prices, thinking about answers to interview questions. All of it seems really interesting at the moment. Some 20 dayz left for the IIMA interview so working as hard as I can. Still worried about acads, have started in bits and pieces, hopefully it’ll all come together in another week.

Had an outstandingly good interview at CL, forgive the immodesty but really kicked some a$$ this time. Got great feedback and hope that all goes well from here. The panel didn’t give any negative feedback at all. I knew the interview went well but didn’t know it was this good. Sorry if I sound like I’m bragging, I’m just really happy, nothing else.

Well, apart from that, I had an interesting experience today. Went to Prayas (An NGO that works to help homeless children).It is quite an eye opener to go to such an institution, the reality hits hard when you see so many children, orphans who do not who their parents are, and you realize how lucky you’ve been to have been born and brought up in a family where some one or the other is looking after you at all times and making sure that you get everything that you want. Kind of made me feel guilty about all that I have and I was ashamed at the really trivial things we crib about. Be it that mobile that has a camera or that laptop with Bluetooth, all problems seem trivial when compared to what these little children have faced so early in life.

Anyways, I am trying to organize a medical camp soon with the help of my brother’s colleagues. To my pleasant surprise the first person I called up was more than happy to come and look at the children so we should have a camp within the next week or so. Hope it all works out so that these children have one thing less to worry about.

Will be blogging about my preparations as they go on.

Ciao for now

Rohit

Globalization - The innocent scapegoat

2005-01-29T15:15:00.000+05:30

Have you ever stopped and tried to think how profoundly our lives have been permeated by the symbols of globalization?

Let us look at what a student like me living in the year 2005 needs\uses. Necessities include, Food, air, clothes, books, communication devices, watch, TV, newspaper, some mode of transport, though there are more I have only these at the top of my mind.

Now lets look at who manufactures these.I’ll take my own example, I use a cell phone manufactured by LG (A South Korean Company), the TV that I have in my room is made by a Japanese company, Sony, the newspaper that I read (supposedly!) Economic Times is owned by Bennett Colman Ltd. , My watch is manufactured by Casio(American?, definitely not an Indian company again!), I wear jeans manufactured by an American company , My bike is a product of the Hero-Honda collaboration Honda is Japanese.Almost all the books I have read in college and other general leisure reading have been by foreign authors. Even the damn blades are made by Gillette!

How could I forget my dear PC, now lets see, as I look around the products are made by Samsung(South Korea), Intel, HP, Nvidia, only the UPS is Indian!

I am sure most of you will have a similar kind of story, now so much debate goes on whether or not globalization is good or not, I ask “can the urban population now do without globalization?”. What if all of a sudden you take all these things away from the urban consumer? This is a rather interesting concept, In the book “Future shock “ Alvin Toffler writes about how the human race will have a tough time adapting to the changes in culture and in fact a crisis may arise due to the extremely fast pace of change.

Haven’t we become so dependent on these products that any debate on the underlying concept behind their existence is superfluous? Then why do we have so much debate, and to tell you the truth I have never ever understood how globalization “exacerbates” the poverty of the poor. If someone is unemployed and is unskilled, but still some MNC sets up a sweatshop and gives them a job then at least they can feed themselves.

No one forces the people to work in sweat shops; they do it voluntarily, simply because they need the money to survive. Rather than blaming the MNCs, like many leftist politicians choose to do, we should look at where our system has failed. Why not blame the endless list of bureaucratic procedures that are strangling the system and hammering its efficiency? Or why not question the fact that only 15% of the money allocated to sarva shiksha abhiyaan is actually granted?

If today the power sector needs Rs. 165,000 crores of investment to satisfy the growing Industry, then the only way this capital will land in India is by shedding the “we are still hung up on socialism and we choose not to move our asses” attitude.

It is frustrating for me to see that I live in a country with such massive potential and still the progress is only a modicum of what can be done. Why is India lagging behind? When will the culture of corruption end? When will the politicians start acting like responsible civil servants? When will we accept global cultural practices? Will it take another rising of the masses; I don’t see any other solution.

Ironically, I feel that if ever an uprising against the government will take place, it will be in rural India. An India that doesn’t understand the global economic scenario but does feel the frustration of endless poverty. These will be the people who, in the last 50 years, have been promised everything they could ever dream of, but have been given only hardship and hunger.

God help my country.

"Tech"tonic Shifts

2005-01-28T19:32:00.001+05:30

Started with acads for the interview
Seemed like such a long time since I had seen tech related stuff, kinda enjoyed doing it. Finished one book (Yaaay!) though ‘twas the easiest subject…Digital Electronics

Coming soon are demons like DSP, Digi comm.(I literally shiver when I think bout this subject), Analog Elec ( not exactly my strong area), Electrical Machines ( the most abstruse subject EVER!aaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhh!)

Apart from that…preppin for the intw on Monday( another Mock!) .Interestingly enough, The feedback that the CL faculty gave me was that my MBA answer(which I had prepared beforehand) needed some work but my “Introduce yourself” answer(which was Impromtu) was gr8! Something to think about there, mebbe I should give all my interviews unprepared.

Not surprisingly they gave me “Needs to work hard” for the general awareness feedback…lol..mebbe next time they’ll ask me” Gimme the name of 10 chief ministers”…wunder if they have some kind of fetish with the number 10…now that I think about it…10 stocks..10 mutual funds..10 gov…10 lt gov..seems to be some pattern here.

Meeting school friends tonight for dinner…will be a relief from IIM\CAT and all that...

Anyways, time to get back to the drudgery of Analog Electronics, Sedra and Smith you better watch out!

Mock Interview #1- Is this the sign of things to come?

2005-01-28T04:49:00.000+05:30

I had my first mock interview today at CL. I was screwed big time.Heres’ the transcript and do gimme some feedback guys.

Me-Rohit, Panel: P1-lady, P2-guy
P1: tell us some thing bout yourself
Me: told
P2: Why MBA
Me: 4 years in coll, did nuthin but took part in mgmt. contests, enjoyed it thoroughly. read books on mgm, journals, like ‘em.Interaction with studs., faadu profs,infra
P2: what bout 4 years in engg….why don’t u use that?
Me: repeats…even when in tech school, took part in mgmt stuff, want to create max “value”…limited scope as an engineer…
P2: don’t gimme vague and superfluous answers
Me: will enhance skill sets….blah blah
P1: read newspapers?which ones?
Me: yeah, ET.
P1: which company owns ET
Me: Bennett colmann
P2: In how many cities is it printed?
Me: no idea sir
P2: Headlines in todays edition
Me: told
P1: Interest in stock mkt haan?
Me: yeah
P2: what is a mutual fund?
Me:told
P2: Name 10 in India
Me:LIC,UTI cholamandalam,HDFC, SBi LIC….can recall only these sir
P2: how many schemes of SBI
Me:87(thot I read it somewhere…P2 nods…,methinks he didn’t know it either)
P2 : what is I banking?
Me: told…bout private wealth mgmt and other shit like they maximize returns with least risk….
P2: whats the scene in india?
Me: not too many here, merril lynch, morgan Stanley,Deustch bank….GS doesn’t have even an office in India…
P2: where do they invest?
Me:stock mkts
P2: which sector…
Me: dunno exactly but methinks more like an index fund…balanced investement across all sectors(P2 nods again…I am sure he knew nothing bout this)
P2: ok…what price is ranbaxy trading at?
Me:990
P2: SBI?
Me: 630?
P2: sure?
Me:errrrrrr……not exactly…
P2: gimme quotes of any 10 stocks..
Me: for some reason forgot almost everthing…cud give only 3-4
P2: hafta check that…smiles wickedly…
P1: lets come to acads
Me: nooooooooooooo…….
P1: GSM?
Me:told
P2:CDMA?
Me: told
P2: compare…
Me: ok….gsm better qual, cdma cheaper, higher capacity…
P2:what do u know bout 8085…
Me: mumbled summin
P2: 8086?
Me: additions to 8085…16 bit paging, segmentation,can address more memory, higher clk freq…
P2; which companies manufacture these?
Me: Intel, Atmel…Motorola did 68000 viz very similar….
P!: what is a bio chip
Me: dunno
P!: why is a chip called a chip?
Me:*baffled*…goes on about how they chip wafers off the semiconductor mass)
P1, P2: both smile…wryly
P2: who is prez of India
Me:told
P1: vice prez?
Me: told
P1: previous vece prez…
Me: dunno….mebbe APJ?
Both : whaaaaaaaatttt?
P2: gdp of India
Me:$477 billion
P2:talk bout ITES sector
Me:talks
P2: which five year plan going on?
Me: 10th
P2: salient features
Me: gawd only knows …
P2: gimme names of 10 governors in India
Me: ( I was like….faakkk dude what the hell r u asking me?)…dunno
P2: lieutenant governors?
Me:dunno
P2: diff b\w lt governor and governor?
Me: lieutenant is subordinate…
P2: sure..
Me:not really..
P2:full form of UPA
Me:told
P2:gimme 5 parties in their alliance…
Me: cong, RJD,DMK,CPI(M),SDF..last wun was a tukka since I cud not recall anymore
P2: achievement of UPA..
Me: another vague anwswer
P2:handling of Tsunami
Me:blabbers some inanities about how they refused aid frm other countries to work independently..
P2: ok Rohit why should we not take u..
ME:I haven’t answered all the questions u asked me..(should have said..most but said some
P2: what will u bring to our insti..
Me: have done comm. Service have seen plight of ppl…will bring a different perspective and hence will diversity…
P1: thank you
ME: me sheepishly thanx em and go out thinking bout how it cud go so badly

Nothing on my strong hobbies like reading and blogging ;-)
Damn! Only some 3 weeks left now…gotta really pull up my socks…
ciao

News that makes me think

2005-01-24T15:30:00.000+05:30

5 people killed as army jawans throw them out of the Farakka Express

The army jawans told others passengers to get out the compartement without rhyme or reason.When some protested, they were thrown out of the train and then were run over by a passing train.Sad really, that our “glorious” army harbors such maniacs. Incidents like these highlight the value of life in India. Imagine the repercussions if something like this happened in a country like Sweden\Norway\ Switzerland, where the population is still small enough to make them respect the value of a human being and feel the pain when fellow citizens are murdered.

3 % reservation for disabled in IAS.

I will not say that I understand the pain of being physically challenged because that would be an insult to the suffering of those who were dealt a hard hand by luck but I will voice my disapproval against this decision.This action was taken after Ravi Arora , a physically challenged IAS aspirant was denied a seat because he was physically handicapped .What I don’t understand is that how does this incident warrants a reseravation of 3%? Why not make I clear to the selection committee that the candidate must not be rejected\selected based on is physical capabilities.Why this obsession with creating quotas?

DMK alleges misuse of Tsunami Relief Funds

Now there are two things possible here.

DMK is right: How low can our politicians and bureaucrats fall? Stealing money from people who have lost homes, families and livelihood.
DMK is wrong and is simply alleging to gain political mileage out of a disaster that killed over 1,50,000 people.
So you see, neither scenario makes me especially proud of my country.

Father sells child for Rs 500 to cremate wife

Don’t know how to react to this.

Spot the Difference

2005-01-23T15:09:00.000+05:30

1970s
Billy Joel : Piano Man

Sing us a song, you're the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for a melody
And you've got us feelin' alright

Now John at the bar is a friend of mine
He gets me my drinks for free
And he's quick with a joke or to light up your smoke
But there's someplace that he'd rather be
He says, "bill, I believe this is killing me."
As the smile ran away from his face
"Well I'm sure that I could be a movie star
If I could get out of this place"

Noww Paul is a real estate novelist
Who never had time for a wife
And he's talkin' with Davy,
who's still in the navy
And probably will be for life

And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Yes, they're sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it's better than drinkin' alone

sing us a song you're the piano man
sing us a song tonight
well we're all in the moodfor a melody
and you got us feeling alright

It's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday
And the manager gives me a smile
'Cause he knows that it's me they've been comin' to see
To forget about life for a while

And the piano, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, "Man, what are you doin' here."

sing us a song you're the piano man
sing us a song tonight
well we're all in the mood for a melody
and you got us feeling alright

***********************************************
2000s
Eminem - I don't give a fuck

Slim Shady, brain dead like Jan BradyI'm a M80,
you Lil' like that Kim lady
I'm buzzin, Dirty Dozen, naughty rotten rhymer
Cursin at you players worse than Marty Schottenheimer
You wacker than the motherfucker you bit your style from
You ain't gonna sell two copies if you press a double album
Admit it, fuck it, while we comin out in the open
I'm doin acid, crack, smack, coke and smokin dope then
My name is Marshall Mathers, I'm an alcoholic (Hi Marshall)
I have a disease and they don't know what to call it
Better hide your wallet cause I'm comin up quick to strip your cash
Bought a ticket to your concert just to come and whip your ass
Bitch, I'm comin out swingin, so fast it'll make your eyes spin
You gettin knocked the fuck out like Mike Tyson
The +Proof+ is in the puddin, just ask the Deshaun Holton
I'll slit your motherfuckin throat worse than Ron Goldman

So when you see me on your block with two glocks
Screamin _Fuck the World_ like Tupac
I just don't give a fuuuuuck!!
Talkin that shit behind my back, dirty mackin
tellin your boys that I'm on crack
I just don't give a fuuuuuck!!
So put my tape back on the rack
Go run and tell your friends my shit is wack
I just don't give a fuuuuuck!!
But see me on the street and duck
Cause you gon' get stuck, stoned, and snuffed
Cause I just don't give a fuuuuuck!!

***********************************************

Need I say more!

Well done, Mr. Mehta!

2005-01-22T02:30:00.000+05:30

I have been taking GD\PI with an IIMA pass out named Malay Ray. Now that dude has set out on the unenviable task of making us ignorant engineers appear as if we are aware of what is happening in the world. So he has been teaching us about everything from the power sector to telecom to banking to stock markets!

Now, just a couple of days ago, he was talking about the Harshad Mehta scam. After hearing what really happened I was truly amazed at the intelligence of the man. Sad really that he decided to use it the wrong way.

The Harshad Mehta scam:

Well, I just learnt it a couple of days ago, I am assuming that most of the junta is as ignorant as me and will be just as unaware. So here goes the most interesting scam ever!

In the early 1990s, the banks in India had to maintain a particular amount of their deposits in government bonds. This ratio was called SLR(Statutory Liquidity Ratio).Each bank had to submit a detailed sheet of its balance at the end of the day and also show that there was a sufficient amount invested in government bonds.

Now, the government decided that the banks need not show their details on each day, they need to do it only on Fridays. Also, there was an extra clause that said that the average %age of bond holdings over the week needs to be above the SLR but the daily %age need not be so. That meant that banks would sell bonds in the earlier part of the week and then buy bonds back at the end of the week. The capital freed in the starting of the week could then be invested.

Now, at the end of the week many banks would be desperate to buy bonds back. This is where the broker comes in. The broker knew which bank had more bonds (called ‘plus’) and which has less than the required amount (called ‘short’). He then acts as the middleman between the two banks.

Harshad Mehta was one such broker.

He worked as a middle man between many banks for a long time and gained the trust of the banks’ senior management.

Lets say that there are two banks A(short) and B(plus).Now what Harshad Mehta did was that he told the banker at A that he was dealing with many banks and hence did not know who would he deal in the end with. So he said that the bank should write the cheque in his name rather than the other bank (which was forbidden by law), so that he could make the payment to whichever bank was required. Since he was a trusted broker, the banks agreed.

Then, going back to the example of bank A and B, he took the money from A and went to B and said that he would pay the money on the next day to B but he needed the bonds right now (for A).But he offered a 15 % return for bank B for the one day extension. Bank B readily agreed with this since it was getting such a nice return.

Now since Harshad Mehta was dealing with many banks at the same time he could then keep some capital with him at all times. For eg. He takes money from A on Monday, and tells B that he’ll pay on Tuesday, then he takes money from C on Tuesday and tells D that he’ll pay on Wednesday and the money he gets from C is paid to B and as a result he has some working capital with him at all times if this goes on with other banks throughout the week.

The banks at that time were not allowed to invest in the equity markets. Harshad Mehta had very cleverly squeezed some capital out of the banking system. This capital he invested in the stock market and managed to stoke a massive boom. He took the price of ACC from 200 to 9000.Thats an increase of 4400%!!!The market went up like crazy and the bulls were on a mad run.

Since he had to book profits in the end, the day he sold was the day when the market crashed. The same day Vijaya Bank chairman committed suicide by jumping from the top of the banks’ office. The chairman knew that when it would become public that he had written cheques in the name of Mehta, he would be dead meat.

One rather unknown fact about this scam is that there was a very important player in this scam who managed to keep a very low profile. That man was Nimesh Shah.He was just as involved as Harshad Mehta but he knew how keep out of the hands of the law. Nimesh Shah still deals in the stock market and is known to be a heavy player.

Harshad Mehta is now dead. It is rumored that when he died, he still had 10% of ACC shares with him.

The damn chicken!

2005-01-17T23:30:00.000+05:30

I have just lumbered my way on to the bed after almost falling to the ground laughing. Wondering why? I just read a nice long list of jokes.Now,One of the oldest jokes in history starts with the question “Why did the chicken cross the road”. Each person would answer this question with his own particular mindset. Here are a few such answers.Many personalities here are political, some are intellectuals but all the answers are most lip smackingly goofy! And yeah I added some in the end to add a DIT-touch and of course i have added answers that an engg srud would give!

The question to all of them: Why did the chicken cross the road?

SAEED AL SAHAF - Iraqi Head of Information
The chicken did not cross the road. This is a complete fabrication. We do not even have a chicken.

GEORGE W BUSH
We don't care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the
chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either for us or against us. There is no middle ground.

COLIN POWELL
Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

TONY BLAIR
I agree with George.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR
I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

GRANDPA
In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.

SIGMUND FREUD
The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

BILL GATES
eChicken2003 will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook - and Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2003.

ALBERT EINSTEIN
Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

VIVEK OBEROI
I am still agreeing with my previous testimony that I had recieved several calls from the gangmembers of the chicken about this happening in near future.

SALMAN KHAN
I have called this press conference to let everyone know that I did not make any phone calls to the said chicken.

ARUN SHOURIE
disinvestment of chickens is necessary for the economy to grow

SHAKESPEARE
To cross the road or not to cross....that is the question

AB Vajpayee
Humein................yeh nahin sochna chahiye ..................ki murghi ne rasta paar kiya ki nahin........balki ye sochna chahiyeki usne rasta kyon par kiya..........kya is paar khana nahin tha.......agar nahin tha to ...................is samasya ko jad se hatana yehi hamara dharm hain.

And the following by yours truly……

First year BE student: The seniors told him to.

Second year BE student: (counts the number of chickens, sees 43.Then counts again, sees 15, then again, sees 76.He gives up trying to answer the question and goes back to his glass of vodka)

Third Year BE student: To file an application for low attendance.

Final Year BE student: if(chicken_got_placed)
event=daaru_party;
else
event=off_campus_interview;

some college specific jokes(non DIT junta may not get these)

GADRE
Doesn’t matter why it crossed the road, the important thing is that it is not applying for an MBA.

SENANI
The chicken crossed the road looking for more efficient current conveyors.

BHATIA
The chicken just got placed in TCS!

RAWAT
Sir chicken ke saath ek photo to ho jaaye.

Enjoy!

2005-01-16T03:43:00.000+05:30

College mates! left to right, jain,me,amwan,kaushal,tomar

Viva Voce

2005-01-16T02:30:00.000+05:30

If there is one place where the all the fun is , in an engineering college, it has got to be the vivas.With the future of our country cooking up such ludicrous answers that few would believe that these are the same people who beat lakhs others to get into IITs,DIT\DCE, REcs etc.

The following post shows some of the examples of ingenuity shown by engineering students.All of these experiences had been posted on PG and I have simply done a copy paste job.But do read ‘em, they are hilarious and bring back great memories. Some are from my own college, some from IITs and some RECs. All supposed to harbor the “cream” of the country.

Here goes…

Venue:NSIT,Delhi

Prof: Is there 3 phase elec?
Std: yes
Prof: Is there 6 phase elec?
Std: (lil confused)mmm....yes
Prof: Is there 15 phase elec?
Std: (now bordering on bewilderment...looks around for help)sir....mmm....cant say...i guess .....yes
Prof: So tell me .....where is all this electricity coming from?
Std:(realizing that trap has been set but still tries to recover): sir.........mmmm.......Delhi Vidyut Board

REC Warangal

Q: Nikhil, the circuit you have drawn is wrong and you will not be allowed to proceed with the exam ie perform what’s in the circuit.
Ans: Madam, is it factually erroneous or aesthetically unpleasant?

sir:-why is the blade of jackplane inclined?
myself:-(questioning in return)how can its smoothen the surface if it is not inclined. its not possible.
sir:-WHAT?
myself:- see sir (he is more attentive now) when u butter the bread , u incline the butter-knife and take off the top layer of the butter. thats why the blade of the jack plane is inclined. sir u try to do it with vertical knife, its not possible.

Sir : fan runs on AC or DC ?
Student : AC
Sir : Why not DC ?
Student : Chal to jaayega, lekin utna mazaa nahi aayega

Prof : Wjhat is blah .... blah ...
Me : er.....I don't know sir..
Prof : Wjhat is blah .... blah ... part 2
Me : er.....I don't know sir..
Prof : Kal raat ko kitne baaje tak padhe ?
Me : (hoping to gain sympathy) Sir, kal mein raat ko do baaje tak padha !
Prof : Answers dekhke lagta hai tumhne ek baaje shuru kiya tha padhna

Venue: Foundry Lab, IIT Kgp
Prof. : Tell me what is foundry
Stud: (looks around the lab... roams his hand) SIr, This is foundy
no more questions from him

Venue:IIT KGP,Manufacturing Lab

Prof: So u are from Calcutta, Tell me what kind of joints are there in Howrah Bridge
F: err...Sir .. Welding ...
P: Accha its welding ... good ...
(He then wnets on to tell him that its Rivetting, which is the Nut-Bolt used joints)
P: Accha now tell me why is it Rivetting and Not welding
F: Sir actually howrah bridge was built in British Period. They made it Nut-Bolt str and not Welding so that in case there is an insurgency on one side they can dismantle the bridge and keep ppl from crossing the Brdige

Venue:IIT KGP

There is this guy who is real dumb ( not to mention ) and he is writing his first year electrical circuits end sem exams..he is lucky enough to get a seat next to some "muggu"...so, he passes a word before the exam starts requesting him to keep his paper wide wide visible...this "muggu" guys in turn requests him to change the language and the matter a lil bit so that they don't end up writing the same thing...

Now, hold your breath...

The "muggu" guy wrote in his paper....****** 3 phase *******

to this, our stud copies, with a lil bit of innovation....******* 2.99 phase *********

Venue: Viva of 3rd sem Instrumentation lab in SJCE Mysore

Prof: What are the constants in a first order.....equation??( cant remember what that damn equation was)
Student: (After thinking hard for 10-15 secs...) sir.....a,b
Prof: ok what is a?? what is b??
Student: Sir.........they are constants

4 sem BE electrical prac exams
venue-electrical machines lab
Q-how does a DC motor start??
Ans- after thinking 4 few secs . Clears his throat and goes dhuk dhuk dhuk dhuk dhuk dhukdhukdhukdhukdhukdhukdhuk..
The prof is and 1 of the stus sitting next to the senior falls down laughing!! The prof says-"enuf stop"
response-"dhukdhukdhukdhukdhuk dhuk dhuk dhuk dhuk dhuk and ends with a clicking sound.

Venue:CET,Trivandrum(not sure…)
Sir! I dont know Malayalam" - The most cliched phrase I used in CET to escape from any sort of Questioning and all.
Machine Shop 1 Viva
External : Question No.1
Stud :
External : Question No.2
Stud :
External : Question No.6
Stud :
Now The external started to ask Question No.1 in Malayalam
Stud replied back with confidence - "Sir!!! I dont know Malayalam"
External : Oh! I thought you dint understand English!
Stud: Wonders whether to laugh or cry!

A drive in delightful Delhi

2005-01-13T12:55:00.000+05:30

So u wake up in the morning, the birds are chirping, u put on a nice CD of Enya and listen to Pax Deurum or Athair Ar Neamh for a while (For the uninitiated, these are some masterpieces by Enya, an Irish lady with a voice sweet enough to kill for).

The sun is out and the bright rays make you warm. Life is good and you thank god for everything that you have, a potentially successful career, a loving family, good friends and the other ubiquitous comforts of life.

Of course, then you remember that you just have to get one small chore out of the way, namely drop off your brother at some place nearby, and then you’ll have the whole day to yourself. You daydream a little about what you’ll do and how you’ll spend the day. Musing about reading some delightful book or maybe sleeping in your cozy lil bed the whole day with small breaks for eating. You are suddenly awoken from your reverie as you hear you mother remind you about the small task that stands between you and you plans, the act of dropping your brother off.

You take a nice hot bath and have a sumptuous breakfast and get ready to go. The destination is not far, you are told. Of course, you think to yourself, what is 5-6 kilometers really in this day and age of flyovers and fast cars.

You switch on the ignition and make a blessed start to you journey. In the way, you encounter many a moron, some driving like potential slayers or some simply suicidal. But the fact that your elder brother is sitting next to you makes you keep your thoughts to yourself. You mutter to yourself that these f***kers should have their licenses revoked and also be given a nice dose of ass kicking, but you keep quiet.

You calm yourself and think that you will not let these people spoil your day, you dream a little about the thought of lying in a hot bath and you smile again and think to yourself that the goal is getting closer with every passing second.

So after many trials and tribulations, including a rickshaw wallah calling you some names that would chill the spine of many a sophisticated man and also being accused of driving rashly by a young pedestrian who believed that while he was on the road, the most important thing was to stand in the middle of the road and light his cigarette, you finally reach your destination and your brother goes off merrily.

You envy him a little as you remember that there is still the journey back home and rush hour has just started. You brace yourself for the impending battle and tell yourself to concentrate on the purpose of all this, that is to get back home and relax.

And so the ride back home starts. You may as well call it a ride through the cauldrons of unfathomable hell. The torture of driving through a jam packed road moving at snail’s pace starts to take a toll on you. You sweat and can feel your temper rising.

You try to calm yourself but no avail. It seems that the moron behind you has decided that this is the day to find out how loud his horn can possibly honk and there seems to be an inquisitiveness on his part to find the duration for which he can keep on making this noise without infuriating one of his fellow road mates. You curse the bastard and show him the finger. The honking stops for a while and you’re relieved. But the relief is short lasted as you find out that the silence of the horn was only the result of the fact that the guy is now standing next to your window and wants to have a little street brawl.

Apparently he is a fan of WWF and isn’t exactly thrilled at the fact that you gave him the finger. You mutter to yourself that this is the last thing that you wanted but since the situation has now presented itself you might as well handle it and not make a mess of your face in the process. So after a bit of arguing and a mob of 20 surrounding the two of you, you find that there are others who were irritated by this bugger’s incessant horn honking and you have some support. So you win this small battle and the dude goes back to his car but not without telling you that “Tu fir se milio mereko saale …..”.

So you sit in the car with a sense of victory and feel that you just have to put all that has happened this morning behind you and just get home.

After another half an hour of crawling movement, the traffic finally clears out and you breathe a sigh of relief. The road is empty in front of you and your goal seems closer than ever before. You step on the gas and drive a little faster.

You see a red light ahead, but to your delight, it is green. You are just five minutes from your home. As you pass the red light you suddenly see a middle aged lady in a car, chatting on her cell phone without looking where she is going and also jumping the red light. You push the brake with all your might to avoid her, but alas, it is too late. Your car brushes against hers and there are very noticeable dents on both cars. There is no limit to your fury and you stomp out of the car to give the woman a piece of your mind.

But she steps out with a sheepish smile, with guilt on her face, she mutters” Beta aapko bhi to dekhna chahiye naa”. You just lose the will to live. Not only does this woman not accept her mistake, she is trying to con you into accepting that you were at fault too. A crowd starts to gather and you feel that the woman will easily generate more sympathy than you could ever dream of. The tide could easily turn against you.

You simply ask her to move her car and head back home, thinking about how much it’ll cost you to get that dent fixed. You get to the garage and after two hours of denting, painting and what not you finally get the car fixed. You pay the mechanic and start the drive back home after having burnt a hole in your wallet. You were sweating due to the balmy atmosphere of the garage and now the cold wind is blowing, making you shiver. You get home cold and dead tired. You finally enter the door to that cherished place that you call home.

You sit down and decide that all is not lost and you will still make the best of the day that is left. You have bath and feel refreshed again. Life has a purpose again; you feel the urge to live return. The latest book by Alvin Toffler is on you table. You smile at the fact that you’ll finally be able to read about new ideas and learn about the world economy. You get yourself a cup of hot coffee and lie in your bed with the book in your lap. There is a small smile forming on your face.

Suddenly you hear your cell phone ring. It’s your brother. He wants you to pick him up from where you dropped him.

Lazy Bum!

2005-01-11T11:15:00.000+05:30

Ahhhh....the joys of unlimited sleep!
One good thing that i have done in the last few days is sleep like hell, i sleep at 3 in the night and wake up at 12 in the morn..
Life is good :D

Apart from that i have also been reading a little bit and have started to gain some momentum towards my prep.

Interestingly enough i have also crossed the four figure mark AFA the blog hits are concerned,its nice to see that peeps are visiting.

Too lazy to post more right now, will make a long post soon about love n stuff, all this coming frm the fact that i just broke up:P

ciao
rohit

The last four years

2005-01-04T06:00:00.000+05:30

My parents are often told by our relatives thet they are very lucky to have such “laayak”, as in bright, sons.Ek engineer aur ek doctor.Now I can confidently vouch for the fact that my brother deserves the title of “laayak” but the fact that I will soon become an engineer definitely doesn’t entail me the same title.I will go through my four years in the college and just show you how an average engineer will spend the years of BE.

First Year: Brave new world

So I was happy that I cracked the entrance exam and got into one of the best colleges in India. I was finally out of school and it was time that I stepped into the “real” world. Many people had told me that there would be no more spoon feeding like there used to be in school and it was now all going to be my own responsibility. So I braced myself for a tough academic pursuit ahead of me. Little did I know that the next four years would be as far removed from academics as possible. The first month was filled with ragging and meeting new people and exploring the campus and the new experience of staying in the hostel.

The classes started and I started to get a feel of the kind of horseshit that I would be served for the next four years. The first sem comprised of physics and chemistry and some more solid state physics and all in all I knew that I was going to have a tough time in college. Soon, the end sems appeared outta nowhere and started the new culture of studying from Xeroxed notes, which was hitherto an unknown concept to me while I was in school. Passed the first sem and managed to end up in the bottom quarter of my class. With a deep sense of guilt I looked upon those passed six months and decided that the next six months would see a new rohit.

The second semester started again with another barrage of unknown and abstruse subjects which landed me in a bit of a tangle once again.Add to that the fact that I was introduced to the new concept of “daruu”, all my feelings of guilt and repentance vanished after one peg .It seemed that this sem was going the same way s the first one, but somehow god managed to save me from the ignominy and I managed to perform a lil better and it was time to celebrate with a daroo party in the hostel again.

Here, the first year ended. A year that saw a shift from life in school to life in college.

Second year: The fight back begins

After the taste of easy success in the second sem result, I found myself believing in the philosophy of “jo hona hoga ho jayega”. Which then meant that whether I study or not , I will still obtain the same result, hence anytime spent in studying would be waste of time which could much rather be utilized in more enjoyable activities like bakchodi, movies or of course, a drinking binge. So with a boatload of time I was confused about what to do with all the time on my hand. Here I did the only productive activity in college, which was reading. I read quite a bit and enjoyed myself. When the third sem result came out, although I managed to pass all the subjects , my score sheet was not a pretty sight. With 40s and 50s all over the place, I found my faith, in my earlier held beliefs, shaking. Maybe I did need to study. I still wasn’t sure but I had an inkling that studying a little may change the course of things. So the third sem ended on a rather sad note.

As we entered the fourth sem, for some reason, a lot of talk was focused on placements. Everywhere you looked people was shouting that unless u have a %age of 70 u would have a hard time getting placed. With my paltry 64%, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. All of a sudden things became serious. This was a matter of real concern now. While I had been whiling away my tie and fooling around, I had messed up my profile so badly that I was in danger of not getting placed. I finally woke up. I made life a little organized and worked hard for the next sem and somehow managed to do what was required.

Third Year: The year when Time stopped

Before describing this I would like to state that I have yet to have gone through a more boring year in my life. Time often seemed to stop in my pre final year. With an abundance of time and a lack of activities with which to keep one busy, life got pretty damn boring.

Fifth sem I by far the most boring time I have spent in my life. Innumerable hours spent just lying in the hostel room, doing nothing. Just the sound of pink Floyd or maybe metallica or pearl jam. Another sem passed without anything of note. Life was starting to drift and I had no control over it.

Sixth sem started with a zeal to start prepping for CAT. The so-called mother of all entrance examinations. So preparations for Cat started and so did the brushing up o coding skills. Soon it was going to be the final year and companies would be making a beeline to recruit us. Everyone was busy with Kernighan Ritchie and Tanenbaum.Of course, by the wayside as also the small matter of sem exams, which were starting to become a little easier to handle now, with experience.

Final Year: Ahhh! The end is near now!

The fourth year is without a doubt the most exciting year in the life of an engineer, and so was the case with me. If I remember correctly, We had the first company on the 29th July 2004.It was TCS.I was waiting for the first company, didn’t mtter to me which one.I just wanted a job and then get on with the endless job daru parties. so TCS came and took some 105 people and I got thru too. I was on top of the world. All of a sudden, three years in college seemed worth it.Companies kept coming, classmates fought amongst each other about placement policies and what not. In the end everyone ended up with at least one job.A majority had 2 jobs and some even 3.

Then came CAT. The all important 2 hours of my life. I wrote the test and came out with a grin n my fce and knew that although I did not do to the best of my abilities, I may just have done well enough. The process is still on. Lets see where I end up. If I get into an IIM then I will proudly say that both the sons of my parents are “laayak”.

Till then,
take care,
Rohit

New Year, Eh ?

2005-01-03T08:10:00.000+05:30

Stock Markets! Inflation! Interest Rates! Hobbies! Acads! Damn!
The work never ends, does it? So I somehow managed to scrape my way through CAT and now this.I thought that the hard work was supposed to end after the written, no one told me about this part of the story.Damn those GDs and PIs! Adding to that was the fact that I have a fever and everything tastes like a bloody karela!

Hope everyone else has had a better start to their new year.Wish you all a very happy new year , little belated but still. Well, the New Year has a very interesting concept attached to it, New Year Resolutions. Well New Year resolutions are being formed and broken since at least 4000 years. In fact the Babylonians thought that what a person did on the first day of a new year affected the way the year would progress for that being.

Everyone has them but really how many of us have the will to actually hold on to those resolutions after the first week of January. Now all this thinking about resolutions made me wonder what resolutions are popular. I could guess that losing weight and probably stopping smoking would be there but still I got curious. So, I googled a little bit and found the top 10 most common resolutions. Here they are,

1. Lose weight
2. Stop smoking
3. Stick to a budget
4. Save or earn more money
5. Find a better job
6. Become more organized
7. Exercise more
8. Be more patient
9. Eat better
10. Become a better person

All right then, how many of us just saw our own resolution there. Well, I can see two of mine there. One is to become more organized (god knows how I waste my time, sometimes I think that few people could achieve such levels of inefficiency) and secondly to be more patient.Oh yeah before I forget, I got to get my bike serviced too, that’s been pending for six months now. Another example of how procrastination can achieve gargantuan proportions.Well,lets see if I can tackle these resolutions in the coming year.Hope you guyz can hold on to yours.

Well,that brings me to the end of my first post in the New Year. I hope everyone has a great year.

Adios
Rohit

First post from the Laptop!

2004-12-31T15:30:00.000+05:30

yay,i got a laptop as a gift from my brother!!First post from the ubiquitous symbol of mobile computing.I was just browsing this site...
some really funny signatures here.I have always loved to read quotations at length but this site really has some funny ones from anything to everything.
Some good ones,
Give a jackass an education and you get a smartass.

Now that food has replaced my sex life, I can't even get into my own pants!

Happiness is like peeing yourself, everyone can see it but only u can feel its warmth!

On a scale between one to ten, you're an idiot!

"A new study shows that licking the sweat off a frog can cure depression. The down side is, the minute you stop licking, the frog gets depressed again." - Jay Leno

"AOL for Dummies" is kind of redundant, don't you think?

"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!" - Homer Simpson

"If these pills don't stop the kleptomania," said the psychiatrist, "try and get me a nice video camera."

"It's all coming back to me now", said the blind man as he peed into the wind.

"Nearly everything you read signed "from God" is just somebody putting their words in My mouth." - God

"Streakers *repant* your end is in sight."

"The game of catch has never been so fun!" - inventor of the hand grenade.

24 hours in a day. 24 beers in a case ... coincidence?

A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? - W.C. Fields

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. -Ernest Hemingway

American beer is like making love in a canoe. It's f*cking close to water. - Monty Python

And God said: Let there be vodka! And He saw that it was good. Then God said: Let there be light! And then He said: Whoa - too much light.

As a rule, I don't drink -- as a habit, I do!

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder...

Beer - The reason I wake up every afternoon.

Beer contains Vitamin Pee.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Beer: Helping ugly people have sex since 1862!

Beer: Now THERE'S a temporary solution.

Don't drink and drive. You might hit a bump and spill your beer.

Dough, the stuff, that buys my beer, Ray, the guy that tends the bar, Me, the guy, who drinks my beer, Far, the distance to the bar, So, I think I'll have a beer, La, Laa lAA lAh LaH LAA LAAAH! Tea, no thanks I want a beer, which brings us back to Dough Dough Dough!

Everyone needs to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.

Give a man a beer, he'll waste an hour. Teach a man to brew, he'll waste a lifetime.

I don't drink anymore. Of course, I don't drink any less, either.

I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. - Frank Sinatra

I have a drink to celebrate the little things. Like Tuesdays - we only have one of those a week!

I killed a six-pack just to watch it die.

I swear to drunk I'm not God!

I'd rather have a beer than win father of the year - Homer Simpson

Some of theselines really made me roll on the floor especially the ones on beer.
Do check it out, its a lot fun.

My first rendezvous with finance

2004-12-30T09:30:00.000+05:30

Ola(well I ended a post with this word some days ago and my brother corrected me to tell me that this in fact means “Hi” in Spanish so the mistake now stands corrected)

So I have started gaining some momentum in my GD\PI prep and have joined a group being taught by an IIMA alumnus. I’ve had just one class till now but it was good and I learnt a few things that I will talk about here in just a moment. Apart from that, I just came to know that IIMB had come out with a new shortlist and it was a little jitter but I checked again and my name is still there, but my interview has been postponed quite a bit.

OK, back to the class I had. So this was my first tryst with finance and I have to say that what little that he taught yesterday was really interesting. He started to talk about “convertibility”. Now this term refers the conversion of a particular currency into another, say $ into Rs.Now any country has certain laws governing the freedom with which one can convert currency from one form to another. Several factors affect the path that a nation chooses to follow in its policies regarding convertibility.

Just a few terms first,

Full Convertibility
No Convertibility
Current Account Convertibility
Capital Account Convertibility

Now the first two terms are self explanatory, where one would have absolute or no freedom.

Current Account Convertibility: Say if person X produces some product in India, and sells it in the global market using some account. Now the payment he receives in the market is of foreign currency, he can then convert that money back to his own national currency and this freedom would refer to Current Account Convertibility.

The last term refers to the permission that one can keep money in an account and he can convert into any form using that account.

Now, coming back to the initial question, “How does a country decide on its level of convertibility”?

Any decision regarding this will be taken keeping an eye on the dependence of the country’s’ dependence on foreign exchange.

Now say if we look at India, We follow a regime of current account convertibility, so the exchange of currencies can take place freely as far as trade is concerned, but we cannot arbitrarily convert Rs. To dollars without answering to the RBI.This is done so that an investor does not put the country’s economy in a pickle.
For example, say an investor buys some $20 billion worth of Rupees. Now he can wait and watch for the rupee to appreciate and then he will sell the Rupees for dollars, as a result others will also start converting Rupees into dollars since rupee starts to fall due to excess supply, as a result this could trigger a chain reaction and you would have a crisis with the rupee in the doldrums. So, we choose a more conservative approach by opting for Current Account Convertibility., to avoid such situations. This is in fact what actually happened in the East Asian Financial Crisis where the Currencies devalued to almost 1\8th of their value in a span of 3-4 days.

So that was a little bit about what constituted the first lecture. There was also some other stuff like inflation, interest rates, FIIs but I will blog about that later.

Apart from the techie stuff, we also learnt a little about the “Charmed” life of an Investment banker. While any MBA aspirant prepping to got into an IIM would dream of a PPO from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and the likes, it is a really tough job to be an investment fund manager. Your ass is on the line for every move you make. Since the stakes are so high, small mistakes cost big time and careers don’t take that much time to shatter. Anyway, that discussion is for another day at another place, at IIMA maybe :).

I have a 3 hour class tomorrow and I am really looking forward to it, I’ll blog about it when I get back. Plus I can’t wait for my brother to get back from Chicago tomorrow. He just bought a Dell laptop for me and I am almost jumping out of my shoes to see that. Ahhh, finally I’ll be able to blog while lying on the bed. May god bless the inventor of the Laptop!

Apart from the preparation, I also wanted to talk about another natural disaster that you all must be aware of, a few days ago an earthquake and then a following Tsunami wreaked havoc in the lives of lakhs of people. It is really sad to see that almost 30 thousand people have been fatal victims to this fury expressed by nature. I would urge all of you to donate what you can and do everything that you can do. It could be a monetary donation or maybe just a prayer, just does that little bit to make the lives of those ill –fated people a little easier. May the dead rest in peace.

Gracias
Rohit

IIM Vs IIM

2004-12-27T04:31:00.000+05:30

Hi guyz,

Life is starting to get a lil organised after getting calls, seems like the new responsibility of converting the calls is going to change the way i handle my time.

Anywayz, after spending a loooooooot of time on PG(www.pagalguy.com for the uninitiated) i wondered about the concept of comparing different IIMs.When I am talking of this comparison I am talking about ABC only(no offence to LIK).

When people compare the IIMs, the discussion will often revolve around topics like Infra,Faculty,Placements, Industry Interface et al.But what my query is that how many of the students actually look at these when they decide b\w ABC.

The general rule is that u choose "A over B over C".Unless of course u were brainwashed by a senior of yours and u just have to go to B\C and u dun give a damn bout A or you just can't stay without daru and gujrat being a dry state , IIMA is simply ruled out for u.

Anywayz, what i am trying to come to,is that in the end the debate of IIMX Vs IIMY (where X,Y ={A,B,C}), ends up being an ego clash between people who are alredy studying in those particular IIMs.

A dood in IIMB will claim that IIMB=IIMA and IIMB>>IIMC, while an IIMA student will simply write off IIMB\IIMC as lesser colleges without giving it a second thought.

I have yet to meet a B-schooler who does not follow the "My daddy strongest" policy(Apart from mebbe Mike(IIML)...another dood at PG).
While their tirades against each others' college may seperate them, what bring them together is the concept of "I slept for only 4 hours"

For some reason each of them is out to prove that they are the busiest people in the friggin world.OK, I understand that these people worked hard to get thru but for god sakes stop pretending like u dun have "the time to sit down and breath" guyz.I know that the "fight" in an MBA is much greater than in BE but really if go from one extreme of lazyness(BE) to the other extreme(IIM) u r bound to feel it is out of the ordinary.

Only one guy(from IIML) who has told me the truth that while very B-schooler will proclaim to sleep on "4 hours" in a day none of them will care to add that they still do as much "bakchodi" as they did in their engineering days.

Its been about 7 months since i have been visiting PG and to tell you the truth I am rather sick of all the "My B-school rocks" threads.All being replete with incidents on how they partied so hard after studying so hard and how they cudnt keep their eyes open in class coz they slept for "4 hours" last night.

I am in an engineering college, in the sem that has jussed passed, we were in max masti mode. In the hostel there have been many times I have slept at 6 and woken up at 10 so please stop before u tell me that its hard to do, I am not buying it anymore!

ciao
Rohit

P.S:Just to add , this is not directed towards anyone in particular and this is what I feel, not necesarily true, just my thoughts.

Learn from the leaders

2004-12-27T02:14:00.000+05:30

I just read one of the best articles i've ever come across.This is what really makes for inspiring stuff.By the way, i am sure all engineers will be delighted to find the mention of "Fairchild Semiconductors" in this article.Enjoy!

*********************************************

From the Knowldege@Wharton Newsletter:

Becoming the Best: What You Can Learn from the 25 Most Influential Leaders of Our Times

When Andy Grove got his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963, he was a corporate recruiter's dream candidate. He had a number of job options, perhaps the best of which was with Bell Labs, then the Mecca of research in solid-state physics. But Grove made a different choice. Rather than head for Bell Labs, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor, a West Coast upstart, where he worked under the legendary Gordon Moore, who led the company's research operation. That was an early example of out-of-the-box thinking from Grove, who five years later left Fairchild with Moore and others to co-found Intel.

After he succeeded Moore as Intel's CEO in 1987, Grove took other steps that shunned conventional logic -- perhaps most visibly during the "Intel Inside" campaign of the 1990s. Back then, the most recognized brands in the computer industry were hardware makers such as IBM or software firms like Microsoft. Intel, though it supplied more than 80% of the microprocessors to the world's computers, was hardly known outside a small band of industry insiders. Determined to change that narrow perception, Grove led Intel into an aggressive branding campaign that made the company a household name by the end of the decade. Today, as its products play an increasingly critical role in stitching together a globally networked economy, Intel has emerged as one of the world's top technology companies, with 2003 revenues of more than $30 billion.

Grove's leadership of Intel -- marked as it has been by unconventional thinking, imagination and integrity -- contributed this month to his being named the most influential business leader of the past 25 years by Wharton and Nightly Business Report (NBR), the most watched daily business program on U.S. television. “My life has been intertwined with Intel,” Grove told Nightly Business Report co-anchor Susie Gharib. “My proudest accomplishment has been to contribute to the creation of a company that has helped put a billion PCs into people’s hands.”

To celebrate NBR's 25th anniversary this month, Wharton and NBR worked to identify the 25 most influential business leaders of the past 25 years. NBR's viewers nominated more than 700 business people from around the world, and a panel of six Wharton judges selected the top 25. The winners are:

Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com; John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group; Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group; Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers; Peter Drucker, the educator and author; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; William George, former CEO of Medtronics; Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM; Alan Greenspan, Chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve; Andy Grove, chairman of Intel; Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler; Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers; Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines; Peter Lynch, former manager of Fidelity's Magellan Fund; Charles Schwab, founder of Charles Schwab Inc.; Frederick Smith, CEO of Federal Express; George Soros, founder and chairman of Open Society Institute; Ted Turner, founder of CNN; Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart; Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric; Oprah Winfrey, chairman of the Harpo group of companies; and Mohammed Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank.

To arrive at this list from among hundreds of nominees, the Wharton panel employed five criteria. Their goal was to find business leaders who created new and profitable ideas; affected political, civic or social change through achievement in the business/economic world; created new business opportunities or more fully exploited existing ones; caused or influenced dramatic change in a company or industry; and/or inspired and transformed others. The judges included Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management; Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources; Raffi Amit, director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Research Program; Barbara Kahn, vice dean of the Wharton undergraduate division; Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr., vice dean and director of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education; and Mukul Pandya, editor/director of Knowledge@Wharton.

Learning from Leaders

In addition to identifying these individuals as influential leaders, the Wharton judges discussed aspects of their character that contributed to their success. Understanding what made these people stand out, the judges reasoned, could help others to become better leaders in their own organizations. In Grove's case, for example, his ability to be open to unconventional ideas was a critical factor. In his or her own way, however, each of these leaders has traits from which others could learn.

Consider Warren Buffett, whom Michael Useem describes as "a man for all seasons." According to Useem, not only is Buffett "an investor extraordinaire" who has delivered enormous returns to investors in Berkshire Hathaway, but he was also highly successful as the hands-on CEO of Salomon Brothers, helping restore confidence in the Wall Street firm when it faced a severe management crisis. These days "Buffett has become the conscience of the Street, offering great wisdom on contentious topics like expensing stock options," Useem says. In other words, in addition to his genius at spotting good investment opportunities, Buffett's influence derives from his moral stature and integrity. In the aftermath of scandals that have rocked U.S. companies in the past few years, it is difficult to overemphasize the importance of ethics as a factor in leadership.

Bogle, like Buffett, owes his influence to having delivered great value to investors -- though his approach was strikingly different. The former CEO of the Vanguard Group has long argued that "owning the entire stock market at very low cost is the ultimate investment strategy." This belief led him to launch the Vanguard Group in 1975. Bogle was a pioneer in introducing and helping popularize index funds -- which kept fees extremely low for investors. Says Peter Cappelli: "One of the reasons why Bogle is on this list is because of the enormous impact he had on the average person."

Sam Walton's approach to Wal-Mart's customers was similar, according to Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr. The goal of making a wide range of products available to average people at the lowest possible price enabled him to take the retail company from a single store to a megacorp that is now ranked No. 1 on the Fortune 500. "Walton's legacy is that a single person can make a huge difference in an industry. It doesn't happen overnight, especially in an industry like retail, but it can happen over a period of years. Walton believed in delivering great value at low prices to his customers."

Welch's leadership, in contrast, delivered great value to GE's shareholders. One measure, according to Useem, is that Welch took GE from being a "$13 billion company in 1981 to a $550 billion company in 2001 in terms of market capitalization." GE's stock price saw a 40-fold increase during Welch's tenure, consistently outpacing the S&P 500. But Welch's greatest strength, says Useem, was spotting and nurturing other leaders. "Welch has written the textbook on leadership. He has often said that he doesn't know how to make jet engines or produce Tuesday night television shows at NBC, the GE subsidiary. But he does know how to pick people with leadership potential, give them the resources to meet their goals, and get rid of them if they cannot. As a result, Welch has built one of the best leadership teams anywhere."

Mittelstaedt notes that team-building also counts among Bill Gates's strengths as a leader. Like Grove, Gates saw the potential of the PC to transform the world, and he built Microsoft into a software powerhouse. In addition, though, he is among those rare entrepreneurs whose abilities have expanded to keep pace with the growth of his enterprise. "Very few successful people who have started as entrepreneurs have led their companies until they grew to a very big size." In Gates's case, says Mittelstaedt, he has had the vision to bring in people and then let them serve the company. "Gates has done this in a way that most entrepreneurs are not capable of doing."

Each leader on the list offers similar leadership lessons. While most of them are recognizable names, a few are less well known or are simply no longer in the public eye. James Burke, for example, was J&J's CEO when the company faced its well-known Tylenol crisis in 1982. Seven people died after taking the pain-killer, and it turned out that someone had introduced cyanide in the pills as an act of sabotage. Burke's handling of that has become a textbook case for companies facing crises for more than two decades. Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, has recently written a book about Authentic Leadership drawing upon his experiences. Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, has been a pioneer in the field of micro-finance, providing loans as small as $10 to impoverished people. His great innovation was to recognize that lending could be separated from collateral -- and still be the basis for operating a sound financing business. Micro-lending programs modeled after Grameen's have now spread to more than 100 countries.

If there is one trait that each of these leaders shares, it is tenacity. Unlike so-called serial entrepreneurs who cash out of their companies after a few years and move on to their next venture, these leaders have had a long-term vision. They have been willing to ride out the lows with the highs. This willingness to slog it out and stay in the game for the long haul has been reflected as much in the success of their enterprises as in the endurance of their own influence as leaders. Asked why he never left Intel to start another company, Grove recently replied: "Intel is like a river. It changes every day and behind every bend there is a new start, a new challenge. I cannot think of any place where I would rather have worked."

*********************************************

I crossed the first hurdle....thank u god

2004-12-22T15:57:00.000+05:30

ABC calls are out!

in case anyone wants to check

IIMA
IIMB
IIMC

Hell i am damn happy!!
got GD\PI calls from IIM ABC till now...
man i am so happy..
i remember when i was in 12th i wrote the JEE and got a rank of 1912...was being offered a lowly Civil engg at IITD...chucked it for NSIT-ECE...
now i feel i did the right thing...
mebbe i'll make it to the IIM(fingers,legs,hair, all crossed!)
thank you god..
all i asked for what i deserve...you gave me even more
thank you!
adios

YAAAAAHHHHHOOOOOOOOO!

2004-12-20T23:55:00.000+05:30

CAT results just out

i got 99.74
am hapiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii......so hapyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!
my dream(sic)hass a real chance of coming true now...
too happy to spend time on the PC
time for daruuuuuuu....
ciao
enjoiiiiiiiiii!

Sufiana Sounds

2004-12-20T10:17:00.000+05:30

I dont know how many of you have heard this new artist called "Rabbi"...but i heard him once on the TV and cudnt stop myself from downloading his song called "Bulla ki Jana".
Though i have tended to listen to mainly Metal and a bit of Hindi songs in the past 2-3 years, i gotta say this is one helluva song.So, before you give it a pass and call it just another "Punjabi Pooper"...give it a try..it'll leave you mesmerised.
You can download it from here

You can also read about it here

A Preview:

His music owes its feel as much to Bob Dylan as to the Ragis of Punjab. And with Amitabh Bachchan on his list of fans, Rabbi Shergill and his brand of Sufiana have finally arrived.

Enjoy!

Oh happiness! Where art thou?

2004-12-19T14:31:00.000+05:30

I have been wondering about whether I should write on a particular topic that has been bothering me for some while now. Finally, I decided that better to get my thoughts out of my system rather than letting them linger behind.

Alright, here is a question for anyone who is reading this blog

“WHAT WOULD YOU DO WHEN YOU HAVE ALL THE MONEY YOU COULD SPEND, ALL THE POWER YOU COULD NEED AND ALL THE MATERIAL COMFORTS YOU COULD EVER DREAM OF? “

Some days ago a friend of mine asked me this question and it left me dumbstruck. I was amazed at the fact that I did not have a clue about what I would do. While I consider myself to a very practical and goal oriented person, it came as a shock to me that all my goals were material in nature. It left me really confused about what I want to do in life. Do I really want to pursue and MBA or do I want to work in a company or do something that I really want to. Irony is that I don’t have clue about what I want to do!

This particular dilemma has its roots set in another particularly peculiar problem. In the last one year I have talked to many of my friends about what would it take for them to be happy? While most answers seemed to be about money, success, traveling abroad or climbing the corporate ladder, I could not find one answer that seemed convincing enough and one which would really provide a person with long lasting happiness. It is not surprising then that most ppl in the S\W industry (i.e. where engineers end up)even after earning lotta money, traveling abroad and doing all sortsa stuff still think that their lives are shit!

I used to think that doing an MBA and then having a career in marketing would make me happy. I can’t believe that I ever believed that BS that I had cooked up for myself. I for one feel rather stupid now when I think about the fact that I am running like crazy after an MBA when I for one don’t have a clue why I want to do an MBA. How long can a person keep on doing things simply for the sake of money?

The damned problem doesn’t end there. The friggin shit drives me crazy when I find something that interests me but I cant pursue it ‘coz I dun have the balls to opt for something that puts the security of my future in danger. So I stick to the traditional Engg.\MBA career and keep on cribbing about the fact that I don’t have an iota of interest in this particular field.

So all in all I am confused!!!
I know that tomorrow when I wake up , I will still be running like crazy after that IIM MBA and my goals will be just the same as they are today, mebbe one day I’ll find the courage to conquer my fears and find a real source of happiness and have the balls to go for it.

Till then, its IIM Zindabad!

Boooored to death!

2004-12-19T10:05:00.000+05:30

Man! Life is gettin real boring.With nuthin to do, just waiting for the CAT results to be out,i am getting pissed with the amt of time and lack of things to do.Books,Movies,Hangin out...nuthin seems to be interestin nemore.

The worst part is that the pessimist in me will never lemme prepare for GD\PI before i get calls...aaaaarghhhhhhh....why the hell is it taking so long for the f***in results to be declared...man tis hard to wait for something you want soooooooo badly....just hope that when the results come out, i don't end up disappointed.

Anywayz,since i am getting bored, only one thing left to do....blog a lil more...
Spent the last one hour reading posts on PG, picked up arbit threads and found one interesting post from a dood in IIMB, this relating their summers
**************************************************

This is the official web release of IIMB's summer placements (for the Batch of 2004), which concluded on Saturday.

Overview
IIMB’s Summer Placements this year broke all records, wrapping up in less than three days flat with forty-one lucrative foreign offers to its batch of 187 students. It is the fastest ever process at the IIMs and at any Indian b-school with a batch of comparable size.

Investment Banks from abroad, multinationals and the best Indian corporates came, saw and picked up like never before.

Snapshot
Total no. of companies scheduled for Summer Placements: 120
Total no. of recruiting companies: 74
No. of students in the batch: 187
Total no. of offers: 255
Total no. of acceptances: 183
Total no. of international offers: 41, twice the number last year
Number of slots: 3

Slot Zero
Locations of Foreign Offers : New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Singapore

Sectors: Mainly Investment Banking
No. of Slot Zero international offers: 41

Companies and no. of offers by them: Goldman Sachs Lehman Brothers New York Lehman Brothers Asia, for Tokyo and Hong Kong , HSBC London , Deutsche Bank , Barclays Capital , JP Morgan Securities London, Deutsche post Worldwide, Barclays Capital and Technofast Consulting , ICICI Bank International banking

This is possibly the highest % of a single batch going abroad for summers in any B-School this year. Speaks a lot about the calibre of this year's batch in IIMB

Last year’s Slot Zero recruitment: 9 offers last time from 3 companies.

Slot One
Sectors: All streams, including Consulting

Companies: IBM (1, ICICI (16), Hindustan Lever (10), Cognizant (9), Times Group (9), Tata Admistrative Services (7), Citibank (6), ICICI Prudential (6), Procter & Gamble (5)
Among the new companies on slot one were KPMG, Accenture Consulting, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers. 13 consulting offers were made during Slot One. International recruiters on day one were National Kidney Foundation Singapore, Procter & Gamble Singapore and Olam International.
**************************************************

Man! those are some awesome stats...41 international offers outta 183...phew!The number of stud companies is awesome....and this is w\o taking into acc the awesome companies in India i.e. Mck..etc.
The diff b\w an engg summers and MBA summers is like crazy..i am supposedly doin my trainin right now( get that smirk off ur face!)...thats right..sittin at home..and will get a certi in the end frm some company...can't wait to get into an MBA course and then do a real summers!
Anywayz, thats enuff for one post,time to watch a movie :D
adios
rohit

The new Buzz in town

2004-12-18T12:19:00.000+05:30

Just read about a new marketing concept called “Buzz Marketing”. While it is well known that the most powerful mode of marketing is word-of-mouth, this technique takes it a little further. The probability, that a consumer is going to buy your product, increases greatly if another person gives a favorable review of the product. So we have Companies now hiring people to go out in the supermarkets to whisper into your ear that so and so product is the right choice baby! These people are the breed that are generally looked up to as trend setters, the people who set the fashion for tomorrow, the people who decide what is in and what is out.

So what gave birth to the new concept? Look at a few facts that I found in the article

“more than half of the ads for cars, credit cards and pet-related products are ignored by television viewers. In addition, 42% of ads about home products are ignored, as are 45% of fast food advertisements. The numbers are far worse in the case of viewers with personal video recorders such as TiVo For that group, 95% of fast food ads were skipped, as were 68% of car ads, 80% of pet product ads, and 94% of financial product advertisements”

It is clear that traditional marketing techniques have taken a beating and some innovative thinking needs to be done.While Buzz Marketing is just and extension of an existing concept, marketing experts warn that unless it is used judiciously, it will become just another pain in the ass like pop up ads on the internet, or telemarketers who just wont quit calling. Call me skeptical but I don’t think that companies will be able to make good use of this tactic simply b’coz all of them will get excited all at once and in the end we’ll have a lot of “Buzz” but will start sounding more like noise to the average Joe.

There is an interesting ethical debate associated with this concept. The conflict is that it is not right to send marketers disguised as normal folks and try to deceive the consumer. It is a known psychological fact that if a person does not know that he is being convinced, it is easier to convince them as opposed to if they know that they are being persuaded. This kind of marketing is being seen as the last step in the ultimate intrusion of privacy by marketing firms.

Anyways, all said and done in the end the product needs to carry off the hype that is generated thru any kind of marketing that has been done to support it,’coz a bad product will bomb at the market, with or without a “Buzzing“ marketing campaign!

Whats' on TV, Honey !

2004-12-18T00:16:00.000+05:30

I was just watching the news and i noticed a common ring to all of the stories.Each of them seemed to have something or the other to do with sex.

"SEX", its a funny lil word that can make a lotta indians uncomfortable.While we are the most proficiently expanding nation in the world (numerically), the word sex is still considered taboo. Weird lil hypocricy,isnt it ?

Anywayz, i'm digressing from the topic i wanted to talk about. So i'm watching the news and all i see is SEX SEX SEX everywhere.I mean for gawd sakes who gives a shit if kareena kapoor and shahid khan were taped kissing , or if a 12 class chick and her bf decided to tape an act that most kids in school are doing anywayz.Why is there this obsession with SEX?

The media is supposed to be an indicator of the level of maturity that a society has reached.If we go by the kind of reports on TV, then i gotta say , we all must be just a bunch of sex starved perverts who would shag the next thing that we see moving!!

But we do know that our society has matured as time has gone on and sex is slowly coming out of the clauset, so in effect we should have more mature instruments of mass media, shouldn't we? Sadly enuff, we don't.The reason? Simple, SEX SELLS!Thats right , at any point of time more ppl will watch a hot chick running around naked than a documentary about global warming!

So we come to the question of the role of the media.Is it supposed to follow the simple laws of economics and supply what is in demand or should the media focus on reports that are more substantial in nature ?

Hmmm, hard task answering that question....anyways, I still think that good hard hitting journalism can make ratings go as high or even higher than some sleazy story.If we look at ppl like christianne amanpour(CNN) or Tim Sebastian(BBC) we can see that some journalists have delivered mind blowing performances in creating awareness about prudent issues and these reports have delivered awesome ratings too.So it can be done! Its just a matter of the indian media waking up and realizing that there is more to report than sex,violence and gore!

Words-Worth

2004-12-17T11:02:00.000+05:30

Holidayz have just started but i already have an inkling that this is not going to be the joyride i thot it was going to be.While books make for good company i still feel that it will get real boring reeeeel soon.

Anywayz, am getting bored so will blog some more.so get ready for a pile of BS that i am going throw at u.

I was thinking about the kind of lingo that we in college use and then realized that the way i talk now is completely different from when i entered this college.While there has alwayz been a heavy mix of abuses while i talk to my friends but recently in college some rather fascinating words have come up.

A few of them that are at the top of my mind right now would be

Thassa: this is the most excessively used word in the NSIT campus."Thassa " means BS.Thats right it means pure unadulterated bull shit.Be it someone trying to fool a teacher who is keen on knowing the number of butterflies in an 8 pt DFT or be it a guy trying to explain it to his gf why he cudnt talk last night while he was boozing like crazy in the hostel, thassa is the word u use.

Arbit: quite obviously a short form for "arbitrary".The word has encompassed all spheres of NSIT life and is now used freely even in places where a sane man would question its presence.It refers to anything that is out of the scope of undersatnding of an engineer, whatever cannot be comprehended will be termed as "Arbit".

Max: derived from "maximum". it is not used like its ancestor "maximum", main use include prefixing senteces with maxx to emphasize on a particular object.
examples include "max phat gayi","max hot chick","max mazaa aaa gaya","kal humne hostel mein max daru pi"

Ghissu : "bookworm".Used by ppl like me to refer to ppl those who do well in sem exams.

Fun: while traditionally associated with activities, NSITians have taken the use of this word to another level.A hot chick, or a crazy idea or a nice brand of vodka can be "FUN".

Unfun:The previous word has given rise to this.An example would be a faadu subject like digi. comm. which wud be termed as "unfun".

Suppli: A demon that i have stayed away from ,till now.Refers to a failed subject.

Chicklet: this has been coined by none other than our drummin friend "Kaushal".Refers to a gurl who makes ur body do funny things.

Admin: the portion of NSIT campus where ppl are paid for sitting on their asses and not doing anything.

Well those are some of the words, i am sure that there are more but cant quite recall them.

adios amigos

rohit

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Milan Kundera

2004-12-16T18:02:00.000+05:30

OK, I'm done with the novel,here is a small preview of what lies within those 305 pages.

Set against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the story evolves around different fictional topics but could just as well be the story of real people. A man torn between thought and emotion, between love and lust. A woman who lives for rebellion. Tomas, the male protagonist, falls in love with Teresa and marries her, while still having many one-night stands in an attempt to give weight (meaning) to his life. Moreover, he maintains a love-affair with Sabina.

Teresa is aware of Tomas' adulteries and cannot bear the situation, which manifests itself in numerous detailed nightmares illustrating the realities of life. For Teresa, love and sex go together, whereas Tomas believes that having sex without love is possible. The female protagonist therefore suffers from the heaviness of life, while her male counterpart feels the unbearable lightness of being. Teresa later tries to gain this lightness for herself. Most of us carry the heavy and the light, the expression of either part depending on our character and circumstances. For that reason, one can identify with Teresa as well as Tomas and Sabina too.

He talks about opposites: life and death, heaviness and lightness throughout his story. You can try to decide which life is happier: the light or the dark? What is "The Unbearable Lightness of Being?" It is the realization that, with no hope of knowing the right path from the wrong, there can be no wrong path. One is necessarily absolved of mistakes. The search for meaning in life leans towards the necessity of significance, which comes from a sense of weight. Are events forgiven in advance because they happen only once? But, is it also not unbearable that events only occur once as we can never go back and rectify our mistakes? Everyone wishes they could replay a past error; a lost opportunity, a lost love, a relationship that should not be. Is this not unbearable?! Is this not a weight we feel pressing down on us every day?

The novel is an attempt to identify what makes us need companionship in life so badly, trying to understand the relationships between the conflicting desires that humans possess and act upon. What makes a man leave the woman that he loves and is perfectly happy with and seek something intangible in the arms of a mistress? Why does the same man sacrifice everything he has - freedom, social status, and his life's work - only to go back to the same woman he absolutely had to leave before? Is the absence of any responsibilities and ties in life really a "lightness"? Could this absolute lightness turn into absolute emptiness and thus become unbearable at some point - a burden pulling us to the ground? It shows how vulnerable we are, and how miserable we can be made by our contradictory desires, aspirations and impulses.

Here is one line that struck me->>
"How can life ever be a good teacher if there is only one of them to be lived? How can one perform life when the dress rehearsal for life is life?"

Anywayz, i would recommend this book and say that all in all twas a good experience.

ciao
rohit
P.S: Next book is "Power Shift: Alvin Toffler"

CAT ki kahani

2004-12-15T20:22:00.000+05:30

Yeah thats right, i am one of the 1.6 lac junta that wrote the CAT this year and am eagerly awaiting the results.But with this wait comes the awful run of rumours.Every other day one hears about this result and that result and then u get all nervour and with trmbling hands you type out the URL and it all turns out to be nuthing but a big hoax.Anywayz,its going to be another week and i am sure that the results will be out by then.I am keeping all possible organs crossed till then!

A lot of shit has been happening in our batch in college, some immature ppl have created a lot of bad faith in the class.Although ours was never the "Dream" batch but still twas a good motley crowd . Sadly enough ,some ppl will just never learn to grow up and think beyond petty issues.Will write some more on this when everything become clear.

Am currently reading a book calles "The Unbearable lightness of being" by Milan Kundera.Nice book ,have read only half of it till now seems set for a good end. Will write a nice lil review when i get finished with it.

Chalo its time i got back to my book

Movies lined up for tonite: The Incredibles,The Princess Bride.
Current Song : Yun Hi Chala Chal - Swades

Movies Masti Magic

2004-12-13T20:22:00.000+05:30

Exams ended on 11th and now i have some grand plans for the holidays.
I have a host of activities lined up but the one that is exciting me the most at this point of time is the movies that i will be watching.
I got a hard disk frm hostel wid 17GB of movies and already i am having a ball.
Went to priya yesterday, watched Oceans' Twelve.I had heard some bad reviews about the movie but i found it awesome.I especially liked Rusty's(Brad pitt) character.While in the prequel he was the perfect criminal, no feeling or anything like that but this time he had a lil soft spot for Zeta Jones and of course the dialogue delivery by almost all the characters was mindblowing.
After i came back, watched 3 more movies-IQ-Under the tuscan sun-White chicks.Slept at 6 in the morn.Man i love these holidays!!
Anywayz, the silence of the lambs and godfather 2 lined up for today.
Will be talking bout some serious stuff on the blog soon,Stuff that has been troubling me for a while.
anywayz,for now,its movie time
adios

I'm back

2004-12-11T17:39:00.000+05:30

wow! tis been a long time since i wrote anything on the blog...
When i had started this blog( after being inspired by a guy in IIML ) i had thot that this wud be one place i wud pour all my thots into everyday..but alas! as with all my plans ..this wun cud just not be.
Nevertheless, now i have all the time in the world to write as much as i want on my blog.
anywayz,had my last prac today( lol...i can't believe twas an exam worth 2 credits)
this is what happened when i went inside:
Me:may i come in sir
Bheeku: haan haan beta, aao beta,baitho beta,beta,beta.....
MG:what kind uv certi is this...Paaaah--meeeeddd services, how cud u do yr trainin here?
ME: mam, tis a comp. that manufactures MRI machines,X-ray...blah blah...
MG: ok
LIC external: MRI? how does this MRI work?
Me: (almost jumping, this was the only answer i knew) Sir there is a tube, magnetic field...arbit thassa.....
LIC external: ohoh.....gd gd

some 2 minutes more of this and the discussion finally ended with this question "who is the head of the dept in ur brothers hospital"..lol gimme a break ...r u really askin me that?

Can't beleive this was a viva,altho i didnt really work in my training or nething, i just presented this as an example of the farce that is called"Bachelor of Engineering"
newayz that shud be enuff for today,
ciao
rohit

AIM-CAT

2004-08-13T16:49:00.001+05:30

just wrote another mock
woke up at 3 so a lil groggy...but still did ok
need to study for mock tommorow
rohit

Let me set the ball rolling

2004-08-13T16:49:00.000+05:30

ola!!!
hi!!
namaste!!
I am the stoned racounteur aka Rohit Anand

A student of NSIT,Delhi....final year...Elec deptt
Have developed a very strong aversion for all things technical...love everything and anything related to Reading

I love listenin to anything that my ears are willing to accept and anything that does not offend my mind....

Am prepping for CAT...
have got a couple of job offers (TCS and Mindtree) and life looks good...
will try to keep this blog as interesting as poss!!
adios