2007: One Step Close

Year 2006 was of significant importance to me. I graduated in Engineering (even I am wondering till date that how) I traveled all the way to south India to start with my masters against the advice of my father and family members. But well, today I am sitting here on my desk trying to do an inquest on my last one year.

I am trying to trace the reasons behind my decision about my career. All I remember is that there was this vague picture inside my mind about the white collar job with six figure salaries offered to MBA graduates but then one girl tried to change all this. She questioned my attitude and then to find some answers to her questions I learnt a lot about changing the world. She did not ask me to join some NGO or to do something really stupid but rather she convinced me that how my MBA can fit into the schemes of things that I wanted to do. Well, I don’t know in which part of the world she is now but then all those thoughts are still fresh and honest inside me. Those thoughts were seriously sticky. The idea of providing mass healthcare on affordable cost, educating masses without compromising with the quality of education, empowering people with low cost skills improvement programs, at this point of time they may seems to be farfetched but I know that even ordinary individuals have done extra-ordinary in the past. It was sad that I was unable to meet her during her stay in India and god knows when I will be close again to her but then to inspire you need not to be very close. All I want to say to you is thanks Piali. I am one step closer to my dreams.

New Year.. Anniversary Post.

Whoa.. My blog turned one year older... I am happy because I successfully held on to at-least this one resolution of mine. If there is something to remember I guess I started my year with a fitness routine and I pressed myself on jogging, walking and lawn tennis but I lost my way out due to travel and then to this MBA. Life has never been so demanding for me. Though I still don't study much but then, I have learnt to appreciate this new and stressed way of life. I know life will be like this only so better be prepared. Well, if I have to take one thing out of this year and carry it forward then probably I would take the memories from my convocation. For two days I felt like I was doing time travelling. There I was standing at the crossroads of the two different lives one "of a freak" and the other "of a somewhat serious freak". Anything it will be sheer injustice to summarize that experience in one or two lines. The new resolution is to pen down all that the year 2006 has taught me. Hope I will hang on to it. Three cheers to the new year... Hip Hip hurrah..

Raju Srivastava - My all time favorite..

This is one video which I liked most about Laughter challenge. I don't know how much time has elapsed since I have watched the part 2 but then I am not to be blamed as the deterioriating quality of the laughter challenge 2 contributed a lot to it. The challenge could be better described as Reading SMS jokes challenge. Have stumbled upon this video on google video site and found that I can share this bit of humour with all my MBA friends. Enjoy friends, you deserve this one.

Taking 'M' out of "MBA"

When people start preparing for MBA entrance exams, the only thing which hovers around their mind is this Master word and not Business administration. The kind of media publicity that the MBA’s have got in India over the last few years, have contributed significantly to this distorted perception. Young students freshly out of college and young executives with a couple of years of coding or manufacturing behind them gets a shot of adrenalin even at the recall of this word Master. You ask any fresher, they will say that they want MBA for value addition, seeing the bigger picture, completing the education cycle in one go and blah blah blah. Executives will go one notch ahead and you will hear reasons like their team leaders actually does nothing or their project managers just keep going on world tours, they are unable to connect to whatever they do, no excitement left in their present jobs, they want some challenging career and some more blah blah blahing.

I am not saying that these reasons are all craps. Some people may relate to whatever they are saying but majority of Indian students belong to that category where the manifestation of thoughts and the actual thoughts bear no correlation. I myself can give thousand reasons but somewhere down the core of my heart I know that the only thing that provoked this need was that rosy picture being painted by media year after year.

Poor thing is that the realization of the shattered dreams does not come immediately. You go through weeks and months of business education to reason out that whatever you are reading will go obsolete in next five years and whatever you are doing bear little resemblance to the actual picture. We talk about average salaries which has changed to median salaries and which may further change to a combination of average and standard deviation (statistically this is the best measure) to prove that which institute is better than which but then in the process we forget the emotional trauma of those who fall below average figures.

Today, after spending close to six months here, I look around myself. All I can see is some confused people who are becoming more and more confused. Or may be they are focused towards their subconscious goal (consciously thought but putting it forward in a way that it should sound like their last priority) of getting a job which pays above average salaries. I wonder, I was always under illusion that we will learn how to be masters but what the profs can do when we are hell bent on learning only the business administration part?

Some more perfume ideas..

Flattered by the idea of perfume for innovators our professor asked that how you will find that how many innovators are in the country or how many people are going to innovate in future? Will it be something like you'll sell your perfume to only those who will wear a T shirt with "I'm an Innovator" printed on it? Well, that was one doubt which we were not able to clarify.

Some of the suggestions that came from him were:
Perfume for professors:-> If we can come up with a perfume for innovators then why not a perfume for professors or a perfume for shop-keepers or one for non-teaching staff members.
Offensive perfume;-> Which smells like shit and can keep people away from you.

Well the idea clicked with me and I started thinking about some of the buyer segments for which to positioning this perfume. Well to start with:

Film stars:-> Specially for those stars who keep saying "No Media Please" and who are too shy to brush the public and media gathering aside and be rude. (I am not talking about Salmaan Khan, his biceps and his famed driving skills are good enough to scatter the media person everytime he shouts "No Media Please"). They can now have their say without actually saying anything.

Item girls:-> I think Rakhi Sawant will be a celebrity customer or perhaps not (Some people say that with all that makeup on, she already smells like **** you know what). Well the problem is that when these girls say "no" that means "more". But yeah she would have saved herself a "Mika" by putting on that perfume. But wait! who will invite you to a party then? Well we have an idea of hosting theme parties where only regular users of this perfume are invited. Don't worry we promise who's and who's of film industry and sports world and some top corporates.

Indian Cricket stars:-> Will be another set of regular buyers as it will make the fast bowlers of the opposition team bowl from a longer distance than the regular 22 yards. It is evident that even seniors players like Sachin and Dravid are finding it tough to face the chin music from the even the slowest of the fast bowlers. Well this will keep the bowler 10 yards behind and they will get some more time to watch the ball. It will also keep the fielder's away so no chance of getting caught out. But yeah the problem is that you have to wear a nose filter to stand at the non-striker's end. Okay! we have a solution. We will give away nose filters for free for some time.

Daughter in laws:-> This could be a good gift idea as a daughter in law can give it to her mother in law to make a bold statement " Don't come anywhere close to me or I will start wearing this perfume".

Well, these are my crazy ideas about this offensive perfume. I am dying to hear my friends to critically evaluate my ideas and send in their suggestions. I am still to come up with a brand name for my offensive perfume. Friends! wat do you say??

Crazy, Crazier and Craziest..

Customized toothpaste:-> Buy toothpaste in four different tubes each containing one special ingredient like fluoride, calcium,whitening agent or a dental cream. Buy any number of them by your choice and mix them to get that freshning morning breath. Wait, toothpastes are no longer for morning brushing only.

Toothpaste for diabetics:-> Sugar free or non sweetened toothpaste.

Toothpaste for smokers:-> Which makes them feel score that whatever harm tobacco does on their teeth, there is one toothpaste which is going to take care of that.

Perfume for innovators:-> Wear this perfume and feel like an innovator. decide for yourself what you are going to innovate.

Perfume for achievers:-> To make a statement which expresses your personality and for those who oozes confidence. This will be a perfume for those selected few.

Soap with a hole:-> I don't know exactly what was the basic idea but people are claiming that this soap will be easy to rub and will last longer as very less water can stay on the soap.

Soap with goat milk:-> These soaps are popular in the best but for price conscious Indian customers they are still a distant dream.

Soap for water scarce area:-> Will save water as will give little lather (not convinced by the idea actually.. to save water you always have the option to skip bath. Ask any person who has outlived Punjab's winter he must be knowing how to conserve water.

Seasonal bathing soaps:-> A soap for every season. WEll it's a crazy shot at leveraging the four season advantage of India and selling four different kind of soaps but then how would one know when to switch soaps?

Bollywood fan club calling card:-> Call Amitabh Bachhan and talk to his recorded voice, leave a message. Or sing a birthday song to your favorite actress Aishwarya Rai. You can now live your fantasies with the bollywood calling card.

Calling Card for farmers:-> Send these people the local mandi rates, EMI information and local gossip. Farmers will be very loyal to you if you succeed in doing even a small value addition.

Refrigerator-AC combo:-> Both are almost identical in working. But then the challenge is to integrate the two. You open the door it's refrigerator and when it's closed, its an AC.

Wondering what is all this? Well, these are the inputs from the segmentation exercise for our marketing course 1. Morale of the story is: People can go crazy, if given a chance. And they can go crazier if they are marketers.

Tournament Effect..

We often wonder that we were too good in school and then somehow not able to sustain the same level of enthusiasm and energy during the later part of our career. We pile on a bundle of dreams thinking that life will always be like this. I will get the same people to compete with for all my life. After entering a college with student population much bigger than the combined strength of your school you still think that this is almost the same set of people. Competition will be the same. Slowly the feeling sinks in that life has changed and pace of the change requires you to revise your goals. Now you don't want to be the topper and you will feel satiated even if you manage to get the second rank. What happened? Has your competencies changed? The answer is No. Why? well keep reading.

You are in college where you are the okay with academics but excel in extracurricular and especially good with quant and verbal ability (yeah! you know what I am talking about). You read one article in the daily editorial and feel confident that someday you can make it to the CEO level and MBA is the route to it. You feel confident about the pedagogy followed in MBA. Case discussions, presentations, group discussions and group exercises, you relate all this to your college life and you think you have enough substance in you to make it big in MBA. You target the CEO position of a company of your dreams. Well, you enter a MBA course. For the first few days you find the going easy but then you start feeling that something is not right. We call this "WHAT YOU THOUGHT IS NOT WHAT YOU GET" effect. You slow down to analyze yourself and revise your goals. Now you target the CTO,CFO, COO or any other higher level position ( just below the CEO). Well slowly and gradually, after two or three revisions of your goals, during the start of your placement season you will feel happy if you bag an entry level position on Day 1. Well, it seems logical that you should be realistic but then have your competencies really changed? Again a "NO".

What is this which makes us feel smaller and insignificant over a period of time? Well, the answer is "TOURNAMENT EFFECT". The explanation of this effect is that we are so absorbed with ourselves that we never realize that the stage is getting bigger and bigger. And people around you are becoming smarter and smarter. You are sharing your stage with some of the handpicked people who were perhaps the best in their own comfort zone.

For MBA students this effect has really a meaning. To excel in life you need not always look inside you, you have to be an excellent reader of the environment also. You can not take it for granted that if you were good at something in the past it's an advantage. Well it's rather a disadvantage as it will act as a mindblock for you. Continuous improvement of your skill sets is the key. After all, you are not in your comfort zone. Well, the moral of the story is respecting your self for what you are respecting others for what they are and if you have to revise your goals/targets then please don't feel bad. You can always blame this “TOURNAMENT EFFECT".

Mania of 43..

It has been a month…30 and thankfully not “43” days (k…not sure but, it doesn’t hurt to hope can it?) Since I’ve been haunted by number 43 more than once a day, my disbelief in numerology is getting shattered and ubiquitous reappearance of this number in my daily life is making me think about it and dedicate a post to it. A search on google reflected zero results and it did not help much to sideline my worries about the mystery of number 43. I get a phone call; I hang up and see that the call timing is 8 minutes 43 seconds or any number of minutes + 43 seconds. I talk about this to one of my friends and then the next car that passes ahead of us has its number plate marked 20”43”. I look at my computer clock and find it’s exactly 43 minutes past some hour. I check with one of my friend randomly and ask her the time. She says it’s 2:43 now.

Don’t know what the connection between me and 43 is but, it feels wonderful to think that “43” used to be our teen code for “Love you”.

What Ram Jethmalani wants??

This is the question all those people are asking who walked side by side holding candles and demanding Justice for Jessica. I hope this name “ Jessica” is still fresh in our minds. The two slogans which brought India closer this year were “ Youth for equality” and “Justice for Jessica”. While the former was self made the latter was coined by Media as they were falling short of news stories in those un-eventful early summer months.

Anyways, the fire slowly died out and what remained is the long procedures of filing papers, court dates, appointment of public prosecutor and then hiring a legal defendant. The story got much bigger this time as the person who is going to defend Manu Sharma’s case is undisputed king among the criminal lawyers. Ram Jethmalani has this knack of being in news for all kind of reasons. When he was in ministry he made it into news several times but then his position in BJP was slowly taken by young and brilliant lawyer Arun jaitley and the frustration out of this made him target leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The move is well calculated now. The fire inside him is slowly dying. The young bunch of Yale and Harvard educated lawyers have this capability of delivering a bigger better show anyday anytime. The magic is fading away and this is his chance to prove that he is the best. To choose to defend Manu Sharma is like making a statement that public was completely wrong and they have no rights to decide the fate of a person in the court of public when the case is lying pending with the court of law. Manu is innocent and Jessica was murdered by some non-existent person or Jessica might have provoked him to shoot her or he was already in a drunken state and he didn’t know what exactly he did in that state. Whatever may be the verdict, at-least I am not going to buy this argument that Jethmalani is doing this for a big fat cheque that Manu’s family is going to write to him at the end of the “FAIR TRIAL”. The only other probability is that he wants to prove this thing to the world that a candle burns brighter just before it dies out. I don't know exactly what motivated Mr. Jethmalani to take up this challenging case but well in the court of public perhaps you will no more be an ideal figure.

Getting started once again..

With placements of the final year batch getting almost over now, for first years, its time to jet, set and go once again. It’s the time to be prepared to meet the hard life ahead. The three day’s discontinuity from studies has given us enough time to sit back and reflect over the past four months that we have spent slogging for grades. I am wondering that I took four months to realize that grades don’t matter at all. What matters most is the flair and penchant for work and the way you integrate your academic knowledge into your action. Most of the students who got placed on day 1 and landed the best jobs are those who had this hunger in their eyes and for some reasons fighting for grades do not excite them all.

Anyways, the three days layoff followed by a busy Friday evening and now a seemingly bitchy week ahead (with shit load of work, case presentations and quizzes), I think it’s the best time to think over that final decision that What I want to be in life. But then my gut feeling is that for a person as confused as me, he has to wait until the need arises to update his resume once again.