Brain & Digits

The irrationality of the IIMs/Indians

2011-01-14T12:12:00.000-08:00

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory suggests that, in a free market, demand finds the most economically viable supply that satisfies it qualitatively and quantitatively, and prices get determined based on that; that a free market is the game of "survival of the fittest". I'm sure IIMs teach these Macro-economic-101s to the eager minds that fill their classrooms every year. But what is put on display may make Mr. Smith turn in his grave.

I was bemused to find that IIM Ranchi has recently announced that it would only consider candidates scoring above 99.5 percentile in CAT 2010 for admissions into its PGP program commencing 2011. One doesn't need the Minerva squatting in his head to guess that in a free market, a demand for the top half-percentile share of candidates is one a 1-year-old, fledgling institute can ill-afford to make. Where is the “invisible hand”?

Let's look into the dynamics of the game. The institute can "afford the luxury" of calling for the creme-de-la-creme of young Indian minds not because it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any of the other institutes (in India or abroad) in terms of research prowess, industrial/international exposure or quality of its staff/curricula. I'm not saying that it is bad on these but just that the jury is still out on them. After all, it is yet to produce its first output. Rather, it is just because it is blessed with the ubiquitous 3-letter acronym that 6 other predecessors have been blessed with - I-I-M.

How different is this from the dynastic politics that we’re so used to in India. We vote for people because of their names, surnames, affiliations to people with surnames, etc. We impute quality. We seldom see their merit. Is the case of IIM Ranchi (or for that matter the other ones that make irrationally exuberant demands) very different? Why do students mindlessly flock these institutes? Do they research before they apply? (A 101 for applying to b-schools).

So what does the average CAT-taker use to determine the institutes he applies to? I could think of only one simple business concept – economies of scale. It costs the applicant the same 1500 rupees or thereabouts for the application form whether he applies to 1 IIM or all. Makes sense to apply for all in that case, doesn’t it? The mantra that IIM Ranchi and all the new IIMsfollow is very simple. Take a process. Never bother how cranky/empty it is. See that you have extremely good input. Even if the input passes through your process with rather undisturbed in any sense, they’ll come out as good outputs because started out with the good ones in the first place (Ever wondered why companies at IIMs prefer freshers that “they” can train instead of preferring experienced industry people with a new, acquired business outlook?)

No wonder those simple ticks that a CAT-taker makes with his pencil on the form translates to such monstrous cut-offs. No wonder IIMs get 400-500 applications for every seat on offer while Harvard gets around 13. No wonder a set of institutes with mediocre research grants, astonishingly few research-hungry staff and just-about-ok infrastructure can pass off as national champions. No wonder Indians fall for names instead of the quality that lies within. No wonder India votes for families and surnames.

Why Kinect is a game changer

2010-12-11T02:42:00.000-08:00

After a long wait and weeks of promo, Kinect finally hit the stores both in India and the US almost simultaneously a couple of weeks ago. It retails at around $200 in the US and 10,000 INR in India.

I was grinning ear-to-ear when MS announced that Kinect would be an add-on to the Xbox 360 system and wouldn’t necessarily require purchasing a new console. However, what took my breath away was the fact that MS has designed Kinect not just for the Xbox but for the PC as well. Now this is a coup de grace. Netizens who frequent ted.com couldn’t have missed Pranav Mistry’s “Sixth sense” presentation. I couldn’t help but think that Kinect would take us all a step closer to it. Kinect opens up the doors for a new array of gesticulation-and-voice based programs on the PC that can completely overhaul our PC experience. You might be able to give your keyboard and mouse some rest and just be “interacting” – talking naturally with your computer with gesticulations pretty soon.

I am sure usability experts will now sit-up and take notice that they could soon be doing away with conventional menu bars and interaction elements and coming up with new patterns to make a computer adapt better to human gesticulations. All in all, I think human-computer-interaction is heading into a whole new phase of fun. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Context (in)sensitive ad!

2010-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Marrying e-governance intiatives and IT bench-warmers

2010-04-08T04:48:00.000-07:00

A report on Orissa government's e-governance initiative, in the form of a developing portal for applying driving licences online set me thinking (Yeah, not many things happening around me "set me thinking")

The top 6 Indian software services companies - SWITCH - Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, CTS, HCL (no pun intended with the acronym) - have around 10-20% of their workforce warming up benches at any point in time. What if these companies pool together their "benched" resources and offered them to the government free of cost to code the e-governance initiatives? The government can set up a company to manage these resources and pay just the project managers (or even they can be loaned from these companies if they happen to be on bench).

It's an easy win-win. This would drastically reduce the bill that the government has to foot to develop their software and manage it. From the companies' standpoint, this reduces the bickering by the benched employees, not to mention the satisfaction they get working "for their countrymen" towards a larger cause.

How to offend your users?

2010-02-11T00:14:00.000-08:00

A picture speaketh a thousand words!

Ego measurement

2009-05-04T00:50:00.000-07:00

Shahrukh Khan said that he is the most sellable property in IPL. That is some measurement for a man's ego. However, I came across a more accurate one when I was browsing through cricinfo. What say?

Aloo (f)or Brains (?)

2009-03-18T05:47:00.000-07:00

This is the wickedest article I have come across. Noble as it may sound at the first read that it informs users about a certain infected website (which, by the way, I may have never visited on my own in my lifetime), I cannot help satisfy myself with a reason as to why the person who wrote this chose to provide a link to the infected site.

I am left to wonder if this is the web version of disaster tourism. Remember Vilasrao Deshmukh, Ram Gopal Varma, The Taj, and the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai?

Delhi 6

2009-03-02T08:04:00.000-08:00

I went for the 21:40 show yesterday and was a bit taken aback to see only the last row of the hall filled-up (on a Sunday night in Delhi). Sometime into the second half, the "Aha" moment occurred. Delhi 6 is not a feature film. It is a pantomime with some dialogues. The director has chosen to weave a story around deep characterisation supported by some mesmerizing music peppered with a few dialogues. One doesn't need a second guess to see the effect of this technique on the Indian audience. After being treated to seminal works like "Singh is Kin(n)g" and "Welcome", which require you to leave your brain at the popcorn counter, the average Indian audience just couldn't bear the "cognitive load" the movie placed on him.

The movie was exceptionally metaphorical. Be it the loose brick in the wall that estranged the brothers which the ladies of the house used for gossip or the clever twinning of Ramlila with the original story, right until climax where the mask of the "kala bandhar" burns with the effigy of the ten-headed Ravana, or the flight of the dove, Masakali to signify the ephemeral nature of human emotions, the director screamed at the audience to "look into" his movie, not just gloss over it. (It's another matter that the audience responded to him with the thundering silence of empty halls). He has displayed exception craft in handling his characters and their nuances. Each character has a part to play. No one hangs in loosely. (Let's give the Hero's performance a miss here, shall we?).

I especially liked the visualisation of the song "Dil mera...". It delicately and neatly captured the incoherence of dreams. It was a near-perfect anatomy of a dream - a motley mix of people, places and things one likes and wants; chaotic; all in one place, at once. I was awed by its quintessential realism. Frankly, I dream like that. I don't dream of Swiss Alps and Caribbean beaches filled with bikini-clad women dancing in lockstep to my two left feet.

On the whole, I liked the movie for the sheer respect the director gave his audience by treating them as thinking beings than hedonistic mortals. You do not have to be a connoisseur to love this piece. Just have your feet on the ground, eyes and ears wide open. Oh! Don't forget your brain at the counter, though. You'll need it.

Rags and Riches

2009-01-27T03:51:00.000-08:00

Just why did Slumdog millionaire win 4 golden globes?

May be I don't have a discerning taste for movies and can't tell the dregs from connoisseurs' delights. However IMHO, a good movie is one wherein you are at ease following the storyline. Movie is a medium where the director makes effective use of sound and light (audio and video) to convey his imagination to the audience. Now, when conveying his imagination, he needs to take care that there are no gaps; no assumptions left untold. The audience should make no "guesses" to fill the "gaps" the storyline. I think Boyle has failed on all these counts.

He made the movie in English, which handicaps it heavily given that in the social matrix he weaves, the knowledge of the language doesn't percolate to the bottom strata of the society. In fact, in India, one of the easiest signals into a man's education, career, and to an extent his social status is his proficiency in English. Exceptions to this rule do exist, especially with the profession that the protagonists in the movie take up (i.e., Tour guiding). However, the director made no attempt to educate us how the boys learnt the tongue. I just couldn't bring myself to believe that 2 fugitives jump out of a train and talk syllable-pure English with no formal education behind them. I later learnt that the book (Q&A on which the movie is based) offers a satisfactory explanation. Why this big gap?

I also thought that the "big brother" character (was his name Ajmal?) was very shallow. He turns a murderer one night, and turns a good man overnight again - as fast as you can turn a dosa over a tawa (Indian pancake over a shallow pan, for the uninitiated). Great movie stuff. But when somebody said that the character depictions were "raw" I was forced to look at the name of the movie he was referring to.

For some reason, I think that western audience like a lot of shit about some alien society. If you depict India as a land of snake-charmers where people go to offices over their private elephants and say that this is the underbelly of the country which you have exposed, you will be nominated for the Oscars before you finish your prints. I agree I wouldn't be lying factually there; just statistically. So what do westerners rate a movie on?

Lastly, I am so happy that I am not Amitabh Bacchan (or anybody of any importance); that I can call what I think is a spade a spade and NOT retract the statement later on.

Played out

2008-12-14T05:54:00.000-08:00

I feel a bit ashamed to say that, in my 29 years of existence, I watched my first play today (better late than never). I watched “Chaos Theory” by Rahul De Cunha. I realised two things as I watched the play. I liked the play; I love performing arts. The very concept of seeing the actors performing live, so close to you, was something totally different.

I think the surreal world of a stage play is more realistic than that of a movie. Coined in a different way, a play is less surrealistic than a movie. (Depending on your point of view, the above two statements could be profound or pointless). Imagine. For once it was not the retaken, edited, mixed versions of the best, filtered performances of artists that were presented to me in a sequence of scenes called a movie, but things as they were played out (literally and figuratively) right before my eyes. What a dumb modern-day consumer of canned, recorded performances I have been so far! How different, exhilarating, and cathartic is this experience of consuming something as it is being delivered - Fresh! (Yeah. It is such a simple extension of freshly-made food tasting better, silly).

Though I am stating the blatantly obvious, performing arts need much more skill than movies just because of the fact that you do not have the backup of another "take". You face your audience directly. It is like an author penning down a thought-out story in a big book that everybody can read, as he writes it. Isn't it a bit shameful that writers cannot write live as actors act on stage? The actors practice before, yes but they perform in front of the audience. An author too thinks out the theme in solitude, but he cannot perform publicly. Actors should feel proud of their profession.

The New Car

2008-09-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

This is my first attempt at blogging in my native language. I know that this would reduce my total readership to a tenth of the original (ok ok...you did your math right. One tenth of my original readership would come to a fraction less than one). Well read it to see how not to write a blog in Tam.

லதா காலிங் பெல்லை அழுத்திவிட்டு நின்றாள். ஒரு நிமிடத்திற்கு பின் கதவு திறக்கப்பட்டது. ரம்யா கதவின் மறுமுனையிலிருந்து புன்னகைத்தாள். "வா லதா. என்ன அங்கேயே நின்னிட்ட. உள்ள வா", என்றவள் சட்டென்று உள்ளே சென்று மின்விசிறியை ஓட விட்டாள். "என்ன ரெண்டு நாளா இந்த பக்கமே காணோம்"?

"இல்ல நேத்து இன்னொரு புதூ கார் வந்துது. அதான்..." என்று இழுத்தாள் லதா. "அடி சக்க. உன் புருஷன் பெரிய ஆளு தான் டீ. ஊருக்கு வந்து ஆறு மாசத்துல மூனாவது புதூ கார். Super போ".

"ஏதோ ஆண்டவன் புண்யம் அக்கா. இந்தாங்க கொஞ்சம் சக்கர பொங்கல் செய்தேன்" என்று அவளிடம் கொண்டு வந்த பாத்திரத்தை நீட்டினாள். "ரொம்ப சந்தோஷம். இனிமே குழைந்தைங்க பள்ளிக்கூடம் போவது கொஞ்சம் எளிதாகும், இல்ல?" கேட்டுக்கொண்டே பொங்கலை தன் வாயில் கொஞ்சம் போட்டு கொண்டால்.

"நிச்சயமா. இன்னும் இருநூறு ரூபாய். நெறையா செய்யலாம். ஒரு கார் அதிகமா தொடைக்க எவ்வளோ நேரம் ஆகா போவுது? ஏதோ அந்த colony-ல இந்த மாதிரி இன்னும் நாலு பேரு கார் வாங்கினா அவங்களுக்கு புண்ணியமா போகும்". அவள் குரலில் ஆவலுடன் ஒரு அவலமும் தெரிந்தது.

Reservations...

2008-04-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

Never cease to amaze me. They have done some good to the society. But the latest is sweet: "Seats will be reserved for the socially backward classes in IIMs! Wait a doggone moment. If a guy needs to enter an IIM, he has to be a graduate already. If he is already a graduate, doesn't he cease to be a "socially backward" guy by virtue of his degree? Or is it our government's humble opinion that a person from a backward caste, irrespective of being a graduate, will continue to be deemed to socially backward? Why is it that I am not able to believe that this will remove casteism from the society?

The Aussie way

2008-03-06T05:32:00.000-08:00

I loved the way The Sydney Morning Herald concluded their article yesterday:

Australian captain Ricky Ponting admitted India outplayed them in the one-day finals. A more graceful captain would also have admitted that India had out-behaved Australia all summer.

Succinct punch indeed. It brings out several pertinent things such as:

The Aussies were outplayed (duh)
Ponting could be "more" graceful (though I agree that there might be slight disagreements over the extent of improvement possible - on a logarithmic scale, that is)
Ponting could have admitted something more (bracketed text from (2) to be repeated here)
India behaved much better than the Aussies

On a slightly tangential note, I have a nagging feeling that Hayden just didn't finish his sentence when talking to the radio station. May be had they asked him after the finals, he'dda said: (addtional quote italicized)

They are losing every game they are playing. Look at us. Since the year last, we decided that we only lose finals.

How ignorant!

CEO Talk

2008-02-14T23:16:00.000-08:00

It is after a long time that I gave out a hearty laugh reading a serious post. This is to do with the recent axing of employees in the Yahoo! Bangalore office. Now, if a diplomat is one who makes you look forward to a trip to hell, I think CEOs are much more hideous on the "usher-to-hell" scale. Read this:

CEO Jerry Yang had mentioned a 1000 Targeted job cuts in an investors earnings call last month, and a strategic workforce realignment by mid-February, aimed at eliminating redundancies in bureaucracy and redeploying talent. (emphases by me)

Wow. Such clarity! I can bet my ESOP (It tells more about the ESOPs than my confidence. But never mind) that the release was written with one main objective and one side(y) objective. Main: Convey no useful information that investors do not know. Side(y): Confound the common man to the maximum extent possible through a 3-line press release. A normal person just doesn't comprehend anything out of these statements. If you are smart enough to comprehend what is exactly happening, well you wouldn't be listening to the bullcrap that CEOs spew out in the press meets. You just know. Period.

I think all CEOs must be made to have a few drinks before press conferences. May be then the stock market woud be an entirely different ball game:

Well. We are not doing so well these days and you know what's happening. So we thought we'd fire a few to keep the boat afloat.

Just imagine how much of print real estate, ink, hard disk space, technical analysis, internet bandwidth, and tape could have been saved if he had made that more concise and to-the-point statement. Few IBankers would lose their jobs, but then who cares?

Sigh. Straight talk and management never meet eye-to-eye. Bring on the lagers, somebody.

Nano car. Mega problems?

2008-01-12T20:34:00.000-08:00

Even as Ratan Tata was getting down from his Nano for the first time before the eyes of the media, we could hear shouts of dissent and despair. The modern-day Indian Cassandras predicted doomsday for the average Indian. “Ban the Nano”, was their clamour. Clogged roads, traffic snarls, high pollution levels... list was long, believable, and intimidating to the half-asleep, coffee-in-the-hand-morning-paper-reading average Indian. Malthusian mindsets? One is left to wonder.

The argument put forward is pretty simple. "The price (of the Nano) would make ‘a lot’ of people buy the car and so would lead to congestion in our roads". Sounds…believable, ay? Try this then. "Providing universal education is dangerous since we'll have to contend with too many eligible kids fighting for a job". How about this? “Making too many people earn money would mean that we have ‘a lot’ of people empowered to buy things and will lead to supply shortages”. Same line of thought, ain't it? Accordingly then, we must remain an uneducated, poor nation, for any change from equilibrium is chaotic.

I think we still have remnants of the licence raj within us. We shun change. We shun free markets. We shun innovation. Well. Why is it that these naysayers do not think that there is a functioning government (though many think that it is an oxymoron) in India which ideally should rise up to providing the ecosystem for the industry to prosper? If that means constructing more roads for the people to get from point A to B faster, easier, safer, so be it. You can tax the car and fund the projects. That way each man contributes. The more the merrier. Why is it that people refuse to be taught from history – that necessity is the mother of all innovations? Tata found a necessity (demand) and created the Nano. If this creates the demand for more infrastructure, the government will have to yield to it. The point is not whether the government will react, but when.

Simple lessons. Complex mindsets?

Switch

2008-01-07T04:38:00.000-08:00

ReadWriteWeb, in one of its articles, abbreviated the pack of Indian services companies as SWITCH (Satyam, Wipro, Infy, TCS, CTS, HCL).

RWW has got too many erstwhile coders in their teams? ;) Looks too good to be coincidental otherwise!

The Angolan Shooting

2007-12-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

It's been "some" time sice I blogged and there are quite a number of good reasons for it, beyond my increasing sloth and decreasing time availability (may be these two have a causal relationship), that is. However, this news piece made me break my silence:

Angolan actors 'killed by police'

Certainly, one of "Man bites dog" genre. I do not know if it is the actors who have to be posthumously honoured for 'acting naturally' (talk about Oxymorons) or the police which had to be 'winked at' for this state of excessive alertness. If only our Mumbai police department had been this vigilant, the entire race of villian-turned-heroes would have now been six feet under terra firma. Nevertheless, it is a case of human tragedy - lives lost unnecessarily. Too high a price to be paid for, well doing your job exceedingly well.

Indians Are Privately Smart and Publicly Dumb - V. Raghunathan

2007-10-18T23:21:00.000-07:00

This piece about Indians and how they behave as a group is fantastic. The concept of “Indian crab” is well-known (documented and experienced), but this refreshing lowdown on the behavior of Indians backed by some sound theoretical arguments makes a good read.

I think we see this all around us. The title of the book says it all, doesn’t it? Agreed that democracy is a leveling doctrine. But the Romans who conceived it hoped that it would help raise the bar at every available opportunity. This duality of self-propelling governance which balances excellence and mediocrity but at the same time continues to raise the bar for definition of both is what ideally makes democracy an interesting concept. However, like all the medicines with side-effects, democracy comes with its own strings. I think this book will make people understand why democracy in India has actually managed to put India where it is – a good distance away from the MDGs as the half-time reviews show!

The Blue Umbrella

2007-08-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

I watched two movies this month - “Chak De” and “The Blue Umbrella”. Of the former, I think enough publicity has been made and enough print(web) real(virtual)-estate devoted in the form of reviews, interviews, etc. Of the latter, I venture to write my thoughts.

At least by the time I went to see the movie, IMDB rated it a rare 9.4 (out of 70 votes). So I had high expectations and given that I walked out of the theater not disappointed, I should agree that the movie lived up to my expectations. I should also say that this review (if I can pass this piece as one) could have been different had I read Bond’s novel (on which the movie is based) before watching the movie.

The Movie: Firsts - The setting was fantastic and characterisation vivid. The lensman has captured the beauty of the Himalayas and stitched it into the story seamlessly. Somehow, I felt that the location complemented the characterisation. The story captures the dynamics of a small society of closely-knit people by following a thread of simple incidents predominantly revolving around an 11-year girl and a grumpy old man. What is so beautiful about it? The subtlety, of course. If you had read Conan Doyle, you’d appreciate how the author cleverly uses the character of Watson – a slightly slow-to-understand gentleman who, by asking pesky questions to (otherwise laconic) Holmes, makes the detective explain us his obscure schema. Out here, the author has used trivial incidents as a trigger to capture some complex human behaviors. You’ll observe that he has masterfully controlled the environment by choosing a small society and simple incidents and retained the focus on the depiction of human behavior in the context of the setting.

In all, I liked the movie very much, though I am not sure if I’d give it a 10. Only one mall in Noida runs the movie and runs that just once a day. Many of the audience in the theatre, for some reason seemed restless during the show. May be we need to train our people to accept a bit of reality on reels.

Shame

2007-08-05T03:03:00.000-07:00

I felt so moved by reading this post that I thought I should put up a link from here so that at least a fraction of the people who stop by my blog read this.

CNN-IBN (along with other media channels/newspapers) has taken up the issue of the Srikrishna report - the way the contents of the report published circa ‘98 were brushed under the carpet, soon after Dutt's verdict. I smiled saying that the old 50's journalism (where media was a one-way, broadcasting tool) is giving way to a more participatory journalism (aka the User Generated Content in Web 2.0 parlance, if you prefer it that way). At last, people have started actively reacting to the news. The educated and the savvy have started asking the representatives elected by their illiterate and ignorant countrymen, who queued up in polling booths while the former were cooling their knees off in front of their TV sets watching the voter-turnout statistics. Good, isn’t it? But hang on. If Srikrishna report has indeed been brushed under the carpet, why didn't the media come up with its "awareness drive" any earlier? After all, neither the incident, nor the report is new.

This is where capitalism speaks (to give you the answer). Mr. Sardesai* is too seasoned a journalist to know that raking up the Srikrishna report issue "just any fine day" would only make him look anti-Hindu. He needed bait to lure people, make them click their tongues and say, “Ooh! Yeah. We forgot about that report”. He sensed one in Dutt’s verdict, didn't he? They run the channel for money, not charity - mind you. Who said you cannot just wait for the opportune moment to bring up...eh, your TRP?

*or any other journalist who has started harping on the report in the past couple of days

Should I feel patriotic?

2007-08-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

Looks like the Indian crowd is certainly making its presence felt in the netscape. Google Blogoscoped reports the 20 "top" search words in Google that lead to Reddit and one can easily see the Indian imprint. Here it goes:

1.reddit
2.sexycollegegirl
3.nude bollywood
4.nude bollywood actress
5.bollywood nude
6.nude actress
7.nude indian actress
8.sexy
9.reddit.com
10.redditt
11.buy viagra
12.aishwarya nude
13.bollywood nude actress
14.nude aishwarya
15.bollywood actress nude
16.oy kullanma (I have reasons to believe that this is a misspelt Tam swear-word)
17.nude indian actresses
18.couples having sex
19.actress nude
20.google

Wonder how "all" these searches lead to reddit. While this piece of news left me wondering about the "potential" of the Indians, this other piece from Amit verma's blog proved beyond any reasonable doubt we aren't the most accomplished beings on earth when it comes to libido.

By the way, If you are thinking why I preferred pasting the entire list instead of providing a hyperlink to the page, understand that I would definitely not mind a splurge in desi traffic to my blog. "Brain and digits" may not exactly be an aphrodisiac for the "needy" desi, but then, WTH? I have all the "Top 20 searches". One should see the counter racing slightly more frantically than the tampered Chennai-auto meter if reddit (and Google’s crawler) ought to be believed.

Delving Deep

2007-07-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

Increasingly, I am lead to believe that the easiest way to enter the headlines and get famous in our country is to get yourself into a narrow pit. Deeper the pit, better the coverage. From municipal drainages to farmland bore-wells, the choice is wide. Just remember to have someone who will wake the police, call the media and find out the municipal authorities and you will have all the limelight (literally) on you. Wow! Time to "jump-in", I say.

Indian Railways

2007-06-08T04:24:00.000-07:00

WTH? Isn't this a free country? Who are they to tell me what I can do with my machine? Grrr.

Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit’s End

2007-06-04T22:36:00.000-07:00

I do not know why this blog is turning into a movie review place. May be I am watching too many movies. May be I feel strongly about what I see that I sit down and write about them. May be I have no other work to do. May be…

G and I met an ISB colleague on Saturday night in the Centre Stage Mall. (The one in which they use room fresheners outside to keep the overflowing sewers from bothering the “upwardly mobile crowd” walking in). After making sure that we weren’t carrying any Anthrax packets or Kashalnikovs with a 2-inch swoosh of the apparatus resembling a metal detector that for some reason kept beeping constantly (I suspected low battery), the guards let us in. Over a cuppa and some banter, we decided to go for a movie. The only hall that had a show starting around that time was showing “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

Apart from discovering that Platinum lounges don’t serve you food, cost just 150 bucks a seat and usually never fill-up even on Saturday nights, I found the movie to be a bit too long, but bearable. It was boring till Johnny Depp entered and less boring afterwards. Nothing special or noteworthy, but normal PoC stuff. However, I was a bit annoyed with the way it dragged on in the last half hour. It looked more like those Indian mega-serials which never seem to end even after reaching three or four logical conclusions. Indian audience are trained to empty the remaining popcorn either into their bellies or onto the floor (whichever looks emptier) the moment you show them a zooming-out silhouette of a person waving hands or in a tight clasp with the lead-character of the opposite gender. Unfortunately, such scenes were woefully repeated three or four times and still the movie dragged on much to the annoyance of the crowd that decided to stay after the interval. However, after we braced ourselves several times saying, “this too shall end”, it did happen! There was one final long shot, surely the last one, for it was too long to be followed by another scene and the theater emptied at an alarming rate.

My Verdict: Can watch once.

Empty barrels make much noise a.k.a Shootout at Lokhandwala

2007-05-28T02:26:00.000-07:00

Few movies achieve the dubious distinction of making you think that watching plants grow or cows shit might be a better alternative to spend those two-and-half hours. “Shootout at Lokhandwala” falls and squats itself into this list comfortably. Apart from a colossal waste of time, a splitting headache and an unbee(a)rable damage for the rest of the day, not to mention a lighter wallet and a chance to see some 400 similarly disgruntled faces, the movie promises very little.

The director has excelled in achieving near perfection in miscasting almost all characters in the movie so much so that you feel that even a random assignment might have made more sense. What should have just been a 15-minute action video has been developed into a movie resulting in unnecessary, shallow character depictions and avoidable scenes. The only satisfactory thing is that the reviews have been pretty much univocal in denouncing the movie a complete bore thus enabling the theatres across the country to move on quickly to better releases and less angry faces.

Onto other stuff, I managed to get my bike to Noida. The vehicle with a TN registration looks grossly out of place in a city crowded with “DL”s and “HR”s and “UP”s and an occassional “A/F” (April Fool?). I have a gut feel that, but for the brand of the bike, the UP policemen, given their knowledge about the country, might think that the bike is imported.

Noida mein Naukri

2007-05-11T23:22:00.000-07:00

It's the first time I am on the other side of Vindhyas and it has been an experience of sorts. A few reasons:

1. Barbers prefer the pavement over a street-side shop to render their services,
2. Bus drivers are generous to take their vehicles to the pavement and not just restrict them to roads
3. AC restaurants run the AC in "fan" mode even when the outside temperature is a balmy 43 degrees
4. Cycle rickshaws (hitherto believed extinct in S.India) outnumber autos 100:1.
5. Bullock carts (and sometimes Bullocks) move on the fast lane in the highways.
6. You can announce a ransom of Rs 1000 to anybody who spots public transport and rest assured that it'll be eons before he comes back to you for the claim
7. You find little difference between the terrorists portrayed Hindi films and mid-noon scooter drivers as far as appearance is concerned

I think I'll be constantly appending to the list in the coming days. I sign-off with this excellent license agreement from Wordweb:

Welcome to the WordWeb dictionary-thesaurus.

All users may use WordWeb for 30 days for evaluation purposes. After 30 days it may freely be used only if you personally:

Take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period
AND do not own an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

Home

2007-04-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

It has been 3 weeks since I left ISB and I can see a lot of changes within me. My sleep cycle has gone back to the normal mode (In other words, I sleep), I talk gibberish most of the times I am awake, remain glued to the Internet for no good reason, read essays of Francis Bacon, and ponder over the meaning of life. The general consequences of these activities range from a few raised eyebrows to a shout of, “Arrant nonsense! My son has lost it” (or its equivalent in Tamil) from my mom.

Surely, a couple of things worth mention in this post. First is the weather. It’s still early days of summer and by Chennai standards it has rather been mild, what with the rain gods sending in an occasional shower or two. However, the motley bunch that arrived from Bangalore earlier this week lost no sweat (literally) in denouncing Chennai as an uninhabitable geography. For once I stood exposed to the fact that Chennai (or at least the part of the city they sampled) was devoid of proper air conditioners, road sense, satellite channels, and decent people not to mention the weather that would make pigs sweat! Hmm. Certainly something to take note of. (Beware of visitors from Bangalore)

The second thing is food. For three weeks straight, I have been treated with an assortment of south Indian delicacies. Famished, as I was with burnt rotis, half-cooked rice and never-looking-different dhals of ISB, I am verily delighted at this welcome change. I can go as far as saying that my mom is God’s gift to gastric juices (next to Anatole), even if it is with a burp and the associated emotion. This undoubtedly has been one of the main reasons I enjoy my stay home. It’s a couple of more weeks roughly before I assume my new responsibilities in Delhi and until then I have no complaints that daily, it is rice… thrice.

Exit ISB

2007-04-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

Last week was an eventful one - Farewell parties, orkut invitations, handshakes, smiles, hugs, tears, all amidst some exit formalities, and a grand graduation ceremony that marked the climax.

The climax was an interesting one. Montek Singh, through his convocation address, promptly reminded the school management that it forgot to tell him that all the B-schools worth their salt teach their students Stats 101 and Macro Economics 101 as part of their curriculum, and that after a gruelling year and a packed couple of days spent ferrying parents, sisters, friends and all I-wanna-be-theres, the students will have as much interest in knowing about the agricultural growth rate of India in 1963 (incidentally, when Montek Singh himself was busy calling his parents for his graduation) as George Bush about the real meaning of Democracy. However, Rajat shone out with his speech filled with relevance. Overall, the day went well, except for the lunch, which I hear, was responsible for emptying the Lomotil stocks in the campus pharmacy the next day.

Do I really feel sad leaving the campus and my small circle of friends? It’s a closely-knit world; one is never apart. You really do not feel that your friends are far away. True that I can no longer dial an extension, put my friend on speaker and play a network game for an hour and half, discussing the strategy, but hey, things got to change. I feel it’s a year well-spent (I’m not talking about network games here). ISB was a humbling experience; a tiring, testing experience. (I am not talking of the academic schedule here). I realized a lot of things. ISB somehow taught me what to expect, how to scale expectations, when to use jargons, and a dozen other things, and definitely, one of them was that, just as your blog gets too cryptic, stop writing.

No Charm-in-air

2007-03-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

One of the worst decisions I took at ISB was the one to spend an evening in Charminar. What was supposed to be a fine evening turned into a nauseating experience.

Firstly, the approach to Charminar is something worth mentioning. All roads leading to Charminar carry four times the normal traffic any road of the same size can do. Secondly, there is absolutely no parking space outside this “tourist spot” (AP tourism promotes it as one of the seven wonders of the city). I asked a gentleman where to park my vehicle and he looked at me as if I asked him for the address of the Holy Grail . “Parking” seems to be an esoteric concept there. May be, you just leave your vehicle for a quick wander to return to it after some time. Thirdly, the area around the monument is so crowded that even if you magically squeeze your vehicle between some steel and flesh, crossing the road to get to the monument is a nightmare. “Horny” drivers test your noise-tolerance levels and one is reminded of a good old video game where you make a cat cross the road with some obnoxious number of lanes just to earn a few points.

Now to the monument itself. The description of it in Wikipedia is factual. However, it misses several important points. The monument, just as any other of historical importance in India, bears the names of almost all the visitors and their uncles who graced it (with a writing/carving device) ever since it was opened to public. There is an entry fee of 5/- which, I am sure, goes towards the cost of printing the ticket and paying the guard who checks it. The result is anybody’s guess. You grope through those labyrinthine staircases cursing at fused bulbs and missing railings. The person behind you sets his foot on yours every time you pause to check if you are in the position of David Balfour of Shaw fetching something for his uncle over the top of a tower. Once you endire all these and see the light at the end of the tunnel/stairway you experience a fleeting moment of glee. The glee is ephemeral since you will find it quickly replaced by an irresistible urge to puke. Several reasons account for this sudden change. The “nearest” reason is the state of the parapet and all things that lie between you and it. The moment you lift your gaze to look at the thoroughfares, you recognise that you must be inhaling the amount of CO and SO2 you probably are allowed to inhale for a lifetime. Thirdly, you’ll find that the person standing next to you, instead of feeling empathetic towards your plight, is clicking away with his camera what caused your current state of nausea. You think it’s high time you leave and grope your way back through one of the minarets to fetch your bike and start your ride back – dodging through absolute chaos.

A forgettable experience.

Placements @ ISB - Take II

2007-02-26T23:58:00.000-08:00

It's good to be on the other side of the placements. This was easily one of the toughest weeks of my life. So much so that, in one of the interviews, when I was asked what was the greatest takeaway from ISB, without batting an eyelid, I replied, "Endurance!". It wouldn't be an overstatement if I say that I went through the gamut of emotions a human being is capable of and saw some others going through the same. It's all over now. I see the chaos ebb away and some method replacing the madness that ruled the week past. It has left a few people happy, few sad and few untouched. It has been an experience of sorts. Well. It was a microcosm of the 11-months of life here at ISB.

Placements @ ISB

2007-02-16T04:12:00.000-08:00

I am still to figure out a reason for having HR people in a company. Not even after taking a full course on Managing organisations (whose grades inter alia motivated this post) could I appreciate the reasons for their necessity. The HRs of the companies which make a beeline to the ISB to make offers put up their JDs (Job Descriptions) for the benefit of the students. Whether they really give a true picture of what one will do in a company is still a question. Nevertheless, I had a good laugh over a number of them. Here is a smattering to get the idea through:

(Note: All job desriptions are posted AS IS, with the spelling errors, if any)

* Professional : should be good in messaging...
(Get your cellphones or your laptops with the messengers to the interview!)
* Have inner desire to gel in cohesive team and work for business growth...
(This one needs to see your deepest, darkest desires. Keep out)
* Ability to blah blah blah and participate in industry forums
(Oops! I'd never qualify for the job. Industry forums translate to "a day off from office" for me)
* A geo-facing role which would involve providing support to the front ending sales team... (Watch out. They'll make you lie on your back for the other roles!)
* Good 'execution' abilities...These are very involving positions and require the Consultant to position himself in mentally and physically in the shoes of a business owner...Must have had expience is running the operations
(Sorry. I have better places to place myself physically)
* Must have had expience is running the operations (tracking requitments, predicting requirements, processes to fulfill requirements, bringing in systems that improves optimal use of resources)
(Looks like you need to "predict" requirements)

This takes the cake, though:
*2 Years of post-MBA experience preferred

Well. All the best for all the guys and gals on campus for the placements.

(P.S. Thanks to my friends Guru and Siddharth V who culled out a few of these and shared with me)

Google Target Ads – De-"coded"

2007-01-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

To all the Google aspirants, some good news! Here is the “inside scoop” on how Google targets its ads. Well. What the heck? Here is the actual code or at least the code that I think very closely mimicks the one sitting inside the Google servers:

string returnAdText(Page currWebPage)
{
string arrPrice[] = {“Low prices on”, “Cheap”, “Free”};

/*Note: Capital casing conforms to the output*/
string arrQuality[] = {“High quality”, “Quality”, “Good quality”};

/*Warning: Extremely "geeky" code to find the context of the text in the page*/
objContext = getContext(currWebPage);

return (arrPrice[random()%3] + arrQuality[random()%3] + objContext.toString());
}

Of course, as granma has always taught you, leaving a piece of code untested is considered a cardinal sin across cultures. So here is the output (Taken from ibnlive):

Didn’t think it’d be this easy. Duh! Does anyone own Google shares here?

Of Maamis and Multiple Regressions…

2007-01-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

Here is an MBA’ish approach to understanding the enigmatic Indian matchmaking exercise:

Few fundaes:

#1:
A search good is one whose quality can be ascertained by inspection. Experience goods are ones which you need to buy and experience before you get a hang of the product and quality. Credence goods are ones which you can never get a hang of (life insurance – the pre-requisite to test its quality is that you should be dead!).

#2:
One of the fundamental axioms in branding is that Branding (“B” intentional) a product works only for experience and credence goods and NOT for search goods.
--

Armed with this background, let us dive into the crux: Is your match a search, experience, or credence good? The insight is that Indian matchmaking exercise signals that it is an experience/credence good. (Sometimes it does turn out to be credence good – remember the life insurance example?).

Indians seem to have mastered this art of leveraging brands as signals and use family status, caste, native and a hundred other such unbelievable “brand attributes” as signals to the quality of the match. Embedded in the heads of all the maamis is a complex multiple regression equation with the right slopes for all the above said (and unsaid) attributes to arrive at the utility score of a prospective match – an exercise they often execute with alarming ease under water taps, temples, street corners and other such places conducive for a nice little chat/gossip. The exchange and evaluation of variables, model fitting, finding outliers, clustering and pairing – all take place at a pace which would make Google servers shut down in shame for the sheer dexterity in handling volumes of data. Just as many other things, I think the discovery and application of many statistical techniques to arrive at “life-changing solutions” were wrongly attributed to an over-the-roof-midnight-oil-burning freak in some US university while our modest maamis were doing it for ages without any silicon paraphernalia.

Short Story

2006-12-05T19:44:00.000-08:00

Students in "Creativity, Innovation & Design" course have been asked to do a 55-word write-up. I have not taken the course, but here is my stab at it:

The fragile lady thanked the applauding crowd. The occasion - a felicitation for the courage and compassion she showed in donating her dying son's eyes and kidneys to help two people lead lives which they otherwise would not have. It was a deeply emotional moment and everybody’s eyes were in tears – even her son’s own! (54 words)

Doff

2006-12-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

I pride myself in belonging to a small, elite group of gentlemen, who make bathing a diurnal habit here in the ISB. With an intention to reinforce my membership in this clan, I sleepily entered my bathroom in the small hours of the morn, (read: 0900 a.m.) wrapped in my towel when I found that the rack to keep the clothes was filled with those of my quad-mate. Stepping out, I found him coming out of his room. In a rather casual way I asked, "Dude. Can you please take your clothes off?"

Well. The (indecent) request took him by a whirl. I believe he sensed imminent danger, and prepared to defend. He stood rooted to the spot, leaned forward slightly, lowered his head a bit like the felines you see in wildlife channels do just before setting off on their prey, and gave me a cold, fixated stare. Completely missing to gauge the situ, I blinked at him like an innocent kid and repeated my request, but this time though, had the sense to point towards the general direction of the rack. Presently, thankfully he "saw through" my proposal. Easing his attacking stance, sensing that the danger has passed, he went over and took his clothes off, (from the rack, of course) and gave me a smiling nod.

There was deafening silence for a mo and then we both were laughing our tummies out. Phew! Some start for the day.

Soren and the Indian Constitution

2006-11-29T21:53:00.000-08:00

Taken from the editorial of today's "The Hindu":

In the infamous JMM bribery case, four JMM MPs, including Mr. Soren, were prosecuted for receiving cash in return for bailing out the Narasimha Rao Government, which was in a minority and faced a no-confidence motion. Mr. Soren and his fellow bribe-takers were legally exonerated — because their collective act qualified as parliamentary privilege! The Supreme Court held that, under the Constitution, MPs who voted in Parliament after receiving bribes were entitled to immunity from prosecution.

Every Indian should be proud to swear allegiance to a country with such a meticulously thought-through briber-and-the-bribed-friendly constitution.

Jai Hind.

Vaca-shun

2006-11-22T00:25:00.000-08:00

"Never in my whole life have I written so much crap about so many things in so little time". That just about sums-up the speed-writing contest we had the other day at ISB. The office bearers here though took a slightly different opinion and named it the final exam for pricing, which incidentally happens to be one of our Term V electives. However, little did change as an effect. As the greatest playwright said, "A rose by any other name smells as sweet". A speed writing contest, by any other name...stinks, just for the simple reason that the 400-odd 20-somethings here have very little reason to pay 16 lakhs to sit for one.

If you brush aside the fact that the college starts right on Monday, that we have 2 project submissions on a subject due before then and that I have around 5 assignments to be done on my independent study, I should say that I have some 388,800 seconds left for myself in my if-you-choose-to-call-it "break".

Sometimes I do feel that ignorance is bliss and education is an unnecessary evil imposed on itself by humanity.

New look

2006-11-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

Tweaked my blog with blogger beta that allows me to work with a cool WYSIWYG editor. Should see some subtle changes here, though nothing sweeping.

Of Blood groups and grades...

2006-10-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

I was 12 then. The doctor looked at the report as I glanced at my little thumb to see if I could still see the spot where they pricked it to suck my blood out. No. This is no vampire story. Rather, this was in some "Srinivasa Lab", some 2 streets away from home where I had my blood sampled for classification a couple of days before. The doctor smiled and said, "B negative. Rare group". I felt on top of the world. I thought I belong to the privileged group of people to have been bestowed with this rare "bloody" gift.

Back here in ISB it didn't take me too long to realise that my association with "B-" was destined to go beyond my blood group. May be now I have a reason for those little letters in my grade card that seem to reinforce my blood group many times over for no good reason. Interestingly, it can be scientifically proved that B- does not mix well with the A groups - A- or A+ - again not very far from the reality here either. One peek into my immediate friends' grade sheets should suffice to prove that.

Bad grades? After all it is in your blood. Blame that!

The vendor

2006-10-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

The Charminar express was running below the average speed of a super-fast train and I grew slightly bored. I had read every article of the morning paper which now lay crumpled in my hands. The enthused kid sitting next to me on the window seat announced that a station is approaching and started in earnest to read the letters that bore out the name as the train approached to a stop. After a small influx and efflux of passengers, a vendor got in. He was conspicuous by his dressing - a ritual black that symbolises the cult of people who embark on a particular pilgrimage.

This pilgrimage starts with around 40 days of fastidious rituals aimed at purging one of all the "worldly" sins before preparing one for the climax - a journey of around a day or two (depending on where you start) culminated by a bare-footed trek on an unfriendly terrain to keep your appointment with the Almighty. These pilgrims, during the 40 days are expected not to wear foot wears, eat frugal vegetarian food, abstain from drinks, maintain chastity, and not lie. They essentially live out those 40 days being personifications of an ideal Indian devotee - and in return command great respect from the society.

The vendor pressed himself into business right away. He pulled out a big cover of CDs and DVDs and started showing sample titles to fellow passengers. He showed me a couple of titles, "Sir, all new releases, first-class prints - 10 Rs each". He jutted out his thin hand with a couple of CDs in a cheap, gaudy package. I faintly negated the offer. The kid presently finished reading the name of the station. The train moved.

Wish...

2006-10-08T14:16:00.000-07:00

I would you were as I would have you be!

Alas! It is just a wish and so shall it be.

Right to Reproduce

2006-09-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

In the last "Government Society & Business" class, we were discussing about population. "Right to Reproduce" invariably surfaced. Now, I must tell you that I, for one, believe that this proliferation of human *rights* actually leads to more undesirable situations than desirable ones. A good example is the case in point. The right to reproduce roughly states that it is the prerogative of every individual to decide how many children (s)he must have. Sounds fair? Just go below the surface to see the problems. Let me take the Indian context:

In India, the rural poor are not self-sufficient. They rely a lot on the government subsidies for their needs including food, basic education etc. These subsidies come from the tax-paying population. If one such rural guy is asking for an extra 2 kg of subsidized wheat every month for his new kid – the wheat which I, as a tax payer subsidize - don’t I have a say in capping the number of kids that he can produce?

In my humble opinion, beyond all the clamour about “right to reproduce” lies the fact that, in a country like India, a considerably small tax-paying population is subsidizing a substantially large reliant population and hence the former should be allowed to have a say on the latter’s affairs in as much as it affects the former.

Spare Google! For God's Sake Spare It

2006-09-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

Google - It is the darling stock of any finance professor. It is the most quoted/exploited stock in any B-school finance assignment/home-work/exam. In the past two weeks, I valued Google's equity more times than the number of fingers in my hand.

"Oh. Valuation is so much fun", I heard a friend say. As for me, given a choice, I would rather watch metal rust.

Almost every student here had a (different) valuation of the company. The gamut of values that we got for Google's share price by subjecting it to every conceivable valuation technique known to mankind is stunning. I wouldn't be surprised if Larry or Sergey stares right into a half-baked MBA learning the ropes of evaluation pronounce Google as a penny stock. It is just a matter of which technique he chooses, you see. (By the way, the beauty of finance is that "Reverse Engineernig" part. For any finance problem, you can start with an answer and fish for a technique that will give you that number. Chances are that some bloke in some remote corner of the world sometime would have given the right recipe to cook your numbers the way you want them.)

It is time we spare Google. Let the professionals take on.

A reflective note

2006-09-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

I just hung up on a friend who doled out a promise for the umpteenth time. Needless to say she had broken her promise umpteen - 1 times to get to the count. I was just reflecting on why people do these. My myopic mind could think of only the following:

1. Humans are inherently distinct and what one holds as a virtue need not necessarily be so for the other. Culture tries to bridge this gap, but only with limited success. (I feel that attempts at reconciling the value systems of different individuals will be futile and destructive. Hence I do not subscribe to "culture").

2. We "model" our friends as "systems" which respond in particular ways to given situations - more you can predict the system and more the response to your liking, more will you like the person. When you see the system suddenly going awry or making responses that you do not like, you switch off.

3. We always think that an individual will behave in a certain way depending on his past actions, though rational reasoning always says that past is no indication of the future. It is more like guessing a stock price, isn't it? You can never get it right; in case you get it right, you know that it was your lucky day!

The Private moment

2006-09-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

Well. There were a couple of weddings that happened last week. One was that of my friend and college mate. The other one was between two Tamil cine stars. The photo below is that of the latter. What really threw me off my chair laughing was the caption of the photo.

The couple shares a private moment after the rituals.

This is taken from rediff. Private moment? For Gossake, we are talking about a million eyeballs looking at the photograph everyday!

Consultant Physician

2006-09-08T04:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't been keeping well for the past 3 days and yesterday with my fever at its peak, I thought I'll pay the in-house Doc a visit. With the above said intention I entered our "wellness centre" and was greeted with a confused-looking assistant.

On the first look, the bloke looked completely sane. However disaster ensued when he said that I can go right in and meet the gynaecologist. GYNAECOLOGIST?!? I was...stumped. I even thought that my fever has shot right up that I had started hearing funny things. Gathering myself, I politely stated that I wanted to see a consultant physician to which the guy gave a confused smile. Damn! I then said that I needed to see a "normal doctor", not the one for ladies. To this proposition, he did respond and asked me to wait for sometime before the person in contention was to arrive.

A warning to all the ISB souls (at least the ones that chance upon my blog). If you ever step into the wellness centre and find an assistant in the entrance, smiling like an alien lost in the labrynthine roadworks of Hyderabad, state your intentions clearly before letting that infernal chap direct you to the nearest available specialist or even pronouncing intentions of doing so.

Bang & Back

2006-09-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

My Bangalore trip was a short and sweet one. I do not want to make this blog a travelogue, firstly because I didn't go there with an agenda even vaguely resembling that of a "lonely planet" bloke and secondly, am bad at travelogues (not that am good at others).

First day I just stopped short of knocking some sense into my bankers and the second day I shopped and hopped back. That was that!

Between these, however I could note one heartening thing. The BMP has managed to finish the flyovers that they started constructing soon after Jesus was resurrected.

I was in the Forum to shop and was even part of a vox pop a popular news channel was conducting. If you find me on TV, do not panic. Rest assured that you will have to tolerate me only for a trice. After mumbling some incomprehensible stuff, I will be gone.

Gobbledegook

2006-08-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

My friend came across the following line in one of the Corporate Finance slides. Here it is in all its original glamour:

A firm takes a long position by buying a forward to hedge its short position in spot.

The Greek Medusa, we are told, had the effect of petrifying people with a glance. This sentence, I observe, establishes a striking functional parity with the above-mentioned character.

After squinting at the sentence for quite some time, I pronounced my verdict that it must be a misplaced cryptic crossword clue. Frankly, 20 hours of lectures on Debt, Equity, Forwards, Futures, NPV, APV took me nowhere close to decoding it.

Boy! How I love Corporate Finance.

Internship

2006-08-21T00:25:00.000-07:00

We applied for our internship here. ISB, by virtue of being a management institution, thought “internship” too mundane a name and called it "Experiential Learning Program". Unquestionably, an avoidable tongue-twister for an innocuous little piece of academic work. Applications from ISB are routed to sponsors by an Exceptionally-Smart-Guy coordinator. (Henceforth fondly referred to as ESGC*)

We met this ESGC as he was wallowing into his office yesterday and asked him about the status of our application. Here's what followed:

Friend: Hi. We would like to know the status of our application.
ESGC : Which project did you apply for?
Friend: Project number ##
ESGC : Didn't you receive an offer mail yet?
Friend: No
ESGC : Oh, then. That went to the other team.

My friend and I sighed and left.

We didn’t realise that the ESGC neither asked about our team nor told us who the "other" team was. The deal? After a day of soul-searching as to why we didn't get the project, we found the "other" team was none but "us" and that he forgot to mail us previously.

Talk about goof-ups.

* That ESGC can also be expanded as "Excessively Stinking Garbage Can" should be viewed as a strange coincidence in this context.

Orkut & The Six Degrees of Separation

2006-08-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was spending some time with this networking site called Orkut. (Somebody told me that MBA is all about networking).

Indian software engineers warming the benches of their respective companies need no introduction to the site. For the benefit of others, Orkut allows one to search for profiles of people based on names or a dozen other attributes which you wouldn't even have cared about in your friends (Fashion outlook, turn-ons, body art - to name a few). Once you click on a profile, the site pops-up the person's photo (which invariably turns out to be a movie star's or another nice looking guy's/gal's) and along with it neatly shows up a series of breadcrumbs to indicate how you are networked to the selected person. For want of better usage of time, I selected some 30 random profiles from the site (Did somebody say ISB keeps you busy?) and found that none of the network chains that linked me to the people had more than 6 breadcrumbs! Mmm..May be the theory of six degrees of separation which has been so bitterly protested has a grain of truth in it.

I should, however admit that it was quite surprising and a lot disturbing as well to note that I was not very far from all those phony characters lurking around in the site.

Typical MBA class

2006-08-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

For once, I let the picture do the talking.

"Fin"ished

2006-08-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

What you see above is not the Rosetta Stone. This was the cheat sheet some philanthropist prepared and distributed for the Corporate Finance examination.

(For the uninitiated: Cheat Sheet - a sheet of A4 paper that you are allowed to take inside the exam hall with whatever you want written on it. Translated to "bittu" in vernacular)

This morning we had Corporate Finance mid-term and it didn't take me too long to figure out that I didn't know a thing about evaluating businesses. Darn! Whatever firms I tried to value turned to have HUGE negative NPVs*. Midas touch - the wrong way, huh?

Lastly, today I found that a few exchange seats from some of the best universities like Darden, Queens, Rotman are going dime-a-dozen in terms of bidding points. If only I had a few more rupees :(

X-word

2006-07-31T22:44:00.000-07:00

To see the grid clearly, open it in a new, maximised window
My friend and I made a simple cryptic for our magazine. Here it is:

ACROSS
1 Indian Airliner takes-off from Mona Lisa to swim upstream (6)
7 Return On Investment, in short (3)
8 Gobbledygook, for one (6)
9 One way to get connected in ISB - What a notion! (4)
10 Not large (4)
13 What you sometimes find in SV1 (5)
15 Consume (3)
16 The heart of ISB (6)

DOWN
2 One direction, in a way (5)
3 A shaper from olden days (4)4 French negation (3)
5 A bit crap of a talk in class (5,2)
6 So nights were when we started selling! We hear (7)
11 Japanese SUV manufacturer. No cases on them so far (5)
12 And she is ________, and, _______er than that word. Shakespeare! (4)
14 Constrictor (3)

Corporate Finance

2006-07-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

With due respect to the authors of our Corporate Finance textbook, I must say that I fail to understand/appreciate their morbid obsession with excreta. I had a chance to look into 3 problems in the book as part of our homework and all of them had something to do with this unpleasant thing. Sample this. The book asks you to imagine yourself as the CFO of Pigpen services, General Composts and yet another sewage company whose name I promptly forgot.

Accepted that we find (and will find) ourselves in "deep shit" having taken this course. However, I believe that there are subtler ways of driving the point home.

Term-3

2006-07-24T00:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of term-3 and today I find myself knee-deep in course-work! For all of us who thought that the worst was behind us with Term-2, Term-3 has come as a bolt from the blue.

We were explained the bidding process for choosing our electives. ISB is a bit different from other Indian B-schools in the sense that it doesn't "allocate" electives based on your performance in the core courses. Another good part is that you can major in two areas. The system is pretty flexible and cool.

Term-Break

2006-07-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

Term-2 has ended. It went past like a bazooka...and landed not far away. Our Optimisation professor thought that the stress we were subjected to was not enough and performed the Coup de Grace with the only lever he could pull - The End-term paper. That was a damn good pull for the only chance he had!

Am here, lazing through my term-break. Finished a long-pending title and was charming myself with the writings of V.S.Naipaul. I just love this guy for his no-nonsense writing. Just look at the paragraph below. This is his comment on the "Vendor of sweets" by R.K.Narayan:

The sweet-vendor is Jagan, a rich man, conscientiously adding every day to his money hoard at home (the 'black money' of India), but a Gandhian, a faddist, a man obsessed with the idea of purity. He is fair with his customers; he cheats only the government of the country for whose sake, in the British days, he endured police beatings and imprisonment in an unsanitary jail. If Gandhi had said somewhere, "Pay your sales tax uncomplainingly," he would have followed his advice, but Gandhi had made no reference to the sales tax anywhere to Jagan's knowledge.

I was grinning. So true!

(I also saw a Tam flick. Apart from the fact that it proved to be momentous waste of time, I prefer to say no further)

Back to lazing

Names do matter

2006-06-28T11:35:00.001-07:00

We have an online simulation Marketing game tool called MarkStrat which carries a fair share of the weightage for our marketing decision making paper. Now, in Markstrat, a bunch of students are put into an industry that has 5 companies (creatively) named - "A","E","I","O","U".

We have to make product management decisions and upload them and the simulation evaluates our decisions against the other companies and lets us know the results (refer to the website for details).

With this background, let me get to the crux. Some hours before, I received a call and no sooner had I lifted the phone than a voice cried out, "Are you U"?

Though stumped by the grammar and the blunt interrogation, I took the reconciliatory path and tried to get what the voice meant. Here is a reconstruction of what went on:

Voice: Are you U?
I: I am I?
Voice: You are I?
I: Oh, no.
Voice: You are "O"?
I: (consternated) Now then, what do you want?
Voice: Which team do you belong to?
I: What on earth does this mean?
Voice: I mean, in Markstrat

Hallelujah! Light dawns.

Why can't we have some proper names for these teams in that gawd-awful simulation?

Go To Hell

2006-06-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

Never has this statement sounded so sweet to me. In fact, these days, I am looking forward to this journey. Must be a really cool place, hell - sans assignments, deadlines, home work problems, CPs, conjoints, optimizations, processes. Wow man! I wouldn't mind even if I have to reach hell in an Indian-Railways unreserved coach which has never been cleaned since independence.

Who gives a damn about a little bit of warm oil dip or some benign accupuncture? Or for that matter, the cute little cerebrus? I can open the adamantine doors and walk right into the Tartarus, join the Titans, party the hell out (literally) and even devise a conspiracy with my new allies to tackle the olympians.

Note:
The above two paragraphs provide a snapshot of the mental state of a b-school grad neck-deep in course-work. The time of publishing shall corroborate any traces of (in)sanity you may have found in the post.

Term - 2

2006-06-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

Very few things provoke you to say proudly "I was there to see it". World cup soccer is one, sans doubt. The other one was "Commanding heights" - a documentary on rise of free-markets over other forms of economy screened here yesterday. Though you can find the online version of this, a nicely edited two-hour version was just fantastic. Intercepted with a few timely comments from our prof., the show was an "edutainment".

Term-2 is a lot more interesting. We have strategy games to play (not the age of empires series) on marketing, some really good documentaries shown, some nice (and some not-so-nice) class discussions etc etc.

There are quite a few blogs which talk about professors in Term-1 and hence I do not want to repeat the stuff here. The grades are coming out and the campus buzz is "How have you fared?". That makes me gulp.

Term Break

2006-06-10T18:52:00.000-07:00

One good thing about ISB is that you can catch the entire campus mood by just skimming through a few blogs of the current students. It is the term break. People are either home or just partying day-in-day-out. There has been no update in here since I had my Term-I exams last week and immediately after which I made a quick escape to Chennai.

It is just too good to do nothing (productive) and blissfully follow the sleep-eat-drink-watch TV-sleep cycle. Just the one I've ingrained myself into over some days now. But it is kinda boring to suddenly do nothing especially after a month of frenetic activity. Nevertheless, I do enjoy seeing those acquainted sights of Chennai - half-built fly-overs which are as old as (if not older than) the hills, roads which trick you into thinking that you are on a rustic walk when you suddenly sense a bellowing truck right behind you, hand-pumps which bring the devil in the people out....the list is endless.

I'm starting for Hyderabad this evening...back to learning and the grind...back to books, professors, CPs, quizzes, exams et al. Term-2 starts on Monday. That is the exciting part. One will also get to see his past follies (read exam grades). That is the not-so-exciting part!

Anyway Term-2, Here I come!

Sensex and Grades

2006-05-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

One is taught in the statistics class that if two variables increase or decrease in harmony, they are supposed to be "correlated". A few days after I imbibed this concept, I (to my dismay) found that there is an alarmingly heavy correlation between the Indian sensex post May 22nd and my grades.

Both tanked!

LDP & Sundries

2006-05-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

ISB has a program called "Leadership Development Program" which helps you identify your weaknesses through a 360-degree feedback. You should pick two most crippling weaknesses (areas of improvement is a euphemism for weaknesses) that prevent your from being a good leader and give a SMART plan to overcome them.

Sounds cool, right? I identified one of my prime weaknesses as procrastination. I gave my LDP form with the first of the two objectives as "I will stop procrastinating" and submitted the form a good couple of days behind schedule.

A quick round-up of ISB blogs reveal a stark trend. Here is an assortment of the latest topics ISB junta have been blogging about:

Mid-Terminated
Half term
Egg jams
ISB Elections, Mid-terms and ofcourse the After Party!
Mid-term fever and Election-pox?!
The Mid-term exams got over yestersday ...
TEMPORARY RESPITE AFTER THE DISASTER
The First shock
Freakonomics ???
What the heck!!
The Price of Reservation

Yes mid-terms are over. But the less talked about them, the better. I have a DVD and a nice cricket match to watch now.

Reservations - New Apartheid?

2006-05-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

Read the topic again. Isn't this true? When, the country is seething with demonstrations both for and against reservations, I thought, I'll give my tuppence on this:

1. Reservations as a policy: This was introduced by Dr. Ambedkar as a temporary measure to uplift the socially and economically downtrodden societies. This has now become a vote-machine. I think reasons are self-explanatory.
2. Efficacy of Reservations: A policy can be graded by its reach, implementation loopholes and malleability. Reservations have proved to be lacking on all these 3 fronts.
3. Basis: It is a shocking fact that the data with the government is a "liitle" old. Exact number of "little" is 75! Yes. The data that the government has was taken in the 1931 census [:o]
4. Change: . The policy, at this stage, begs for a change. I say that reservations should be there, but just should not be based on caste decided at birth. I liked the way Lok Paritran modelled the policy in their manifesto:

Combination of the following two factors to determine the reservation:

FC : Grandfather / father : graduate or more
BC : Father : graduate or more
OBC: Father is 12th or less or first generation students

Add this to the economic angle

FC : Income levels : 100,000 or more per annum
BC : 24,000 or less but more than 10,000
OBC : less than 10,000 besides the current status
FC : owns house valued 100,000 or more + pays income tax for 5 years or more + owns vehicle + has income tax PAN number
BC : Do not own a house nor income tax owns a vechicle (or please suggest more options)
OBC : None of the above

Pro-reservationists would jump at this saying that this policy is so porous that it would allow rampant malpractices. All that they need to do is stay in a Tehsildar's office to see the number of false community certificates that are doled out everyday.

After all, democracy is a levelling doctrine and more people you have for a side of the argument, more "levelled" it is in the eyes of democracy. We can only hope and pray that better sense prevails.

The Weekend That Was(n't)

2006-05-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

Today is Thursday and am blogging about last weekend. Capital!

Well. I did realize that I came back on Thursday evening with the countenance of a schoolboy prancing out of the school after his last annual examination. But then, something hit me hard and I was thrown into a time-warp and before I could say "Jack Robinson", my alarm went mad on Monday morning. Darn! What happened to my weekend?

Waiting for the next one and am now watching out for the "warper".

On a tangential note, one of my friends was asked to quit her job today. It was something that unsettled me quite a bit. It certainly is a strange feeling to leave the office you stepped into that very morning with the thought that you'll never come back to that place to work. I sincerely hope that Time, the greatest healer gives her strength to tide over this occasion.

Economics - Take 1

2006-05-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you denote the the area of the deccan plateau by "P", the distance between Delhi and Karachi by "D", total runs scored by Sachin Tendulkar by "S", and the number of insurgents currently having chai in Indian military canteens by "T", derive a relationship using all these variables (as many times as you may consider fit) to calculate the current GDP of India, ceteris paribus.

Well. I read the first Q of our economics assignment and can say with 94.3678% (read: supreme) confidence that our prof has spared us from all such easy questions.

What is in a name?

2006-05-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Well. Here is a photo taken on one of our classmate's B'day. Understanding that, given the time-constraints of a typical B-school, you will have hardly any time to devote to personal hygiene, the founding batch students of ISB spearheaded the practice of giving the B'day boy/gal, a once-in-the-year chance of a "total bath", a practice commonly referred to as "dunking". The current batch looks religiously devoted to this tradition and the picture bears a testimonial to this.

But wait! There's something wrong in the picture! There was only one person "scheduled" to be dunked then. The other one was an impromptu. Wonder what triggered it?

Here is a typical reconstruction of what w(c)ould have happened:

(On the pool side...I must mention that the lights went off and the bloke who got dunked was right there, on the edge)

Somebody: Hi there! What's your name?

Pushkar Thakur: Push-kar yaar

The rest, as they say, is history. With a name like this, I reckon you have a life-long obligation not to idenify yourself aloud when you are "on the edge". May lead to drastic consequences!

Yawn. Time to debit some water into my system , credit some **** and incur some sleep (man, am I going insane?)

Pre-read MBA

2006-04-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

The "pre-reading" bug has caught-up big time here. The pangs of the bug seem to be so vicious so that people are scurrying around to pre-read everything. Rumour has it that even a few prospectives of Co 2008 have started with it!

As always, I was just lazing around as the the solitary pre-term I attended, (viz., Introductory Accounting) gave me a "nashaa" commensurate with that of several "neats" of Smirnoff. These "nashaa"s do not wear off that easily.

However, I think that A/C can save me a lot of bucks in the long run. Imagine this:

(Context: Start of weekend)
Bloke1: Bring on the spirits mate!
Bloke2: Chal abey. Lezz go and get some alcohol. (To me) How about you dude?
I: Well. Nothing. All that I need to do to get sloshed is just get a coupla balance sheets done!

Well. I did attempt this! I tried doing a balance sheet for...(drumrolls, please) myself!

One is informed that, to do a balance sheet, certain assumptions must be satisfied:

1. Separate entity: Krishnan Ramaswami is a separate entity in ISB and several souls can vouch for it.
2. Going concern: I do not see me dying in the forseeable future (unless the ASA here has plans to the contrary), though I should admit that am "extremely" short-sighted.

Let us push the other two-assumptions into the petty-cash drawer and move on to the godforsaken sheet. Well. Here is it:

I can hear shouts of "Tally-Ho!" from seasoned accountants that the loan must be a long-term liability. (Glossary: Seasoned Accountants = souls who can take 10+ balance sheets straight before going down). Peace! I just made a strategic decision that I shall apportion a sizeable amount of the *crore* (read: Gross sal post ISB) towards loan amortization.

KISS

2006-04-27T23:17:00.000-07:00

The KISS you find here is NOT the "anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicular muscles in a state of contraction". It just stands for "Keep It Short and Simple". Hope I have KISSed the definition (if you find pun here, consider it intended). And for all those who expected something juicy...am sorry.

We've heard from sources within (and without) the Management arena that business education is all about jargons. A friend of mine once said, "You wouldn't know what hit you in the first few days of B-school". He was right. I am now encountering pebbles, but I smell an appointment with Shoemaker Levy 9 in the not-so-distant-future.

Why did I name this post KISS? At least so far, all that had hit me here have been "acronyms". What with 4P's, 5C's, 6M's, 7S's, the A.P. never seems to end. (If you think A.P. stands for Andhra Pradesh and you are not enrolled for the Quant Pre-term, you have reasons to worry). I think one of my feedbacks (if and) when I leave the campus at the end of the year would be to add a pre-term named "Demistifying Management Acronyms(DMA)" or something to such effect and make the enrollment compulsory. I think that would equip students to sail through the first few days of the core-courses without a bandage or two in their foreheads.

GB & HAND

(if you dunno, what they mean, well...just don't bother)

Are you an Accountant?

2006-04-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

Here is a test to check whether you are one.

Choose the best option:

(T - True, F - False, WTF - What The F*** )

Q 1: Profit of a company is considered as its liability (T/F/WTF)

Q 2: Loss for a company is counted in as an asset (T/F/WTF)

Q 3: A balance sheet showing a high balance would mean that the company is healthy (T/F/WTF)

If you took the common sense route and answered the first two questions with a "False, (obviously)", you are not an accountant. "True" for both, and you are one. Oh! About the third question - if you had not shouted (and marked) WTF, you are not an accountant. (It doesn't mean accountants occasionally shout WTF when confronted with Q's).

Pretty easy, eh?

Darn! For Chrissake, if accountancy means that one will have to defy dictionary meanings of most of the jargon one has been spewing around as a techie (such as credit, debit, asset, liability etc), it definitely sends a shiver down the spine.

Well. All these after attending ONE pre-term class on Financial Accounting. Wonder what the other courses have in store for me.

Talent Nite

2006-04-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

Am just back from the "Talent Night"here. The performances of fellow students, to say the least, was astounding. I think this stands as a testimonial to the selection process of a B-school which lays importance on diversity. Some US B-schools proclaim that they craft a class of students to give them an enriching experience. I personally thought ISB would compromise on it given its batch size. But I think I clearly missed the point that a bigger batch will also help it achieve bigger diversity.

We had a presentation which talked about the statistical highlights of the incoming batch. It talked about the diversity of backgrounds of the students. Co 2007 has doctors, (the ubiquitous) s/w professionals, marine engineers, mining engineers, journalists, fashion designers, army majors, accountants....well the list is long. This merits a mention here since I believe what I witnessed today in terms of sheer variety of talent has a direct correlation with the diversity of backgrounds. I wish I take away a lot from this diversity, of course contributing to it as much as I can to comple(ment)te the learning process here.

Community Service @ ISB

2006-04-20T04:27:00.000-07:00

We went out today to do some "community service". Though I would beg to differ from the what the NetImpact club seems to think community service is, I would wish to refrain from commenting as I do not think what I saw today is an indicative sample of their activity.

However, it was a day of great learning for me. Here I was in urban Hyderabad or Cyberabad - a city that boasts of Cyber towers, Hitech, Hitex cities, sprouting new ventures , rising real-estate prices - and found that there are government schools run here without basic infrastructure. I was moved to tears when I saw the faces of the students there - those innocent faces seemed to ask me what I have done towards making the lives of these future citizens better. Those smiles of the first generation learners whose parents are away to toil and boil told a lot of stories. They told me about the odds they face against educating themselves. They told me about the sheer determination it takes them to just attend school - in the midst of crumbling infrastructure, apathetic staff and corrupt and greedy government officers who think twice to pay taxes but find no compunction in laying their hands on the government funds. These kids, talking in a language which I little understand taught me several lessons.

I felt ashamed in a way. My parents shielded me from all these stuff. They sent me to a private school. My grandfather complemented formal teaching. I had no financial or infrastructure bottlenecks. Well. I did give my best and fared as well as my limited faculties would help me do, but still felt that I could and should have done a lot better.

To point out a few things - I found no lab facilities though the school is supposed to be a high-school, no proper sanitation or clean drinking water, no proper distribution of the mid-day meal and no proper office for the head-master. I found more than 10 abandoned classrooms rife with things you wouldn't want in a school, few elderly-looking boys who seemed to have no business with the place, far less teachers than operative classrooms, a sports room which looked a century old and of course a whole bunch of children craving for education - full of spirits, bubbling with enthusiasm - who think that their government and their fellow people would help them be better citizens of tomorrow.

I was told that this school is the one blessed with the best infrastructure among all those around the area.

First post from ISB

2006-04-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

I begin my journey here!

It is my 4th day in ISB today (though the day has just started!). So what has it been? Well. Firstly, though this is the orientation week with ZERO academics, I have been kept busy so far - settling down, registering, scouting for amenities, absorbing any gyaan thrown on my way, attending presentations after presentations and getting aware of the fact that these nasty things can stretch into any ungodly hour.

Of course, there is a huge socialization drive this week. After a zillion handshakes in the past 96 hours I can put some 20 names and faces together. I sincerely hope that this improves.

There are some small things yet to be finalized, but apart from that I am practically settled here, what with my laptop reformatted, final loan formalities going through fine and groups finalized.

Met with the group of people I will be working with. We are 3 s/w engineers, an army major, a CA and an engineer from ONGC. Given that I am an IT products guy and the other two have IT - services background, we do have a good diversity!

I hope I'll capture all the essence of what I witness in this exciting year @ ISB. One thing is for sure. These guys know how to keep us busy. Even as I write here, there is a party starting just outside my student village - the farewell that the Co 07 is giving the Co 06 guys. And the party is starting just after the last presentation for the day :o

Good-bye Bangalore

2006-04-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

All good things must come to an end. So did my life as a software engineer. This Monday was my last day with my last (2nd) employer - Pivotal. It brought to an end 3 years of my association with them. Strange it is that the human soul craves for money, for I was frustrated that I didn't have any chance to substantiate my salary in Pivotal. My experiences with this employer can at best be described as a mixed bag. I left Bangalore on Tuesday night, after a stay of 5.5 years. But then, with the end of every journey begins another and I look forward to the year I'll be spending at ISB. That should be thrilling - back to school!

When I first went to Bangalore to join my first employment which I bagged in campus, Rajkumar was kidnapped. There was total chaos and we ended-up having no food thanks to all the shopkeepers who downed their shutters for 3 days straight. Hours after I reached Chennai from Bangalore, I heard about the sad demise of Rajkumar. That Rajkumar enjoyed a cult status in Karnataka would be an understatement. The public response after he entered the Gokak movement, the response of his supporters soon after his kidnapping by the forest brigand and the scenes of thousands wailing at his mortal remains will stand as testimony to that. One side I was sad, for Karnataka lost one of its super-stars. On the other side, I was happy that I started from Bangalore a day earlier. The last thing I'd have wanted in Bangalore was to be holed-up with my parents there minus food, transportation and security.

Meanwhile, in Chennai, am trying to catch-up with as many friends as possible. The sun is setting the city ablaze and I just have two days here. I’m starting for Hyd on the 14th of April. I think my next blog will be from ISB!

How much can you hate your VC?

2006-03-28T04:48:00.000-08:00

I came across this profile in Orkut:

http://www.orkut.com/ProfileP.aspx?uid=1993659154902823800

I was ROTFL for 30 minutes.

Frankly, do not know whether to pity the VTU students or the VC!

I Found Myself!

2006-03-23T22:24:00.000-08:00

First things first. The title has nothing to do with spirituality or Nirvana. It definitely has something to do with Stanford. No. Not that I got a call from their B-school, but just that I am "googleable"!

I surprised myself today finding out that google's web-crawler has taken my website and my blog into its fold. So am one of the very few, privileged billion-odd pages the crawler has spotted :). Searches "Krishnan Ramaswami" or "Krishnan Ramaswami blog" show my pages within the first half-page of the results! Now that's some audience, eh?

The Weekend That Was

2006-03-20T04:37:00.000-08:00

What a weekend this was! To say that I experienced a gamut of emotions would be an understatement. It was a swing from the depressions on Sat evening to the ecstasies on Sun and back to some depressions to end it all. I’m not giving you the reasons here for purely personal reasons. But I still thought I'd blog about it so that I can look at this in the future and smile back at this weekend that I had. It was an experience and it was first of its kind in many ways. I discovered lots of things and surprisingly more about myself!

Well. I know this is going nowhere for the uninitiated (read rest of the world apart from Krishnan Ramaswami). So I stop.

It's official. I've resigned

2006-03-13T22:17:00.000-08:00

Yes. This culminates two years of MBA hunting. As the update on 27th Feb in my website proclaims loud and clear, I have been offered an admit from ISB into their class of 07.

It is a nice thing to sit and smile here, with an ISB admit at hand, but a travel back in time to early 2005 brings back the sad memories of missing the IIM bus. But the CAT (2004) experience taught me several things. It taught me to work hard and forget about the results. I would be lying if I say that I wasn't jolted by my failure to get a call from the IIMs, but nevertheless, I hardened myself saying that CAT was not everything. And that is true. CAT was, is and will always be what it is - just an examination. Nothing more, nothing less. Whatever side you emerge from it, you shall also be what you are. You got to move on. Que sera sera.

For the record, I scored a two-notches-below-par 96.4 percentile in CAT 2004, applied to ISB with my CAT 2004 score and then gave my GMAT and managed a 740.

I whacked a mail off to my HR yesterday saying that I will be discontinuing office. With it will end Act I Scene II of my career. (Act - I - Software Engineering, Scene II - My second company). Right now, working through some loan stuff and trying to get my last date in office from my HR. It should, in all likelihood be somewhere near Apr 10. Now that just leaves me with around 5 days to start a hectic year. The term @ ISB starts on April 15.

I will be blogging lot more frequently once am into ISB. I have always wanted to do that. But there was so little happening around me with my s/w engineering profession so that I didn't have stuff to blog. ISB is gonna be entirely the opposite. I think I wouldn't be able to blog my brains out there!

On another note, I'm trying to backlink all ISB blogs. This should be done in a while. Blogger doesn't have a trackback facility. So am trying to manually edit my blog template. Not a nice thing to do in the era of WYSIWYG editors. :(

Kanda Naal Mudhal

2006-02-16T21:33:00.000-08:00

I rarely watch movies, and very rarely do I blog on them. (Well. This is the first time I am dedicatng an entire blog to a movie).

Having said that, I should say that I liked the movie immensely. If you ask me what is new with the movie....well, there's "Nothing". Yeah, just plain nothing. It is the age-old, kinda-triangular-love-story with a youthful cast. But what makes it different from the run-of-the-mill Tamil movies of today is that the story is totally "practical" - no face-five-men-at-a-time hero, no shoots in the alps, no useless "kutthu"s, no villian-with-a-political-clout. This was just a plain-vanilla love story with a good, down-to-earth storyline, fast-paced, entertaining screenplay most importantly, devoid of illogical sequences. I liked the movie for the sheer practicality and the consummate ease with which the story moves. Definitely worth a watch!

Indian Cuture - What is it?

2006-02-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

Often, quite often, we have heard people say that western countries are devoid of "culture" while India is rich in it. As a kid, when I did not know what "culture" meant, I nodded on hearing this statement as any toddler would do when a 40-plus-sagacious-looking-round-spectacled uncle says it with a puff of serious air around him. Growing-up, I find that these round-spectacled uncles were not always right.

So, do I say that India is culturally impoverished as western countries are?

Oh yes, I do! But there is a subtle difference. Western society, at least the modern western society is founded on the basis of science. Church had long handed over the whip to control people's minds to scientific geniuses and philosophers. These people mostly were men of thought who often questioned conventional wisdom and practices and it is only natural that a society molded on their thought regarded culture just as an Indian first-class railway traveler would regard a cockroach just beneath his berth - Unnecessary, uncalled for, grossly out of place, and something to be stomped upon without any hesitation. On the other hand, India had no such renaissance. But there has always been a slow erosion of values from the cultures and traditions of India. So much so that people who talk today about culture and tradition in India do not know about the values that our culture tried to promote. So we are worse off - while the westerners evaluated and rejected culture, we are living thinking that we follow culture while we have floated afar!

Amidst the hues and cries of parties with vested interest that India is culturally superior lies the bare fact that there is a cultural bankruptcy here. People do not know/ignore the governing principles of life as laid down by our forefathers. Culture and traditions have become more of an overcoat - you wear one just to impress. You can hang it up anytime you want to and others consider it perfectly fine if you do so! Indian culture, as it is followed today, is just a set of practices without any values.

Quintessentially, we do not follow the customs while we say we do! Look around yourself. Look at the moral depravity around you, the immorality of the politicians around you, the sad state of the infrastructure around you. Who is necessary for all these? The British? It's us! How is that a society founded on high moral principles, impeccable cultural values and great traditions has degenerated into garbage?

The answer is simple. Indians do not follow anything to the T. We lack one virtue - Discipline. Imagine - a pious person performs all his rituals in the morning, reaches office and feels no compunction in fleecing an aggrieved party! Part of profession, you see? Almighty is invoked for everything in India. The people who printed out the CAT question papers and sold it for a few lakhs apiece had pictures of goddess "Saraswati" pasted on their computers! The trigger for me to write this - I saw a man spitting right in front of a temple today! The crux is - Indians do not have any darned idea of what their culture is! So they, well, cannot follow it.

BSNL - Better Say No to Landline

2006-01-19T01:28:00.000-08:00

I could have also named this blog - "My Ordeal In Getting A Landline Telephone Connetion".

Recently, I realised that I badly needed a broadband connection and initally approached Airtel and then Reliance. Both didn't have the infrastructure in the area I live in and I was driven to our sarkari operator - BSNL. They claimed that you can pay 500/- from your pocket and have a landline connection within a week - All in a jiffy. I was excited! I went to the BSNL office. Here's what followed:

Day 1:

Loation: BSNL office, Bangalore
Ambience: Noisy, Crowded

I enter the BSNL office. The security gives me a look just as the one a jailer would cast on an escaped convict. I pause and start to speak. Before I can even display my Hindi proficiency, the guard interprets and splutters out that it is lunch time and I should come after 2:00 p.m. I glance at the boards there that proudly proclaim that the office hours are between 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

I wait and enter the office at 14:10 hrs. The "Customer Service Center" is extremely crowded and the security has the face of a father whose child has broken the nose of a couple of neighborhood kids. I could see some people pleading with him to be let into the CSC. After a moment of thought, I by-pass the CSC and enter the office. As there is no reception, I go to a desk and find most seats empty. I approach the nearest non-empty seat and ask politely for a new-line application form. The gentleman on the desk doesn't bother to raise his head but points his pen towards what looks like the south-easterly direction and says "Last desk".

I walk up to the last desk and repeat my request. I get a 3-page form. I check it only to find that the new rates announced by BSNL and the ones printed on the form do not match. I ask the gentleman who handed me the form where I need to submit it. Pat comes the reply, "Nearest office to your house".

I come back to my office, check the BSNL site to find an offfice close to my house. The site says that the office closest to my house does not accept new-line connections. I ring them up. They reply to the contrary.

Day 2:

Location: BSL office nearest to my house
Ambience: Noisy, Crowded, Unruly

I walk up to the new-line counter (which closes by 13:00 p.m.) and give my application. I am acompanied by a friend who speaks the local language. The lady doesn't find a DD and says that they do NOT accept any kind of payment other than a DD. That turns out to be a wild-goose's chase.

Day 3:

Location: BSL office nearest to my house
Ambience: Noisy, Crowded

I enter the office at 10:15 a.m. and am made to wait for 20 minutes as they work to "bring the systems up". The lady refuses to see my application. After the tormenting wait, I go up, present my DD and the application.

At this point I should tell you something about BSNL's application form. The application wants more data than what an university would ask from you if they are to get you admitted. One of the many esoteric things they ask you is "the telephone number of a house on the same side of the road as yours". I live in a rented house on the second floor. Other floors are occupied by the owners and I had filled in my house-owner's number in the above-mentioned column.

The lady rejects the application saying that the telephone number should be a BSNL number. I say I know absolutely nobody in the area. She's stoical and says if I continue speaking so irresponsibly she'll ask me to go to some other BSNL office.

Day 4:

Location: Citibank
Ambience: Good

I enter citibank. I'm greeted by a lady at the reception. I say to her that I need to cancel a DD taken in favor of BSNL. She helps me with a form. I sign it and the process is over in 5 minutes. I leave as a happy man plus 500/- in my a/c still minus a landline.

Why Do People Hate Dictionaries?

2005-12-27T21:34:00.000-08:00

Rather strange question to me since I love them. I was advertising the ease-of-use these knowledgable tomes offer to a friend of mine using some very convincing facts like (a) You can see the meaning of whatever word you want in a good dictionary (b) People who write these dictionaries tolerate pains in their [insert body parts here] to see that these words are alphabetically arranged for you and other such sensible things. I then also told him that there are computer dictionaries which spare him the pain of flipping through pages. I then showed him a dictionary that I had in my laptop. He was starting to show signs of interest and I beamed just as a Sales Executive does when he sees his prospective customer reach for his cheque-book. Sometime later, he wanted to try out a word or two on the program and started in earnest by typing the word "possum" to look at its meaning. Out popped the meaning pronto:

Possum (n). Nocturnal arboreal marsupial having a naked prehensile tail found from southern North America to northern South America

Well. Anybody there could have seen that he welcomed the idea of using a dictionary with the same level of enthusiasm as did the people from the Orthodox Church when they heard Galileo proclaim that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice-versa. As for me, I just gave a shrug and a wry smile saying, "Happens".

Response

2005-12-19T01:36:00.000-08:00

Well. I posted the article you find below titled "Do away with Representative Democracy in India" in this website and I received a very interesting reponse. Below is an excerpt from it:

Here are a few not-so-serious suggestions for helping the (election) process on its way:

- There will be a simple question which voters have to answer before they are eligible to vote. e.g., "Using dams to generate hydel power removes the 'strength' from water. True/False"

- Abolish party symbols: Voters would need to read the party/candidate name to be able to vote

- Put a simple maze in front of the booth. Whoever is stuck in it beyond a reasonable time limit is asked to try again in the next election. (It would be nice if we can remove some crucial body parts also at the same, but that's too much to expect.)

- Match the following: Voters would need to match the party to the candidate and then select the one to vote for.

Do away with Representative Democracy in India

2005-12-07T05:46:00.000-08:00

Nothing is more excruciating than waiting for democracy or economy to flourish on an empty stomach. In more than 50 years of Independence and after executing nine 5-year-plans, India is still a "developing" country. That there are rampant unaccounted starvation deaths in India needs no corroborating evidence. India boasts of the largest amount of people living below the poverty line and about 35% of Indians are illiterate even when the government deems anybody “literate” as long as one can write his/her name in his/her mother-tongue. Digging into the roots of these problems, we find that two of the four pillars of democracy have failed completely in taking the nation forward. Let us take a quick look at them:

Legislative: Democracy is a leveling doctrine and the standards of leaders that people of a country elect are only as good as that of the people who elect them. Good, as long as people who vote have sound judgment and discretion. But Alas! Representative democracy for 50 years in India has only given rise to caste and vote-bank politics. "Honest politician" has become an oxymoron in the Indian political context. Far and few are examples of elections won on promises of development and almost non-existent are politicians who are ready to risk their “careers” talking about long-term goals and reforms instead of sops.

The idea of an average Indian politician is to keep his vote-bank in the “constantly expecting” mode using the dangling carrot approach. Politicians know only too well that the middle or the upper-middle-class in India hardly turn out to vote. Assuming a politician eradicates poverty in his constituency and educates all its denizens, he would be facing a vote crunch, just because the educated and the not-so-poor wouldn’t turn out to vote and people left out of the developmental wave would be anti-incumbent! It is a vicious circle that we have spun ourselves into.

Executive: To say that the executive machinery has crumbled would be an understatement. No department of the government is free from corruption and no citizen of India would have been spared embarrassing moments of greasing an officer’s palms. Agreed that even western countries have corruption, but at least they have ensured that infrastructure facilities are devoid of it. The situation is just otherwise here.

Very few radical changes have been pressed forward by India ever since the British left. CAS which was supposed to have revolutionized satellite-TV viewing failed to take off properly. VAT implementation is still in crossroads with several states playing truant. The RTI bill has finally been passed after several years while the situation actually demands a “Duty To Publish” bill which would make mandatory at least all civic bodies to voluntarily disclose and make publicly available their incomes and expenditures. The executive still languishes with the outdated aristocracy and the hand-in-glove politicians connive with the “babus”. Taxation is still archaic, appallingly, India, even today, does not recognize Intellectual Property rights, the Indian penal code needs a close re-look and several constitutional amendments and electoral reforms have never been actively debated in the parliament thanks to the time and the tax payer’s money spent on walkouts and party clashes.

Judiciary and press have been doing better although there have been cases of rampant corruption in the judiciary.

With the main pillars of democracy in shambles, the system offers no raison d’etre. Indian people have shown themselves that they cannot elect good leaders just because politicians have taken care that they have never been fed the intelligence to do so. The youth of today have totally lost belief in the existing political system. They are too afraid of rampant corruption, too reluctant to get down and clean the mess and too strong in believing that the system cannot be overhauled or changed. Greeks might have had success with democracy, but we Indians haven’t had any and taking cue from the ground reality we must embrace ourselves for a change. What India needs is a new brand of leadership that does not have to bother about wooing voters and countering opposition sneers. What India needs is a small set of “honest” people with sweeping powers devoid of politicking. In short, what India needs is dictatorship.

A dictator needs to rise in India either through a coup or though a civil war and put an end to this messy democracy. A true leader who has vision, strategy and conviction is needed and needed urgently. Until then we’ll be languishing seeing the rest of the world growing stronger and better and "visionaries" like Kalam can only be termed naively optimistic to proclaim that we would be a developed country by 2020.

Canada

2005-09-07T15:56:00.000-07:00

It's been a while in Vancouver. A month to be precise and I should say that the weather has been too pleasant to be true so far. (For all those who managed to take their Geography books to the annual exam hall, Canada is to the North of the United States which makes it really close to the N.pole and it is empirically established that poles are freaking cold). Having said that I should also add that we have definitely not exploited this weather to the fullest.

Canada is a country where you can hardly remain indoors. For a comparison, this country is 9 times larger than India, has a population slightly more than Delhi and its suburbs put together and has almost all possible terrains. With such a setting, it is hardly surprising that Canadians just wait to flee their homes to the vast outdoors (which should look like another planet - endless uninhabited plains). Sample this - You can travel 9 hours in a flight and still be within the country. Any more than 3 hours from any place in India in any direction even in IA flights (which can win slow-flying competitions with sparrows) can put you outside the geographical boundaries of the country.

As for now, am trying to get my Camcorder's software to work so that I can upload a few of my photos onto the www. More on this soon.

Tsunami

2005-01-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

After the industrial wave and the partial information wave, it is the Tsunami wave that has struck us and given a rude shock. Millions across SE Asia displaced and homeless and the governments of these countries also face the Herculean task of rebuilding lost infrastructure worth billions of dollars. John Keats wrote:

"Ay, in the very temple of delight, veil'd melncholy has her sovran shrine"

It is not hard to see that the reverse is also true. Even in the worst of calamities, there is always a grain of goodness. This is neither sophistry nor naive optimism but plain practicality. Think about it! This is the time the government can construct well-planned, safe townships with most modern facilities. There is no better time for a democratically elected government to show that they care for the people. They need to rise to the occasion, strategise short-term and long-term plans for rehabilitation and execute them with minimal beauracratic delays and hassles. Think about our neighbours Sri Lanka. The LTTE should reckon that this is the opportune moment to render a helping hand to the government in the relief operations. They are important because the cadres of well-trained LTTE men who know the terrain well would complement the armed forces really well. Probably Mother Nature chose this time to warn the erring lot that it is time to cast off their prejudices and join hands in making every one's life better.

Mobile

2004-12-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

I recently bought an LG G1500 mobile phone. Walking into the mobile-phone dealer, I said to a salesperson, "Please show me a phone with basic features" which translated to hassle-free conversing and SMSing. The bloke there thought I was one of those congenital BPL guys who just graduated to an acceptable position in the society (by virtue of which cellphone becomes a necessity). I couldn't help myself looking around casually to see what people looked for. The "basic" model I asked for was stashed away in some faraway corner of the shop away from all the glare and limelight. Businessmen, Software engineers (If somebody talks in half-baked American accent with lots of grammatical errors...well he could be none other than our recently-from-Western-hemisphere-techie-pal with lotsa dollars and negligible indigenous analytical capability. But the salespersons love them just for the breezy entertainment), house-wives, college students all crowding over latest models of mobile phones. I heard a housewife rejecting a model saying that the FM played in the model is mono! (Housewife since she chose to inform the salesperson so). Gawd! I thought. What are these people after? Cellphones have quickly progressed from being a tool for communication to being tools of expressing your stature,spending capacity(audacity), your "cool"ness index and what more and what not? Add to it a dash of spice, sleaze and all other things possible with a camera in your cellphone and you have a dangerous concoction of Peeping Toms, creatures of the night, who lurk with their 100g pieces of innovation to "catch" people off-guard.

M.S.

2004-12-13T04:26:00.000-08:00

La reine est morte. Vive la reine!

M.S. Subbulakshmi - the queen of Indian music breathed her last day before yesterday. The Hindu, on its Saturday edition on the web reported, "We regret to announce the passing away of Bharat Ratna M.S. Subbulakshmi....". Geographical boundaries, linguistic barriers and religious divisions capitulated before this queen of melody who enthralled her audience with her divine voice. So enchanted were the people of Moscow with her singing that they broke into standing ovation after her special performance there, and followed her with unceasing applause down the aisle, out of the theatre, until her car disappeared from sight. She stood out from other artistes of her age in the fact that she enchanted the intiated and the unintiated alike. Her voice evoked emotions and stirred listeners' consciences. Her syllable-pure renditions teleported people to a world of eternal bliss. I join millions in saluting the Queen of Music whose mortal remains may have been consigned to flames, but whose soul-stirring music shall continue to enthrall us forever. Let us not forget that, after all, Ars longa, vita brevis.

Tamil

2004-09-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

Recently, Tamil was named a "Classical" language. All Tamilians are happy about this "development". Good eh? So whatz this "classical" attribute fuss all about? Recently, I saw that the definition of Sahitya Academy of India of "Classical" language is "any language that has literature that dates back a thousand years and whose written forms are independent....". Well. All the so-called Dravidian languages (except Malayalam, which is soooo modern), I think, would fit the bill here. So, is there something that separates Tamil, given that it outdates the others by being in vogue for twice as much as the others are? (Now then, no Tam bias here. Am speaking facts!).

About - Google

2004-09-09T04:11:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried to look into the "About" message that google toolbar puts-up? (Noooo. That doesn't mean I keep peeping into "About" boxes from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m!). There is a neat little line out there which goes "De parvis grandis a cervus erit". Huh. After some squinting, I decided to overcome my sloth in giving the phrase a try in the search engine itself. After all, they are the very people spewing it around. And bingo! The first site to pop-up told me it meant "From small things come big ones". These chaps at google never fail to impress!

By the way, I picked this from the net:

Recently a company selling underwear for men had some text written on it that read "Res Ipsa Loquitor". Dunno whatz that? Look't up!

Poewr of Huamn Brian

2004-08-23T22:15:00.000-07:00

One of my friends sent me an article yesterday:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe!!

To which I responend:
Well. Yes. It all maens olny one tihng. All tohse yaers we put in our Egnilsh classes triyng to laern the crorect splelnigs of wahcky wrods lkie manoeuvre (maneuver for thsoe who spaek “American”) or pneumonia were a ttoal wsate of tmie, enrgey and mnoey. Tohse Egnlsih taechres shloud hvae jsut tgauht us the frist and lsat ltteres of teh wrdos.

Huh. After all, research is supposed to make our lives simple, ain't it?

MBA - Masti bina Aaram?

2004-08-16T04:55:00.000-07:00

Caught up with one of my college friends 2day doing his MBA in one of the well-known colleges in IN. He had been a s/w engineer b4 he joined MBA and boy, was horrified to know that he didn't know what "blogs" were. I was so horrified that these guys (this guy, rather, for I talked to only one. But c'mon whatz life sans a wee bit of falsity?) who were wasting time with us (I and my alikes) just a coupla years ago dunnot know one of the best ways to kill time. Are the business schools' walls of duty-consciousness so thick that even a highly contagious time-killer like blogging cannot breach them? Tut, tut. That's a pity. Anyway I gave my tuppence of advice asking him to start blogging right away. [Altruism, you see!]

I recently completed 4 years in the software sector. My god, it was fast! I still remember my campus interviews as if they happened only yesterday and here I'm in my second company.

Blogger Meets - Chennai

2004-07-23T00:45:00.000-07:00

Just learnt today that there are meetings for Bloggers in Chennai! Wow! Just couldn't believe that this sleepy don't-care-what's-outside town has so many fleet fingers tapping at their keyboards! Real good stuff. And some sites like this and this (hehe...couldn't come with better words) are just too good.

2003-12-18T01:15:00.000-08:00

Le Roi est mort. Vive le roi !
When Paul Bremer quipped, "Ladies and Gentlemen, We got him." Probably, little did he think that a couple of days later, newspapers will be analysing an entirely new perspective to Saddam's capture - "Rise of Saddam - The Martyr". Lots of newspapers over the past few days have spent lot of ink and devoted their editorial spaces in guessing at the could-be-martyred leader's followers!

2003-12-04T03:58:00.000-08:00

Wrooong data in DataGrid
Chaps at Redmond didn't notice Datagrid eating away the time part of a DateTime column in a WinForms DataGrid?

I'm OK your not OK
VB.Net has a MyClass keyword while C# doesn't have any to equal it!! So much for language independence. Inheritance rules flouted!

2003-10-19T23:07:00.000-07:00

Got my web site updated at last!

2003-10-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Diwali guyzzzzzzzzzzzzz