Kyunki Professor Bhi Kabhi Student Thi...

Disclaimer: This post is meant to be read on a lighter note and in no way meant to disrespect the professor. Project Management Finance (PMF) was a course definitely with immense learning opportunities and the experiences shared by the professor were truly helpful. Special thanks to Vaishali for helping me out with the idea for this blog. (Don't be amused...After all one has to save his bacon...)

The very first mail from the professor didn't augur well for our "so far so good life" in the Vth term. It had all the ominous signs of miserable time we will be having in next coming days. That very moment I was wondering what made me opt for this elective. Somehow we managed to complete our first submissions just before the class but the surprise quiz in the very first class was a very clear & loud message from the prof "Welcome to PMF and Screw you!!" Only relief was that being an adjunct faculty, she will be away for next few days. I reckon she also realized the same else why would she blatantly mention in the course outline "Freedom till my next visit..."

Entire term we were bombarded with 2-3 cases for each session and she ensured that none of those HBS cases was less than 25 pages of reading. Obviously the guys who didn't opt for PMF chuckled at us. And the irony was that her husband who happened to take our MACR course was coolest prof we ever came across. Yes the opposites do attract and it happened when both of 'em met at IIM Ahmedabad. Probably he took the onus on himself to negate the PMF workload by making us write group quizzes & if you have +ve IQ, you would have guessed it right that I was a free-rider in MACR quizzes.

PMF end-term exam was the last nail in the coffin which at least to me seemed like humanly impossible paper to crack (a little less ambitious word would be "to complete") in 3 hours. How a poor guy like me with crawling reading speed is supposed to read a 25 page case in an exam and then solve the case?? Only good thing about that exam was that PMF was getting over. The angel (of course the MACR prof) again came to our rescue to alleviate the painful PMF experience. And how does he do it?? By making MACR an open laptop exam!!

I still haven't been able to gather why did the professor made us keep our noses to the grindstones in the second year. It is supposed to be a chill year with ample of time to sleep, play cricket & sleep again. Isn't it?? One can only assume that she was also made to toil hard by her professors (screw you...you IIMA profs). Thats why they say "Kyunki Professor Bhi Kabhi Student Thi..."

What do you think?

I just finished watching an episode from British series "Coupling". The episode revolved about the misery of a poor guy whose fiancée asked him for his opinion about which furniture to buy. The poor guy spent the entire week (of course he was extremely lucky to get a week) relentlessly trying to form his opinion about the few selections his fiancée had already made. But all he could do in a week is to form just one opinion about the furniture: men can’t have an opinion about sofas, cushions, curtains or ladies’ dresses.

This question “What do you think?” is not going to bother you only when you are buying furniture for your house. This is like one ubiquitous question when you are into a relationship. Fellas you know this situation.You and your partner are out for shopping. She is all lost into pool of dresses while you are wondering “Gosh I wish I could watch this football match at a pub with my friends. What would be the score by now? Its 30 minutes into the game. May be Manchester United is leading 1-0”

Just then the question comes and shakes your conscious into life. After a couple of hours of filtering & screening, two lucky garments made it to the final list just to get you into more trouble. “Which one is better?” Of course you have absolutely no clue which one to chose? You try to be politically smart by saying “Honey you look gorgeous in both of these. Why don’t you buy both??” What the hell!!! You just burnt a big hole in your pocket.

You just made the blunder of not carefully selecting your words. What if you say something like this “Honey I think this one would look much better on a slimmer figure”. You are screwed up big time.

Even if you are lucky one to give your opinion over just one dress, she will make it tough for you by maneuvering her tone in such way which suggests she think that designer designed this dress with me only in his mind. You simply can’t say that this dress is not pretty.

And by the way do you think that your opinion matters? Is she going to change her preference if you suggest that none of this is a good buy? You realize your mistake instantaneously and try to appease her by choosing the third one which in all probability will make you shell out even more bucks.

Moral of the story: Chose your words carefully before you pass on your judgment. Take your time to make your all your calculations. Oh by the way make sure the pause doesn’t seem to be eternal one. You have to be fast..really fast.

What you got to share?

Masand's (a well known critic) review of the movie “Kaminey” said its “imaginative & original”. And the same day a spam on IP (intranet messenger we use to multicast the masala khabars) said “ITCOMM…plz download Kaminey…” And the very next day our beloved & dedicated ITCOMMERS made it available to the Zamorin. (Our shared server that offers us virtually everything that we need on our laptops.)

Apart from Microsoft windows, I can’t recall any software for which I had to pay to use it. I could have avoided that too if that wasn’t forced on to us as bundled OS with our laptop. After all why would I or anyone for that matter pay for something that can be got without shelling a single penny out of your pocket?

I also added the “Kaminey” to my movies collection and shared the same in my Zamorin account. After all I had to ensure that if somebody strays at my account, he/she says “the guy has shared some nice stuff…” Just like any other indicator, this unveils a lot of information about person’s likings or disliking. Apparently the one with collection of sad songs is a "Devdas". Even the size does matter. I’ll dig into a person’s collection for latest additions if I see his shared data counting to hundreds of Gigabytes. Strangely this seems to work even when we use our virtual identities such as “Neo” Or “Joker” or “Ripper” which itself can have N number of reasons why we do so. May be it’s an another gimmick to invite surfers. Don’t ask me why I chose “Abracadabra”. I have got my reasons to do that.

There has been ever going debate whether sharing & downloading data fr om peer to peer networks is stealing or not. A whopping 78% of respondents said they don’t think that they are stealing while they are downloading. I wasn’t one of the respondents otherwise this number would have further increased, increment being miniscule though. I am not going to put forward my point if it is stealing or not but one thing that I think worth mentioning is the impact on industry.

One obvious effect would be reduced sales of copyrighted materials. But a counter argument to this can be that since people anticipate file sharing, there can be increase in sales too. Say a group of teenagers buy a copy of latest videogame and share with each other later on. But the one industry that has been riding high on the wave due to piracy is portable music players industry & mobile phones. As the price for music plummeted, demand for portable players soared with Apple gaining the maximum out of it. Microsoft tried to come up with a portable player called Zune which used DRMs to put a check on piracy. You need to have –ve IQ to be unable to guess that it was a big flop.

May be there will be some technological advances to prevent the piracy, but I guess there will always be smarter people to find a loophole in that. As I finish this humble attempt of mine to express my thoughts, download status says that latest episode of Entourage has been downloaded. Time to say Adios!!

Time for your puppies to get hi-tech

A flea bitten dog is going to fly back to her home. She’ll be reunited with her owners after nine years after she disappeared. Yeah this is one of the many happy ending stories where a lost dog was tracked down to its owners because it was micro-chipped! The owners had micro-chipped Muffy nine years back. When RSPCA Melbourne checked the microchip ID of the dog sleeping on tattered piece of cardboard with the database, they traced the owners back to Brisbane. So sweet na!! (A little girly expression commonly used by XX-es would be “Choo Chweet”. Pardon me I’m being bogged down by Kyle-XY fever these days).

The Animal Welfare Board of India has made it mandatory for the pet owners to get their pets registered. But the tag carried by the pets doesn’t seem to fare well when it comes to tracking down your lost puppy. And here are the opportunistic marketers with another product: Microchip for the puppies. And why wouldn’t they? There are people who will buy just anything for their pets. I need not to talk about any other place; my place is good enough to accentuate my belief. Although Cheeku (yeah that’s my pet’s name) has not been lucky enough to enjoy such high tech products, but for sure he has got larger assortment of soaps & shampoos than all of us XY-es (except if you are a metro sexual shelling out half of your salary on cosmetics).

Pets so easily get gelled with your family. They learn things as the babies do, they like things that we like (atleast Cheeku loves “Rajma Chawal” & corn). Probably they are no more pets for a family; they are members, family members. I reckon that explains why my sister ties a Rakhi to Cheeku every Rakshabandhan.

No wonder all the usual consumer behavior fundas do seem to fit in well when we consider shopping for pets. It’s much very similar to a mom buying the products for the babies. “Which one should I buy? There are all sorts of products for all sorts of shapes n sizes; Pomeranians, poodle, dash hounds, Labradors. This neck-collar will look nice on him”. Not to forget the peer pressure also coming into play: how can my neighbor’s dog has a better neck-collar than my dog? What will he think when he finds out that other dog has got better jacket than him? Poor dog, all he might be interested in is playing with the other dogs or wooing the cutest female dog in the society. This is even more apparent whenever I have visited veterinary hospital to get Cheeku Vaccinated. Everybody there seems to be claiming that my dog is the smartest by making him obey the orders: Tommy sit, Tommy come here, Tommy Shake hand (Remember har kutte ka naam tommy nahin hota. Read it as "not every dog is named Tommy". So never try this to a dog in owner’s absence).

Now Government has been pushing unique citizen ID project, it’s just a matter of time when your puppies will get be roaming here & there with microchips embedded in their body. It seems to be a rational step which might help us tackling the rabies which leads to 30,000 deaths in India every year, highest across the globe.

The Chain ReaXion

9 AM classes are never cool. Apparently that’s the time we get into our “Zombie mode” (Of course I’m talking about MBA guys). Probably our body clocks are nicely tuned to Yankee clocks. My hummingbird attention span wasn’t helping me either. I wasn’t able to get even iota of stuff that was going in the class. But then there is one thing available 24 X 7 for your rescue: Get WIFIed. A glance at my homepage was enough to get me out of dormancy. Oh my apology I forgot to mention my homepage: Facebook. As expected I could see umpty number of ‘K’omrades logged into FB and home-page flooded by FB quizzes, comments & Vineet Saini’s ubiquitous “thumbs-up” & “ambivalent smiley :|”. The most recent fever being the “Mahabharata” on FB.

With every single page refresh, I could see new posts pouring in & every single blessed with witty comments. Some were busy in letting their creative writing skills ooze out in form of status messages while other were engrossed in showcasing their whimsicality in form of comments on others’ posts. I also jumped into the “word-war”. And why wouldn’t I? Make hay while the sun shines. Actually I reckon how could someone resist not being part of such a fun?

I see this as a “Chain Reaction”. Just a little spark and BOOM: it explodes through the entire network. It’s not only Facebook or some other social networking sites for that matter (This although does deserve a special mention; How else do you explain a 5 year old website with more than 250 million active users!!) . You can observe the same explosion in our daily lives as well. We love to go to cricket stadium just to be part of the Mexican wave or boo the opponent team’s player while we could have easily settled into our cosy beanbags and shouted our lungs out “Mom! Please make me a sandwich…extra cheese …”. One group mail or multicast on IP messenger and we rush to NC to shower our blessings on the birthday boy’s butts (pardon me for sounding offensive but the more courteous I wanted it to be, lesser fun it was).

People love to do things which everybody is doing. I guess that’s the human psychology. To some extent it would be justified to say that our acceptance quotient in the society is proportional to the number of chain reactions we are part of. Marketers have banked on such chain reactions for quite some time. Companies encourage the customers to write reviews and testimonials for the products on the websites. iPod has been like a highly contagious flu that everybody seems to be infected with. Google is no more a name for search engine; but more of a verb. Companies are using social networking sites to reach out to new customers. The number of companies using the automated advertising system run by Facebook has tripled over the last year with biggies like Coca-Cola & Starbucks being the some of the successful proponents of such strategies.

Enough of gyan for now. I’ve some 20 new posts to go through on Facebook. Adios…

Summer of 09

I was happy...They couldn't have chosen a better day for my internship joining. Yeah it was 17th of April which happens to be one lucky day for me. Yeah apart from my birthday, it happens to be my dad's birthday n my sis' anniversary: a kinda festival for our family. At midnight while I was busy in accepting wishes from the loved ones, my roomies Dhruv n Gaurav were upto something. I could smell something fishy but they caught me unprepared. Unable to find anything else in the refrigerator, they launched the assault on me with Jam. N believe me if you were to take any advice from me when you see bushwhackers rushing towards you, you do what I couldnt do: you run....n run fast. I had to scrub my face 3 times to get rid of that sticky crap. Nevertheless after attending the call that I had been longing for, I settled into my cosy bed at 1 AM.

Next morning when I reached my office, I was more than just happy to see McD & CCD right across the road. One problem that was killing me was solved now: Where would I have my lunch? I was asked to report to Chief General Manager. I was pretty excited about my project. When he asked me about the project that I would like to do, I let all my managerial skills ooze out to GAS him about exchange rates variation risk and hedging them. Now this sounded fancy at least to me but not to him and he took next couple of mins to thrash all my hopes. "Nahin nahin young man...aisa kuch nahin hota..blah blah blah..." I had to buy some time to think of the project that I want to do. Not a perfect start to ur B'day and internship I guess. But second half of the day was much better. GK M block market can get any single guy's eyeballs rolling and a nice chinese dinner was a perfect ending to my birthday.

Next few days were quite monotonous. As others did, I used to reach office at 10 AM and used to wait in an queue in washroom to wash my face and turn myself from a "Ujda Chaman" to one with neat looks. Dont blame me...Delhi's dust n heat wasnt helping at all. It was irritating watching the oldies spend an hour in front of mirror combing their hair particularly one guy with literally 17 hairs on his barren farm. He used to have a center partition with 8 hairs on one side and 9 on the other. I am not sure though if he used to have 9 hairs on left side or right. 

 I had no intern friend there and used to have lunch and tea break with my oldies mentors. I swear to God I had to convince myself that their joke is too funny or even tickle myself to make myself laugh. Thats when I realised I need to look for some other summer interns. FYI ours was a 23 floor building and it wasnt easy to get hold of any intern. Luckily I met another cool guy Vardhaman and we started our mission to hunt down other interns. While we were on our exploring mission, we came to know about a girl interning in marketing division. Obviously I am not as lucky as Joey to use "Aye...how you doin?" as my opening line and so I asked Vardhaman to do the honours. This way we gelled together as a bunch of friends who really had great time together. It would be very unfair if this blog goes without the mention of our "Gup- Shup" session at library which was the best place to discuss the masaledaar office happenings n ofcourse also the best place for a nap. N yeah I had another good reason to go to library. I had made it a point to have a look at Delhi Times. Afterall only lady's pic that I can see in Kozhikode is Jaya Lalitha.And God bless Lalit Modi for his perfect scheduling of IPL. Although it didnt turn out to be a great one for me as literally every team i supported somehow manage to lose the match. I still remember me and Dhruv fighting with each other over which team deserves to win.

And the rest of time just flew by and I realised only while packing my bags to leave for my hometown that how much I will miss Delhi.Wo Moolchand ke paranthe, Cheese burst pizzas, fights over IPL, 3C's food court, Nap & gup-shups at STC's library, Lunch at McD & Bercos, overcrowded DTC buses...bas yaadein reh jaati hai..kuch choti choti baatein reh jaati hai...

Ma latest escapade...

Exam week was not grilling this time.Dont let this first line cause you hallucinations that I was well prepared for the exams beforehand. It was simply becoz by the third term if anything at all I've learnt in MBA, its what the Geeta says  "fal ki chinta mat karo" but with a subtle manoeuvring from my side; I say "karm bhi mat karo". After all studying doesnt help at all if you get "form the sentences" questions in your exam & you are asked to write down exactly the same sentence as those bloodsucker authors wrote while crookedly trying to make their book more voluminous. Not with my gold-fish memory atleast. Last few days of term weren't very happening either. It was damn monotonous routine: getting busted twice in a day and then hanging loose by watching virtually anything you can get hold of on Zamorin. And thats how my seemingly incessant wait for 31st march ended. 

3 of us Me,Samir n Vaibhav were desperate to get back to our very own City beautiful. We had to catch flight SG#224 from Bengaluru Airport scheduled to depart at 0845 hrs on 1st April. I could have written another blog on how did we finally come to consensus to travel by "Golden Travels" volvo from Kozhikode to Bangalore. But dont worry I'm generous enough not to make you read another blog by me. 

We had done our part of calculations. We were supposed to reach bangalore city at 0530 hrs on the 1st morning. Another 45 mins to Airport and we will be there by 0615 hrs. 2 hours or 20% of margin, statistically sounds more than enough!! We were supposed to board the bus to Bangalore at the IIMK gate itself at 2230 hrs. Inspite of Vaibhav's heroic efforts to be late for the bus, we were right there at IIMK gate at 2225 hrs. Time simply flew by and not before 2345 hrs we did realise that the bus was late and we were still stranded at Kozhikode. It was only after we saw the shimmering lights of the volvo at 0000 hrs and driver convinced us that we'll reach bangalore city by 0630 hrs, we got a bit sigh of relief and settled into our cosy seats.

When the 6 o'clock alarm woke me out of a nice dream, Samir was standing right next to my seat with wretched looks. We needed to be faster than a bullet train to reach Bangalore by 0630. "Bhaiya thodi jaldi karo...flight miss ho jayegi" we said to the driver. "7 baje pahunch jaoge" was his reply. Just when we wore our backpacks at 6:55, he delivered the killer punch. As per his latest estimate, we wouldn't make it to Bangalore before 0800 hrs. Thats when we realised it was time to push the panic button. We reworked our plan and decided to get off the bus at satellite roundabout and called a radio cab there itself. As soon as we get off the bus at 0730 hrs, we pounced on the cab waiting for us.

"Bhag dhanno bhag...aaj Veeru ki flight ka sawaal hai..." was the thought that struck me at that time. It was one of the april fool's day when everyone seemed to be playing pranks on you: bus driver, traffic, traffic lights and even your own destiny. Even the radio jockeys seemed to chuckle at us. Else why would they play "Golmaal" and very ironical at that time "aaj main aage zamaana hai piche" numbers. The cab driver vroomed his way through the busy Bangalore roads à la Schumacher to drop us at the airport at 0825 hrs. We leapfrogged towards the departure terminal entrance gate with Samir even jumping the security check. 3 uncouth guys gushing out sweat from every part of the body; I reckon any security guard would have gunned us down mistaking us for terrorists.We had to jump the queue which ofcourse did create some scene out there. We reached the counter huffing and puffing at 0830 hrs. Believe me the boarding pass at that time was no less than a winning lottery ticket for me as I was screaming my lungs out "Eureka eureka! we did it". But Vaibhav didnt seem to be much elated as all this simply washed away his dream of using airport's facility.

First thing we did after landing in Delhi was to visit a Dominos outlet for a cheese-burst pizza.We did afterall deserve a cheese-burst after our meticulous planning and execution as we narrowly escaped the falling into (de)famed league of Dhoop Mittal & JD. Yeah they did somehow manage to miss their flight during last term break.