My Pug Marks

 Image Courtesy: http://www.thehindu.com/ Now that MBA is over and I am considered an ounce wiser, being back home means work. There are so many pending things that are just waiting in the attic to be dusted and made to work again. One of them is the mammoth task of physical share transfer and dematerialization. Though stated in one pretty sentence, it takes months of effort and work. And of course, money!  My brother has been painfully going about the motions of this work for a couple of months now and nothing much yet seems to have resulted out of it. We struck a good deal with a certain Saraswati something shares. I asked, "How much would this one fetch us?". He replied, "Enough to recover the money you spent on your MBA degree". I exclaimed, "Really! Waoh! Even after they have been dormant for like 15 years??!". He quipped, in exasperation, "Weren't they supposed to teach you all this in B-School?" I did shut up and let him do this pain...

Last exam ends on 31st March. With this, technically, I will be half a manager. Let me write - 1/2 of MBA will be over, yeah, looks better this way. From 1st April onwards, we will be moving for our summer internships at various companies. I pinged a senior of mine who had worked at the same company I am going to in Bangalore for my summers for some last minute advice. Seeing the recession and bad times for B - Schools in terms of placements (not admissions), people would try their best to secure Pre-Placement Offers (PPOs) and won't leave it till the uncertain December of 2009 that it would be. And my senior's advice is there for all to see. Some things in India, it seems, work the same everywhere. A discomforting nevertheless a unifying characteristic for the nation that we are.  Obviously, his name has been blurred to protect his identity. He is a nice chap.  :) The Messenger Chat - An Excerpt Me: Any last minute suggestion sir? Senior: haan, last minute suggestion yeh hai k...

We have three colleges functional from our campus here on the hill in a god forsaken village called Lavale. With almost simultaneous breaks [obviously you won't keep shifts for lunch, lunch has to happen at lunch time, ain't it?], it puts immense pressure on the mess staff. Somebody needs to teach those 'kids' from the other college that it is good to follow the queue as then everyone gets warm food and chatting and flirting can be left for later, at the dining table. It becomes even more difficult to move on when you have scores of girls in front of you. Being the overtly chivalrous person that I tend to be, I let the things go in a manner they do. Girls at times seriously don't deserve this chivalry these days. A pretty young thing tried to make her way in front of me while I was already getting impatient with the slow moving queue. I turned back with a frosty nosed stare. She made that apologetic face and pointed at the counter, ' I just need that!'. I lo...

This is a poem that I wrote at PagalGuy  forum when I was wait listed and way too eager to do my MBA at SIBM , Pune . Those were some days! Some of us started tracking the movement of wait listed people and waited with anxieties and crossed fingers to reach it till our magical scores. I remember mine. It was 97.38. Sometimes, that wait got better of us and what followed is here for you all to see ;) Mom! Results are out! Oh Honey, your GD/PI went well, You're in without doubt. Wait wait..lemme at least check, Oh darn, am in the wait listed deck! When would I ever be in? This is crazy, being wait listed is a mental sin! What went wrong, I wonder.. Panel seemed happy, But then, why does the site say WL 40? Oh crap, that devil guy..He must have crapped! Creepy smile he had, my scores; he must have sapped. Oh, PG told me that guy was in my GD/PI group, Darn! He posts a happy post,  He was a loser, heavens! How did he manage through? Ages it has been, Why doesn't the list move? Are...

I just finished with my last viva of the last internal of the last semester of my first year at MBA. Come to think of it, I'll become 1/2 of an MBA time span wise if I manage to clear all my exams. Otherwise, I don't think management can ever be complete for a person. With or without, before or after - an MBA at the end of the day is just a degree, where, to its credit, you learn the art of that managing a bit better. It feels like a culmination of a journey to be done with this semester even though it is more like a lull before the mighty storm that is to begin 20 th March. It is also the farewell party for seniors today. Same old nice stuff on menu - Good food, lots of dance and booze - who would want to miss it? On the other hand, personally, I would want to stay back, enjoy a movie, arrange stuff in room and my mind and prepare myself to some extent for the 10 days of torture that is to follow? Well, I chose the former over the latter for reasons best ( un )known to me and...

Always wanted to click something like this. Luckily for me, the lamp posts from where I clicked weren't switched on. Samsung U600, 3.2 MP, Low Exposure with a little digital zoom did the trick. Yay! Though I wish I had my Canon...

As I was whiling away time on net, a friend of mine asked me what I have been asked so many times since I have landed in an entity called a 'B-School' - Is MBA tough? Frankly speaking, I find this question tougher to answer than whatever I have faced in an MBA. So, I thought I would answer it in the same old manner, giving gyaan and making it sound the way it would induce a WOAH!!! What fun, right? This is what we all have been doing. Why? Coz everyone does it. Why does everyone do it? Coz well, no one wants to forget the effort or the fluke as the case may be that pushed them into the ivy league. It is like sucking that sweet grape for eons to suck out the last of the sweetness molecule from it. Coz had they not made it, that very grape would have been the sourest thing ever! This time, I begged to differ from the normal gyaan session. Why subject this guy to the trauma when he is eagerly awaiting his GD/PI results. I also did not have the time for it. MBA is as difficult as ...

That's about it I guess. I will be writing once in a while about my MBA life - but here strictly. Things change in a manner as you go about the course here that..ummm..well, you feel like not maintaining a separate blog for it at least ! Add to that certain other means of expressing myself which I have have been thinking for quite some time now. Finally, it comes to implementation to a small extent. Things are working the way they should. It is time time I start to work in consonance with them. I started that blog writing about being inducted into the system. Now, I can safely say - I am one of the 'system'.

MBA - This 3 lettered monster hexes thousands of people across the country every year. Most of them assiduously preparing for their dreams to be made or broken every Sunday at this time of the year. I did too, though not all that hard core prep. Year almost comes to an end, I haven't written much in this blog-diary of mine as I had initially planned. May be, like everything, excitement at times wanes even in an MBA. High hopes and expectations are a few of the vices that yours sincerely indulges in - with the same ungratifying results [whoof! few things never change!] It has been a pretty decent ride - giving you a nice perspective to build upon and move your way ahead as you may deem fit. No one ever shows you a Red light here - though you may feel like creating your own at times. But there is one thing that you definitely realize - it is no mean task to deal with people. People form a B-School. You steer through them and you are a winner. You get muddled up and all you have is a ...

It has been quite some time now that I am here. And as they say - thoroughly inducted into the system. The picture on the left, at times, seems to be true - me being the little red human being and stuff around here being those dreaded aliens, ready to gobble me up. But then, you learn to evade them. Evasive action to events which could turn disastrous otherwise comes to you so naturally that its almost like you were born to do it. Yes - you learn all this in an MBA. You learn how to prepare presentations, you learn how not to prepare presentations and yet be prepared for them. You learn how not to prepare presentations and not be prepared for them and still seem prepared for anything that comes your way! You solve case studies so deftly that it would surprise even the ones who were actually involved in the case - were they anywhere near you. And if somehow - you turn out to be like me - you learn how to be perceived as a good student without opening a single book of a single subject wh...

Yesterday was terrific. Well, nothing much changed. I am still here, managed not to run away from all those things that are supposed to be done, but still. It was an ultimate paradox. I managed to get into Interim Team of IT. For the guy who has been trying to run away from IT ever since he was born in his previous life, it is no mean thing. Ah well, the different thing is that I won't even bother to be in 1 mile radius of a thing called coding. After the I-Team was declared, the selected guys were taken into a room for a cake cutting ceremony. It was fun to say the least. Amidst all the shouting and introductions, senior team members managed to fill our mouths to the brim with black forest cake (it had been ages...we could almost smell the cakes like hungry dogs while entering). Anyway, the legacy continues. Transfer of gyaan from seniors to juniors, about how to go about it. All in all, am looking forward to it. :)

It is the last day of June today. Though, it wasn't that hectic but I guess the week's accumulation is making me feel tired and lazy. I have interview at 2200 hours for IT Team Interim council formation. It has been raining incessantly since yesterday morning,and how so ever I love rains, murkiness of the clouded greys gets to you at times. Especially when you have lots to do. It is all about springing back from this and fighting the whole next week again. Before my post falls in the category of poor-MBA-guy-pissed-with-work category, I will state some learning of the week : One has to learn to wash clothes fast, faster and fastest. Else, use laundry for everything, and I mean everything. Learn to sleep while sitting, develop finer sleeping positions and aspects so that your closed eyes are not visible to the professor. (I have personally slept on the first bench.) Learn to accept that your room mate will not not change his waking up alarm song Mauja hi Mauja and neither would ...

With Bryan Adams playing for you and cool breeze blowing, what else could you ask for? These are the moments one tends to fall in love with. Moments, without which, living a hostel life would lose its spiciness. There are so many things that a residential MBA gives you that you already feel a sense of accomplishment. You make a new record of wearing a pair of trousers for 7 days (Monday to Sunday) before sending it for laundry. No one even knows. You learn to live with the untidiness of your room mate and still kind of like it because he is indeed a nice fellow. You learn to sleep despite the banging doors at night, silly music that is played loud just to show off and some species of wild insects literally sharing bed with you. You learn to not feel guilty of not exercising despite watching all the soccer enthusiasts scattered all over the hostel parks, playing like pros. Your faith in Murphy's laws is strengthened day in and day out because when you carry your umbrella to campus, ...

You get filled with experiences when you live in a hostel. You see life, naked and shameless in front of you. And life itself teaches you how to live it - that is perhaps the thrill of it. Days are passing here at the speed of light. And tomorrow, after the induction test are perhaps are few hours of our lives when we can still treat MBA as the extension of our graduation. Monday onwards, it is a pre-ponement of our managerial lives. Well, that is what we have been told by all. 19 June 2008 is perhaps one of those days (nights I should say...) that would shape things to come. It is these small things that vary your thinking to such an extent that it becomes a milestone in the course of your life. We had a students council meeting at 1600 hours. Most of the MBA-I guys reached anywhere between 1600-1615 hours. And we paid for it. With individual interviews that lasted night long, we sat on the cold stairs in front of canteen for hours. By 0415 hours, when we were let off, most of us had ...

Oh yea, settled into a sort of routine. It is hardly a routine, coz routine is a dangerous word if used anywhere near MBA. Here it goes: 7:15 am - 7:30 am -- wake up and wake ankush up. we go for a jog. cover a majestic 100-200 metres and then walk a bit; straight to mess. 8:30 am -- we can be seen casually going back to the hostel for bath. most of the people are already going for the 9 am class. ankush dismisses them as 'naya naya josh hai abhi'. 8:45 am -- ankush somehow manages to dress up and manage to knock the doors of my room. kshitij (my roomie) is all set to leave. I just have shoes and socks to put and I am good to go. 9:03 am -- We manage to enter the big hall where our induction courses (the basics) are going on. If lucky, we get to sit on the last benches that are still vacant. 11:00 am -- All sort of groans and grunts start coming from students as a ritual, while the teacher (I won't name her, she teaches well indeed.) continues to throw more definitions at t...

I reached Pune a few days before I had to reach my hostel at Lavale. It is my first time away from home, so my mom was even more concerned than usual. We went to Shirdi, which was quite hectic. On the way, Western Ghats, the most worn out ranges of India looked magnificent as they flirted with dying sun's last rays. Ah, well, finally the day came. As I decked on the bus which would take us from S.B.Road to Lavale, it was a different feeling. I wasn't ecstatic, nor was I low. But, it was something different. Indescribable. Soon, I was travelling to Western Ghats. The city was left far below. Cool breeze and drizzle greeted as we entered the Symbiosis Knowledge Village. This amazing place carved out of a Ghat on 800 Acres of Land is breath taking. A campus life which I always wanted. I had it now, finally. Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), my B-School. I was waiting to be proud of something. Now, I was - and it has just been a week's journey...

I have another blog where I write about my life in a B-School. I guess it is done for what it was useful for. I post all of it here at My Pug Marks...and close that one. Just in case you are curious about that blog - click here [while it exists!]