29 Apr 2009

Learnings outside the classroom..

"Hey Ankur, I wanted to apologize to you. I didn't intend to corner you. I hope you didn't mind." 

The professor of Financial Accounting from Duke stopped me outside the dining hall after lunch and said those words. I was stumped. Earlier in his class, I had opined that Shareholder's equity is the liability of a company towards its shareholders. The class opposed me in chorus and the professor told me never to repeated this anywhere. It was usual, a professor correcting his student. I didn't even think any bit about that, then or later.

But still, I was humbled and touched by his gesture. I will keep this in mind wherever I go in my life. The learning has begun.

Thanks professor.

22 Apr 2009

It's just the second week honey..

Pre terms are on here and this is my first post from ISB. It's been just 11 days and feels as if months have passed. A total information overload has started taking its toll.

My quadi Satyam got locked behind the bathroom door today. The housekeeping had to call the carpenter to break the door open and rescue Satyam. What was more was that he wasn't alone in the bathroom. He had taken the housekeeping supervisor along to demonstrate him the problem with the lock. Apparantly this year is specifically bad for Satyams of the world !

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell, the quad here is a four bedroom flat shared by four students. Our quad would perhaps have the highest average GMAT score - 765. We form a simple arithmatic progression with 750, 760, 770, and 780. We discussed last night to paste our GMAT scores to our room doors. That's the closest geeks can get to being cool (All pun intended!)

Today, yours truly had a chance to sit within 10 meters of a person who sits with the likes of Barack Obama. The Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfeinvisited the school to deliver a talk on Entrepreneurship. It's always inspiring to see how humble all those top guys are. Though I had to repeatedly tell myself not to get up from the seat, go right down the aisle to the front row and shout at him. I always have this urge whenever I am supposed to behave. In the school, I always wanted to slap my principal whenever I bowed good morning or afternoon to him. He liked me very much. He even admitted me to school even though there were no vacant seats. I always felt like slapping him. 

During the high coffee, an American working for the US consulate in Hyderabad approached me and Priyom while we were admiring the girl whom I had discovered last night from the profile book. He caught us off guard and we had to struggle to think for our introductions. To begin with mine, I almost said what a nice pair of legs she had! I have seen more girls in shorts, minis, micros, and bikinis in the last 10 days than I had seen in my entire stupid life so far. Anyways, three other guys joined us soon. The American was amazed to see that all of us Indians were working with American firms and mostly in America before coming here. Perhaps his first brush with the global outlook at ISB.

This batch is a diverse one with rich experiences all across. Just our section A itself, of about 72 students, boasts of an ex IAS officer, an ex Lt. Colonal, a national level Bharatnatyam dancer, a black belt in Karate, the business head for the west region at Lowe, the senior creative group head for another advertiser firm (can't recall the name), a second ranker in BTech at IIT with a GPA of 9.7/10, a French guy who plays Tabla and sings hindi songs and Urdu Kawwali (Sometimes the sadist in me wishes he were more French!), a millionaire real estate businessman, an Army girl, and of course yours truly. They all speak a great deal about how lucky there are to be studying with yours truly for the entire next year!

Even our study group of five, which will be doing most of the core terms assignments together for the next six months, boasts of three IIT graduates, including that second ranker I already told you about, one 40 year old sales and marketing guy who did his BTech from IIT Bombay in 1992 and now has two cute kids, and lastly yours truly. The fourth one is a CA who also secured 49th rank in the CA exam. And the fifth one is a cool chick who was a corporate trainer but sadly got married when she was 21. Some people are too early to fall in love, aren't they!

By the way, yours truly is looking for a sweet, pretty, and caring girl for himself because his dreams of hooking a hot chick here just got shattered, given all those dudes in the batch...sigh!

7 Apr 2009

ISB: 3 days away

My mom asked me today how it feels with only three days to go. And I thought for a moment -

In 3 days, I would set foot on what was a distant dream for me for a long time. I will become a current student of the Indian School of Business; a part of ISB. Within me, I still haven't started feeling the reality yet and by dramatizing it in the sentences above, I am trying to drum it down myself. But the devil's sense still tells me 'how come something so good happen to you !'