Get your vocabulary right..

"Netaon ne yeh kaha, Netaon ne woh kaha...Neta corrupt hain, Neta ghooskhor hain.."


They all are politicians damn it, not all are leaders!


Rajneetigya bolo, neta nahin!

Being consultant..

There are three types of days in a consultant's life:

1. When client is working and the Firm is working - Consultant works
2. When client is not working but the Firm is working - Consultant works
3. When the Firm is not working but client is working - Consultant works

Comp(ensatory) offs?!! What are they?

But life is lousy for a consultant, I tell ya! Why? Here is how a friend put it:

1. You work very odd hours.
2. You spend a majority of your time in a hotel room.
3. Your client pays for your hotel room plus your hourly rate.
4. You are paid a lot of money to keep your client happy.
5. Creating fantasies for your clients is rewarded.
6. People ask you what you do and you can't explain it.
7. It's difficult to have a family.

I agreed till I 'stepped back' and realized that he had just made me look like a prostitute!

But then sample my own experience when my girlfriend went to tell her mom about me:

1. Her mom didn't recognize my B school's name (IIM is known to every infant in India but ISB is not)
2. She had never heard my Firm's name (my firm doesn't brand/advertise itself)
3. She didn't understand even my profession (my girlfriend was also not very sure how to explain. Poor girl just believed me when I told her that I also do something respectable)
4. She was convinced that I do something shady when she heard that despite being from an unknown college, working with an 'obscure' firm, in an unheard profession, I earn well.

Only three letters do justice to my feelings...

...WTF!

Shifting loyalties..

I love writing blog but lately it went down on my priority list. A couple of days ago I saw a note on my blackberry that I had written on a flight in Jan this year. So I thought to revive my blog with this. Here it goes -

Enough! I have decided. Now on, I am going to take jet airways only. Their airhostesses are so much prettier than Kingfisher's! And the jet airhostesses said hi also to me, all of them.

I feel bad for having lost 37 opportunities to spend time with them over the last 6 months. Those kingfisher airhostesses would say hi to everybody ahead of me but when I come, they would start looking at the passenger behind me as if I wasn't there!

That apart, I admire NG's eye for beauty more than VM's who claims that he personally recruits his crew. But NG doesn't make any such claims anyway. It must be some obscure aspiring senior manager who is enjoying making offers (job offers I mean) to all those beauties who would otherwise not even notice him in the bar.

So, tomorrow's flight to Hyderabad is a jet now. And the day after's to Mumbai too. This reminds me, my imminent hyderabad trip is giving headaches to my girlfriend these days. I am going to ISB to take mock interviews of people shortlisted by the firm but she thinks I will get laid by some chick there who really wants an offer (job offer I mean). Though I secretly suspect she is convinced that my looks are not going to do wonders for me but still she is somewhat insecure because of the cult status of my firm which I have made her believe creates a bright halo around my head that blinds all ISB students. I have tried explaining to her that these are only mock interviews (as if the ladies would seek appointments to sleep with me if I were taking real interviews) and even showed her my packed mock interview schedule but she still believes girls would find a way to nab me. She doesn't know that kingfisher's airhostesses don't even acknowledge my presence. But as this rationale is based on my looks, which, I suspect, she discounts anyway, it wouldn't convince her. So I wouldn't mention it to her.

Why inflict humiliation on the self!

Bored...

Huh...I have a headache man! I slept at 5.30 in the morning and woke up at 7 in the evening. In between I sleepwalked two times from my room to Goel dining hall in full clothes to keep my system running. And now I have a long night ahead. Perhaps three more movies, what else!

I have started hating free days now and to top this nonexistence of any deadlines, this bloody term break makes the campus ghostly. This time at least 100 ISB grads are in Goa. Don't know how everybody decided to go to the same place! I am going too tomorrow..for the first time to Goa. Didn't go with my engineering college trip in 2003. We considered Andamans and Lakshyadeep too but the expenses deterred us. We are still on student budget for a few more months!

Term 6 GPA distribution came this evening. Looks like if I persist this last mile now, I am going to be in the Dean's list too. Don't know how I managed a marksheet without a 'B' all these terms. I didn't want to slog here. This bloody Garora told me to slog, damn him! All his fault, I am not going on a date this valentines day too. When did I join IIT? 2001, yeah. So, from Feb-2002 to Feb-2010, it's been 9 years since I have been thinking every 14th Feb that next time I am going on a date dude! But I somehow always manage to chase girls away. So here this one goes too with me spending my evening in the Gym. May be next time...

..for now, I got to go to Gym dude. So long..

Drunk and out..

damn damn damn...I am completely inebriated at 2.36 in the night. ISB Solstice, the annual alum reunion is going and ISB is in all festive mood.

The days are fun man! One week to go for exams and in this one week, I have two individual assignments to submit for merger and acquisitions, one group assignment for the same, one group assignment for financial statement analysis, two group assignments for new product management, and two group assignments for financial engineering. And oh yeah, the interview preparation for McKinsey and BCG is going on with alums from McKinsey calling me late in the nights for case prep and my group calling me in the library for 2 hour 2 case sessions every third day. It's almost like a finger up my ass.

But the days are fun man, really! I am coming from the 2008 party lounge, all full with about 300 people, many alums, many spouses and many friends-with-benefits, yeah you got it! But it was fun...three large vodka pegs back to back, a long due chat with Garora, my one close friend, and a reminder that yes this is what I had bargained for. And then someone asks me where that girl is..oh ya, the same girl I went on a date with in one of the parties, when the next day everyone in the class thought I am seeing her and was concerned because they think I am a 'good' guy and she has been going out with bit too many people and ditching them like anything too often. But I wasn't seeing her. She just asked me out and I went. But its fun, people care for you! So, she came today with this another guy from my section only. The new catch, oh ya. But life is fun dude! This another girl, the daughter of a big industrialist, who was in my negotiation group last term put on a glittering pink lipstick and is looking damn sweet today and add to that she joined me in chat. Nakul and Manju were leaving, so I joined them. Enough it was for me for tonight. I had my head spinning and din't need any more liquor. On way back, Aloke is talking about the damn interview he is expecting. What the f**k dude, get a life. I am drunk at the moment. I'll tell you what to do for the interview tomorrow. Now, for God sake, go to bed! He got scared and let me go. Those muscles help you sometimes, I tell ya guys! Kick-ass!

Tomorrow I am turning 27. But life is fun dude, I tell ya. This is what I had bargained for..

SUST, SUSU, et al...

Markstrat is a well known game in the MBA world. You compete with your batch for the same market, do R&D, launch products, build your brand, do advertising, deploy sales force, collude and what not! (Alright, collusion is not possible because of the Honour Code demon that bars us from placements and gives a straight F in the subject at the smallest violation of rules)

Every product has a four letter name - First letter for the market (S for SONITE market), second letter for firm (U for firm U. There are 5 firms in the industry, A, E, I, O, U), and the last two letters are your imagination for your product.

You are given seven periods, each equivalent to an year and you have to maximize your profits every period.

Our firm is U, so all our products for Sonite market start with SU-

We launched SUST two periods back and it has not really been sust. Instead it has quickly become our star product. However, the surprise came when our recent launch SUSU exceeded expected sales and the production fell short. In fact, this time our production of SUST, SUSU, and SUSI, all, fell short even though we had targeted almost 75% market because of our strategic positioning on all segments. But the markets grew by far and with the targetted sales numbers, we got only 61% market share and the production fell short. But still, this time our net earnings were the highest of all periods, perhaps because we had taken 4 large shots of Vodka before keying in the first marketing mix numbers.

But those names are giving us a ball of a time in all our markstrat sittings and Vodka added to the slime. Krishna told Somesh and Ranjana "Why don't you guys do SUSU (together?!) !" when all he meant was to ask them to plug in the advertising and sales force numbers for the product in the system. And the dirtiest of all happened when we all agreed that we were targetting (our) susu at high earners. Not that subtle, eh!

I have daily discussions with our competitors over the wrangle for the only market and this time I had challanged a firm A girl to do whatever she could but she wouldn't be able to beat us. We beat them up by almost 40 million markstrat currency this time. Dinner tomorrow should be fun. I can't wait to rub it in at her. Dining hall is our most common hangout to socialize and markstrat has only added to the meal time chaos.

The other guy, who is my partner for DMOP assignments, and his group opened champagne last time when they made 41k (as against our 55 million, to put the numbers in perspective). They have seen negative net contributions (read positive losses!) in all other periods so far, so a positive contribution, however small, was a reason to go on a binge. The guys are all set for the B- in markstrat. But he is a good chartered accountant, I can't stop laughing at his markstrat plight everytime I look at him. They made a -1500 this time too. Two days ago, I told him I wished Markstrat had an M&A option with a possibility of a hostile take over if your share price went too low. The guy told me how he wished he could kick me in the nuts, if he were not scared of my biceps.

Life is not fair dude!

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. Blankfein, visited 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!

Bin, Pallet, Small Hang Tag, Large Hang Tag, Business card...phew

Small harmless labels on the retail shelves...

...no easy game, I tell ya.

First international b'day..

People coin all sorts of quirky terms!

My college friend wrote to me "so how r u celebrating your first international b'day..." Man! international b'day!!! I can't stop smiling.

And then in the gym, I was talking to this friend of mine when I said

"aaj mere paas IIT hai, ISB hai, H1B hai...tumhare paas kya hai ?"

"mere paas girlfriend hai..." he hit straight on my raw nerve ! He sure knows my secret sorrow.

But yeah, for a moment discounting the fact that I am away from my family, this birthday is one of the best I have ever had. No, not because the clubs here give free laps on your birthday. Why do you always have to think of me that ways!

Kalyug..

Something came up in the discussions of two frustrated engineers last night. I thought why not to write this one here.

तो साहब, अर्ज किया है -

एक वक्त था जब दोस्त कहते थे कि दोस्ती के लिए तो जान भी हाजिर है,

आज देखिये बीवी को जान कहते हैं, और मांगो तो मना करते हैं ...

It had become us vs them...

We fed them poison and killed them. When we couldn't find anyone to dispose off the bodies, my dad did that. The two mice had been to every corner of the house and had tried their teeth on every possible thing. They ate my chicken sweet corn soup from inside the packet, they ate the mathri with pickle from the luxery of my plate, and last few of my nights were always tortured by the memories of that time a few months back when one of their ancestors pulled out that stunt of climbing up my jeans, right up the back of my T-shirt (Gee, and I was IN that T-Shirt all the while thinking that one of my parents is playfully running a hand on my back, only to find them both before my eyes the next moment while 'someone' was still playfully teasing its fingers up my back), and jumping from the tip of the last hair on my forehead. Nobody would have believed me, had my mom also not seen it jumping at the last moment. That one would perhaps make a suitable match for a female mouse who has mentioned an adventure loving mouse as an ideal match on its orkut profile, well...

The recent ones had evolved even over that previous one in that they somehow always managed to eat the oiled bait I specially saved from my dinner every night and still never get into the mouse trap for a whole one month. They even avoided the cake poison that we put at 20 odd carefully chosen locations for two days. My dad had been gone out for about two hours in search of that poison cake the day before, when my mom made me wait for the evening tea because dad could return any moment. Eventually, we had no alternative but to make tempting dough balls tinged with cynide and I have to say now I have never seen such an example of customer satisfaction with any of the products on the market in recent years. I am going to write a testimonial to that cynide company today. Only four hours it took and they lay flat in the middle of the room. God bless the manufacturer.

My sister argued something about mouse rights, as in we shouldn't have killed those mice so mercilessly. Perhaps it's the affect of the company of this really beautiful girl in her class who has a pet mouse in her hostel room (Yes, a white one. But what the hell, it's still a mouse! And not as beautiful as stuart little or the girl owner herself) All her snaps on my sister's laptop are with her mouse only. I have been in predicament from some time about asking her out. How long I would be able to avoid not just meeting but pampering this Mr. Mouse if I get the prized opportunity to date her is anybody's guess! All right, you don't have to remind me that I don't have guts to ask her out anyway. Yeah, not just her but any girl. Okay, not even a not-so-pretty one. All right, that's enough, leave it now!

Killer language...

It would be unfair to the purpose of my blog if this one weren't put here..
These are the gems of language usage, most of them by the 'perpetrators' of education upon us !


Principal to student..." I saw u yesterday rotating near girls hostel pulling cigarette... ? "

************ ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ***
Class teacher once said :

" Pick up the paper and fall in the dustbin!!!"

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
Once the Hindi teacher said...."I'm going out of the world to America.."

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
"..DON'T TRY TO TALK IN FRONT OF MY BACK.."

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
Don't..laugh at the back benches...otherwise teeth and all will be fallen down.....

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
It was very hot in the afternoon when the teacher entered.. She tried to switch the fan on, but there was some problem. and then she said

" Why is fan not oning" (ing form of on)

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
Teacher in a furious mood...

Write down your name and father of your name!!

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
"shhh... quiet... the principal is revolving around college"

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
My manager started like this

"Hi, I am Madhu, Married with two kids"

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
"I'll illustrate what I have in my mind" said the professor and erased the board

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
"Will u hang that calender or else I'll HANG MYSELF"

************ ********* ********* ************ *
Librarian scolding the student," IF U WILL TALK AGAIN , I WILL KNEEL DOWN OUTSIDE"

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
Chemistry HOD comes and tells us...

"My aim is to study my son and marry my daughter"

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
Tomorrow call your parents, especially mother and father

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
"Why are you looking at the monkeys outside when i am in the class?!"

************ ********* ********* ********* ****
Lab assistant said this when my friend wrote wrong code..

"I understand. You understand. Computer how understand??

************ ********* ********* ********* *****
Seeing the principal passing by, the teacher told the noisy class..

"Keep quiet, the principal has passed away"

This social set up is flawed ! huh...

She started dating someone else when I could not speak to her when she sat before me on my table in the office canteen, leaving about 50 vacant tables around. Hell...if only I had spoken to her that day. 'The R-Factor' is happily married now.

I have got to find some explanation for all these tragedies to preserve my sanity (You wish I had prefixed that with -in ! Yeah ? Hold that pal. The Indian constitutions doesn't explicitly grant you the right to freedom of wish. And this wish of yours goes as far as to infringe upon my self respect. I could sue you for that in the court of justice to realise my right to constitutional remedies !) . Huh...Perhaps the printer was out of order or the toner ran out of ink when it was my turn to receive the paper of luck. And he dispatched me to earth with a blank sheet in hand. Sure da...do I have a choice against you!

But given a choice against this syndicate of humans who have formed a nonsensical social set up, I would make it a democracy. You should have a chance of voting your incumbent parents out of power when you are dissatisfied with the way you are being reared or when they start ignoring your teenage hu-'man' rights (!!!) ! Democracy and regular elections would not only give them an incentive to rear you better but would also let you elect the likes of Akshay Kumar for dad when you reach your teens so that you can learn the 101 ways of, you know, well...at least ask that gorgeous 'R-factor' out.

Eh...that argumentative Indian in me !