Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Meeting with Indian Cricketers

Apparently a second string Indian team consisting of former players played(and won) Pakistan in a charity match at Toronto. And guess what the team traveled with me in the Air India flight from Toronto to Delhi. Got a chance to chat with them a little bit and also managed to get a few pictures too!!!



Monday, March 05, 2007

Toronto – Ploughing a lonely furrow

Finally I reached Toronto this morning at 6:00. My tryst with Air Canada is over. I’ll try my best never to fly Air Canada again. I immediately checked with Air India on my flight this evening and got to know that the flight is delayed to 2:25 AM on Monday morning. Phew ! At least I got some time to go around Toronto. Took a cab from the airport and checked in at Deluxe Inn. I was taken care of by a desi cab driver and then a desi hotel receptionist. I see too many desis in Canada (some in really deplorable conditions) and I could clearly sense that each one is longing to be in India. I can see their eyes sparkle when I ask them the very obvious question “Are you from India?” Checked for a tours to Niagara, but the bitter cold plus the Sunday meant that there were no trips. So took a longish nap till 2:00 and took the Toronto subway to get to the “Union” station at downtown. The subway system is very similar to the one in Singapore. Here there is an east-west line and a U-line from mid-north west to down south and all the way up to mid-north east.

A forty-five minute journey split across two trains made me realize the size of Toronto and I reached downtown. This is a typical downtown, the familiar glass-plated concrete jungle, if you will. It was not very difficult to spot CN tower, the very purpose of my visit. With a $26 entrance fee I could go up to the second level observatory. The only other buildings of this scale I have visited were the Sears Tower and the John. F. Hancock towers in Chicago. A 44 sec trip on the elevator took me to the first level observatory which is around 346 metres. The view of the Ontario Lake was simply superb. I just got reminded of Chicago because the Michigan Lake view from Sears tower is almost very similar to this one. Looking at the ground from the glass floor section was quite a scary thing. After getting an extreme picture here, I went up the second level observatory (447 m) which is rightly called the top of the world. I have decided to add a few other high rises to my to-see list are

i) The Ostankino Tower, Moscow
ii) Petronas Towers, Malaysia
iii) Empire State Building, New York
iv) Taipei 101 Tower, Taipei

Back in the airport the 2:25 AM flight is now pushed to 6:30 AM. What a journey this is turning out to be. God please save me !!!

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Terminal Musings

Never in my wildest dreams have I thought of the proposition of spending a whole day in an airport. Some excellent co-ordination by my company’s travel department and a big snow storm at Toronto has got me stuck at the Calgary International airport now. My original flight has been canceled and now after being standby for 3 flights I’m waiting for the fourth flight. Although I’m mad at a lot of people I’m taking this time to just cool off. After all I haven’t had any time for myself since April 2006. I was busy all of May 2006 winding up my first 100% mainframe project (curse my efforts at becoming versatile). And then I was busy preparing to fly to India for Divya’s engagement. All of June 2006 flew by with the engagement work and trying to reserve a marriage hall for the wedding.

Talking with Sreeram ( a.k.a Kulguru) during my vacation was a really big turning point in my life. He egged me to take GMAT and told how strongly he believed that I could be in a top B-school. What a great friend he is…You are great machi. Then came the two months slog balancing work and GMAT preparation. My college time MBA aspirations were all too obvious to my friends because I cracked the CAT 2001(It is a different story that my naiveté did not help me convert the interview calls). But this time I kept a really low profile about my second attempt at getting into a B-school. I can count with one hand the number of people who knew that I was preparing. Even after getting a pretty decent score I kept everything under the warps about my applications. I know that a lot of my friends are angry with me because I was operating so clandestinely. This MBA thing almost ate me full time up to early December and by then I was ready to fly back to India. Divya’s marriage happened on 11th Jan and in the middle of all commotion I had my ISB and RSM interviews. I then set out to Pune to help Divya and Sujith settle a lil bit.

Another nice twist was this Canadian due-diligence assignment. A couple of good meetings during the client visit helped me land into this fantastic assignment. I consider myself really lucky to be part of a team doing due-diligence for a $100 million deal…Do I really need an MBA I thought after getting picked up for the assignment. I met some really exceptional Infoscions here. The good quality in this team was the fact that even though the team members came from so many different offices each one knew to how to work cohesively towards the one goal of collecting and crunching as much information as possible. After a terrific presentation of the DD findings to the client yesterday, the team disbursed.. Once I head back it will be my last month with Infosys. I have learnt a lot from her (Infosys) and even though we are breaking up now in not so good terms (I got indications that my promotion is being withheld :-( ), it is a relationship that has shaped me. Okay, the pork ribs and the glass of wine are empty now and I’ll put a full stop to my inebriated rambling too :-) !