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 :-) !