Chennai blues - I

"Hey, watch out", screamed Arjun as a Forrester zipped past their small Corolla. "Whatever happened to you. Do you realize this is I70 and not your panagal park main road where there is no lane discipline". Pramod didn't utter a single word. "Take exit 204 and I'm gonna drive after that".

"Susan...I don't know how she is now?"

Arjun set the cruise control and glanced over "Why what happened to her?"

"No da...We had a small misunderstanding"

"What business do you have with American women? You don't even talk to our desi girls"

"I tried to convince her but she would not accept anything"

Arjun took exit 197 and stopped the car in the 'Sonic' parking lot.

"Are you ok? I don't quite understand what you are saying. Whats going on between you and Susan? What doesn't she accept?"

"Boss. She wants to marry me and will not take any amount of reasoning why it cannot work that way"

Six months is indeed a long time. Arjun finished his last project and went back to Chennai to take care of some family stuff and Pramod continued in the same apartment 'coz he was sure of Arjun's return. Bored without company he joined the neighborhood gym and started taking aerobics lessons. Susan had her share of rhythm troubles with step aerobics and so the instructor set up separate times for Pramod and Susan. The typical south Indian good boy he was, he could not help notice that Susan was cute. She was around his age and seemed to be very quiet for the average American. Pramod liked ogling at her but never tried to initiate any conversations until Susan stopped him after class one day and said, "Hey, I'm Susan."

"Hi...I'm Pramod Rangarajan. You can call me Pramod"

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Story...to be continued

Term 5 Done - 62.5% MBA

Yet another term whizzed past or I should rather say bull dozed past us. Contrary to popular alum gyaan term 5 was one of the most hectic terms. May be the choice of courses hurt me but almost the whole batch kept saying this. Did four courses; Marketing Execution, Marketing services, International Finance and Global Strategic management. The less said about academics the better. I would have loved to derive more out of the subjects and what the profs. wanted to convey but somehow the workload was overwhelming enough that I was either under prepared for the classes or was distracted with one thing or the other.

The resume fever really caught up this term. I have been fine tuning my resume all through the term but both my selective applications so far have been dinged (Anyhow I'm too tall to be part of a "short-list"). Did not come as a big surprise considering the spiky strong profiles that got short-listed. More international companies are coming this term and the system of not knowing the final results till February ensures that some of the best in the batch end up getting literally every international offer. I do not know of a way around the complicated issue of accommodating rolling international recruiters without affecting domestic recruiters who come only in Feb. Can't really complain 'coz almost 150 recruiters come around that period.

After exams till this friday, me and team of three others achieved a first of sorts. We won the first place in an RFP contest at IIM Ahmedabad's Confluence 2007. The team sacrificed Diwali celebrations on campus and submitted the prelims proposal 2 weeks ago and lo we entered the finals. After a full nighter on friday we flew in to Ahmedabad on Saturday morning. The IIMA campus was a no-nonsense place and the architecture reminded of my days in CEG. IIMA students were great hosts and everything was organized to perfection. The victory was really sweet and could not have come at a better time. Term 6 starts tomorrow and I'm now staring at two case submissions due by morning. God, please give me the strength to get through two more :) !

I miss you

As I trudge along and squeeze in this post in the midst of the 100000 things I'm into, I seriously miss one person. The one person who never knew how bad the world around was. The one person who did not think any one competes against anybody else. The one person who did not know what jealousy was. The one person who did not read between lines. The one person who had no ego. The one person who did not try to work through personalities and ego's. The one person to whom life was nothing more than waking up and going to sleep and being nice to everyone in between. The one person who was never bothered about the next hour, leave alone tomorrow. The one person who had friends swarming around all the time. The one person who was the darling of everybody. The one person who was happy all the time. I seriously miss you 'My innocent self'. I really do.

Tact

One conversation lead to another and finally led to a discussion about one brilliant guy. I think it is only a small token of appreciation to have a post on this amazing guy(although volumes have been written about him already)

Brief Profile (ISB folks... notice the spikes in the profile!!!)
RAJU NARAYANASWAMY IAS
First Rank in Secondary School Examination
First Rank in Higher Secondary
10th Rank in IIT Entrance Examination
First Rank in IIT B.Tech Computer Science
First Rank in IAS Entrance Examination
First Rank in IAS Training Institute

After 10 years of commendable service in IAS, he was forced to leave the profession and take up a position in UN. Later he came back to service and latest news is that late September he was shunted from Idukki after unearthing a Rs.19 crore scandal. So what exactly is happening here? A man of such unearthly intelligence does not know how to work through the system and tactfully do good? I may be passing value judgements here but is it true that with such extra-ordinary brilliance comes a certain kind of restlessness that will prevent a person from having any tact?

OpenSocial

It is a tooth and nail battle out there. A little over a week ago Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.5% stake in facebook.com, the no.1 social networking site in the world. After this news I created a facebook account, to add to my Orkut and Myspace accounts, as if the whole world wants to network with me and read my useless profile PJs. But is it really worth so much. What are these guys fighting over? Are these social networks just mines of demograhic data? Are they answers to unmet customer needs? Or are they just high potential advertisement channels?

Making this fight further interesting, Google chose halloween day to announce to the world its new social networks developer platform called OpenSocial. And not just that, Google already has signed up MySpace, LinkedIn and Friendster into this platform. And news has it that some of facebook developers have also signed up. This battle is getting interesting by the day.

As a hapless user, I just want one social networking profile, totally integrated with all my desktop software and my mobile phone. Google/Microsoft - Are you listening?