Photo crazy Section E

Yesterday and today we had the last session of our Term 1. After each session our sweet section E took photographs with the professor. For a change I have decided to be the photographer instead of being photographed.

I have uploaded some of the group pictures at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7618008@N06/523449070/

Miserable Makkadman

Makkadman, the indian version of friendly neighborhood Spiderman, has made my miserable for abot 2 hrs.

If you don't know who is makkadman - visit this site:

http://makkadman.com/

I was trying to get the help of Makkadman (our sec maneater aka monitor) to stop the spam that was going on about code of conduct. Instead of replying to the mail that was being circulated with our section, I accidentally replied to a mail that was sent to the complete batch, an Alum, GSB president and CCA head. As I have pressed the reply all, the mail seeking help from makkadman reached the inboxes of about 500 people and I realized the mistake only after the fateful mail reached my inbox. I did send a sorry mail and tried to recall the mail, the damage was done. I had received 10 phone calls and few advises about how to control damage.

Last two hours I had spent deleting all the recall success/failure messages. All my Section mates might have had lots of fun at my foolish behavior. The mail contained nothing offensive/abusive, it was more on the lighter side and I hope that it lightened the tense election atmosphere and that it has not earned me any enemies.

Two extra-ordinary professors from Wharton

One of the great advantages you would have at ISB is that you will be taught by some of the best professors in the world. In term 1 we are taught by Prof. Bruce Allen, Mark Finn, Bob Stine and Richard Waterman.

Today we are done with Business Statistics and Managerial Economics. I managed to get an autograph from Bruce Allen on the book authored by him. It's really a great experience to learn from Prof Bruce Allen. He related the subject to reality so well and he makes it so lively.

Me and few others from Sec E managed to catch up with Prof. Waterman and Prof. Bruce Allen and got couple photographs with them and here they are:


Anand, Ratnakar, Prof. Waterman, Prof. Bruce Allen, Rao Korupolu and me

Anand, Ratnakar, Prof. Waterman, Prof. Bruce Allen, Rao Korupolu and Dr. Vishwa Kirti

I managed to click another nice pic from AC4 Level 2. How is it?

Networking

One common advise that I have received from almost all my colleagues from the top B-schools is that Networking is very important and that I should network with everyone possible.

But Networking seems to have a slight negative connotation. I don't know if it is specific to culture, region or background. Generally we get to hear the "it doesn't work here" generalizations for almost anything new. But in my experience I have seen that though the differences are always there the commanilities are also there, may be hidden beneath. At the outset the differences will come out and show up but the commanilities are left to be discovered. This applies equally well to situations, locations, people and so on. Only thing that you need to consider is the packaging and the customization.

What I would like to highlight is that Networking is not about knowing people for your selfish motives. Instead it is to get connected with people and see how each of us can benefit from each other in a win-win way. Many times people ask you for a reference and you don't know enough people to really refer. You would be doing a great deal of help if you can supply leads to those who want. You can provide references without saying "don't tell them how you got this info" only if you are open, your intentions are transparent and if you are genuine.

Most of us would agree that helping others is a positive thing to do and you are reaching beyond the thinking me, mine and myself to help others. You just need to be thinking the same and you would know more and more people. If you are genuinely interested in helping people, just do that in a conscious way and that could lead to the development of a good network.

I have been using Linkedin and I did a search of all those from ISB and then sent out about 300 invites. About 50 have already accepted my invitation. It's useful to be in touh with others who have attended the same school and who knows when can you be of help to others and when you would be needing their help.

Today we had a meeting with Prof. Ramchandran as a part of the official mentoring program and it went off well. There were 10 of us and we spent about an hour discussing what all happened till now. It was a simple interaction session. These kind of initiatives defnitely bridge the gap between the Shool administration and students.

Finally we have got our Statistics midterm results and I did well. Now I am confident about the Term 1 final exams. Lots of other things are happening including the elections for GSB placom, SLC, OIC and so on. I think it's time to get back to studies.

Rock E, Rock EEE

That's our section slogan and it seems to be working. From what I hear. all the otehr sections are envying us now. All the dunking sessions have seem lot of aatendance and ethusiasm. There were atleast 30 from the section for each dunkind and all the Birthday Boys and Girls really seemed to have enjoyed that.

This Friday we had a blood donation camp and section E's contribution has been the maximum. There was a flood of mails praising each other and at one point I started feeling that it is reachig slight overdose but then as long as it is praise no one is complaining.

We had our first monthly Birthday Party and I would like to specially mention SP who was the key organizer. These kind of things normally don't appeal to me but offlate I have realized the importance of having fun but unfortunately I am not good at setting up these things. Now I really appreciate the enthusiasm and ability of these people who are truly into making things fun and enjoyable.

One of the key points that were revealed in the 360 degree feedback is about my task oriented behavior. I always believed that I am very friendly with people and get along with others pretty quickly and easily. The feedback clearly bought out that I netwrok very wel and maintain personal relationships very well but when it comes to professional relationships I focus mostly on the task. After reading the feedback I could see exactly the same thing happening. When I meet someone I try to see the good things in the person and try to learn new things from that person. Learning need not be about business, skills etc but mostly my interests are about culture, values, religon, customs, beliefs and so on. But when it comes to any project or work I start evaluating people and often I feel they are not meeting the mark and this leads to certain amount of criticality in me and I can't appreciate them at that point.

This is one aspect of my behavior that I am trying to work on. I really cannot see what is the right behavior, but I surely know that there are certain things that I need to change. I need to find a mentor to help me on this. May be I should write to RV or DI or RJ about this. I will do it today.

I want to end this post on a positive note and here is the Sec E's birthday cake for the month of May for you. Have a bite:

Secret of success, as discovered by Dr. Kirti

Friday afternoon is a very difficult time. You have choose between watching a movie, doing some study, taking a nap, writing or reading the weekend spam, and so on. While everyone is busy trying to do one of them and trying hard to avoid the guilt of not doing others, a mail comes from Dr. Kirti with the subject line - Secret of success_direct transmission. All the recipients open the mail to and the below mail:

Hi all,

I have discovered a new method of study which seems to work very well. It is known as direct transmission. See the attached pictures for clarification.

I am sure we will agree (actually am 99.7 %) confident.

Regards,
Dr. Vishwa Kirti Sharma




Courtesy: Dr. Vishwa Kirti Sharma

Short weeks and long weekends

When one of the Alum mentioned that we will look forward for the week rather than the weekend, most of us didn't believe that. But now after 5 weeks we will swear by it. In Term1 we have classes only from Monday to Thursday and we have no classes on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Initially I planned to do lots of things during the weekends but now after 5 weeks I think I have to change my plan totally. Most of the time on weekends we spend in completing the assignments and during the week we spend time to catch up with whatever was covered on that day.

It's not that it is very difficult but you cannot take your eyes off even for a second. The elections for GSB president happened today and I voted for the guy who I felt had some proactive ideas. I think he is gonna win, but I don't have any idea what he is going to really achieve.

Out senior students study club has definitely benefited me, thanks to all the other memebers. We are going to continue with the effort in future too. Though we have an official study group, it is sometimes important that you have others who go at your pace and understand your troubles. Empathy is the key word.

Something interesting happened yesterday. During the day it was very hot and after the classes we all moved to our SV's and suddenly at around 9 PM it started raining heavily and the weather suddenly changed. At around midnight despite the rough rain and the wind a bunch of people came out from the comfort of their quads and studios and moved in a resolving way to SV1. They reached E5 and pushed the bell. Few seconds later the Birthday boy came out and was literally shocked to see the resolved group. The group took him from there to the pool where there were another 20 odd waiting to dunk him. It was Puneet Sakhuja's Birthday and it was time for dunking. Sec E did it again, the enthu and energy were tested but the section withstood the test. Anant Jhawar who scored the highest in the class got dunked and so were many others including me for different reasons. Then we came out, sang the Birthday song and then smeared the cake all over the face of Puneet. While returning back we were discussing the market for a cake with green papaya extract for purposes like this. It would not only serve the purpose but would also have an additional utility of acting as an exfoliant.

This is the last free weekend in Term 1 and next week we would be ferociously reading all the books, notes and whatever else we have and getting ready for the Term 1 final exams. This week is going to be further demanding as we need to catch up with everything that happened till now and whatever would be covered next week. At this stage I can say that I have become much better in statistics and economics. Marketing is untested but I am confident of ding well, financial accounting is the only subject that I need to prepare well.

I have decided to go take some time out for myself and go for a swim. Let me not further prolong this post. Happy weekend to you all and best of luck for all those preparing for GMAT and those who are taking their GMAT this week.

Foundations for future

There has been a strong rebounce from different quarters despite the intense pressure of Term exams looming over. Our section, Section E, has just won the volleyball competition that was squeezed into two days after the midterm. This week we have the GSB election buzz with manifestos and soap box speeches. We will be getting to see our MGEC midterm papers by afternoon and everyone is tensed inside except the two toppers who already got an indication from unofficial sources. In the midst of this CAS has organized the photoshoot for the profil book. The foundations for the placement week are being laid right from now.

Another interesting thing is that many of my vague complex thoughts are getting cleared from different dimensions. Mark Finn, Richard Waterman, Piyush Kumar and Bruce Allen continue their efforts to take us forward in our course. But it is the quizzes and the assignments that actually drive us every weekend, the classes are infact a respite from the weekends.

We continued with our last time Marketing assignment completion Marathon this time too but managed to reduce the length from 13 hrs to something like 10hrs and I think we did better than last time.

As we go through these ups and downs on a daily basis, there are a set of people who see all this amusingly and pass it of as the most common thing. Every year they get see similar things going on in cycles.

While writing this post two major thigs are completed. I have finished my photoshoot and I got my MGEC midterm scores and yuppy! I did well.

A sneak preview into what you would get to see during the placement season is below:

Intentions, perceptions and reactions

Almost everyone has a good intention when they start something. From what I have seen and heard, I think I can safely assume that each of us want to lead a happy and successful life. We try to do whatever is possible to achieve that. While we attempt to do whatever we feel is necessary, we plan things and set goals based on our capbility. Now the capability thing tends to become very subjective as it is quite difficult to measure and quantiy and therefore it depends greatly on self-perception and self-image. Some of us have great capability but we believe otherwise keeping in mind all the failures. Some us are capable but we perceive much more than what we have considering all the successes that we had till now.

I can safely conclude that at the basic level each one of us is focused on self. How can I do such a big assumption. Wait, I have an argument here.

If someone says, he is not self focused but wants to help others and is selfless, my question, where is this goal coming from. The goal is coming from the person himself, based on his thought that helping others will make them happy and improve things around and if things are better around he will be happy. See it again cam back to the person wanting to be happy. Only difference is that he derives his hapiness out of others happiness.

There are other people who have goals that are realted to them, their family etc. It is straight forward here and we can see directly that these people are sef-focused.

So whatever your goal in life is, you are self-focused as the goal itself is coming from within and it is yours. Even when someone is obeying orders given by someone he is obeying them beacuse he either fears a danger and wants to avoid it or he sees some reward (material or spiritual) which he believes will make him happy.

By accepting that all of us are focused on self we can deduce that our intentions always have something good for us. The problem comes only when our intentions clash with those of others. THough no one starts with an intention to hurt others, because of clash of interests goals of one person come in the way of others. Why do come in the way of others, because there are many things in nature and earth that are limited. Not only Earth and Nature but also other things like Time are scarce. That brings us to the theory of economics which says that we have all this trade, restrictions, taxes, competition, markets etc (picked randomly, no order). Another research says that human race survived and succeeded because there is trade, which means that scarcity is good. Otherwise we will never be able become better than what we are today.

While scarcity is good as it leads to competition and makes everyone involved stretch more than what they usually do, therby increasing the overall contribution - Total ontribution in a competitive scenario is much more than the sum of individual contributions in a non-competitive scenario, it also has flip side. After a certain point each party involved exhausts their positive ideas and that's when the negative starts luring us. Remember the basic intention is still the same - lead a happy and successful life. Despite reaching the maximum limit is someone wants increase his pie, only thing that he can do is grab the pie of another one and that's when the basic intentions start clashing and perceptions start playing in the minds.

Perceptions are not real. They are just impressions that each of us fomr in our mind based on our side of experiences. They can sometimes be totally missing the reality, sometimes get tuck in time (don't change with changing scenario), and even potentially harmful to others (extrapolating beyond the observed range - generalisation. Reactions are even dangerous. They are based on our perceptions about perceptions of others. Here we are fighting in air where our feet are not on the ground of reality. It reminds me of the Crouching Tiger and the Hidden Dragon. While it is possible in a movie to fight continuously in air in reality it is not the case. We can fight in air for a very minute period but immediately after that we hit ground reaity. If you fly too high reacting you may fall heavily and get hurt badly.

You can fly to certain extent without fogetting the reality and possibly you can be safe. But when you have the reality in mind it is better to allow the other party to fly high, aloow them to attack but just move away just in time. You have saved your effort and energy and may be you can help the other party to recover and thereby leading to a possible collaboration. I think it is time for me to stop and get back to my reading.

What's going wrong?

Yesterday there was a bomb blast at Mecca Masjid, old city, Hyderabad. After the blast agitators attacked police and police use their latis, water, plastic bullets and then real bullets. Some people died because of the balst and some as a result of the firing.

While watching the news, one thought stuck me. Why did the firing happen and how the terrorists achieved their objective of inflaming communal fire so easily.

Some points that came to me:

1. Most of the irrational and mob behavior is due to lack of education
2. Human race had been using the unique endowment of reason very well by learning, storing and passing knowledge and finally setting up institutions to pass on the wisdon to future generations.

Some of the channels for passing on knowledge and wisdom that I could list out are:
1. Formal Education system
2. Religious teachings
3. Political system
4. Public Administration
5. Family and peers as a channel
6. Economics and trade as a rationalizing agent

Apart from these we have so many open channels through which a person can aquire lot of knowledge and wisdom, such as, books, internet, movies and media.

But from what we has been yesterday, we have to question the effectiveness of these channels.

First , access to formal education is becoming restricted due to costs attached and certain part of the society is unable to access them easily. The economics part of the education is placing constraints on this channel

Second, religious channels are slowly loosing their basic principles and are becoming and more and more power centres rather than hep human race to live peacefully. All the religions agree on the basic principles of life and there is no conflict. But when it comes to the modalities there are lot of differences and peopl seem to be stuk to the modalities rather than focus on the principles. At the end of the day we are all living beings and we would like to live. When it comes to life and death there is no religion. Any religion that asks you to give life or take life is not a religion. As a living being the first goal should be to live. Second goal should be to let others live and third goal could be to defend yourself when your life is in danger, which again emanates from the first goal. Most of the religious institutions are in the mode of building their base rather than actually helping people to live and let live. Members from every other cult/sect or whatever division they have claim that they have best way to reach god and therefore they are superior than others. If you are uperior you don't need to proclaim, others will realize it soon and follow you automatically. If you have to tell people and use force to make them agree where is your greatness.

The political system that has been created by the society to support the society has forgotten the reason for its existence. It has become a self-serving system. A leader does something considering only whether people will vote him or not. If they have elected you once they believed in you once, do whatever you believe is correct for sometime, if you are going wrong, you will be told not just in one way. We hav media, we have courts, we have internet and blogs too. Politicians have stopped inspiring and leading people long long ago. Instead they are being led by their selfish motives.

Public administration that was supposed to inject intellectuality and rationality into the society stopped having any life and has become a mere machine. A rubber stamp in the hands of political system that will only create the necessary impression based on how forcefully you hit and where you hit it. A clear example has been the land grabbing for poor movement started by CPM in Andhra Pradesh. All the administrators had to say was that the government was thinking and they are waiting for them to come out with a decision. Isn't it your responsibility to push the government for a decision when you feel it is important. Can you just say that I gave my advise but I am not responsible for waht evetually happens? Administration has become a mechanism and nothing else.

Family and peers are becoming counter-productive these days. Parents are encouraging children to win at whatever cost. Every other person is born great and has to prove his/her supremacy in whatever forum possible. Peers add to that pressure. Slowly the family and peers are also giving away to societal pressures and are beoming less and less influential in driving the right kind of behavior.

Finally we come to economy. It has been claimed that the success of human race over other species can be owed to the trade and specialisation. I personally believe that economics is the only force that can bring in rationalization to human behavior and show them where they stand. But the issue with economics as a process is that it is very slow to bring in any change and a lot more time to reach equilibrium. It took almost 200-300 years for India to reach a reasonable state of equilibrium in terms of financial opportunities.

But it is going to take a lot more time to reach equilibrium in the knowledge part of the wealth accumulated by humans. I think we all can make it happen fast and I urge you to think in that direction.

Facing the first hurdle - Best of Luck to everyone around

It has been almost 7 years I will be taking couple of tests today. The atmosphere here at ISB is war-like. Everyone is wishing each other good luck and all the spouses are praying to god and are ready to smear the Veera Tilakamu.

There is complete silence in the campus and I can see the student in everyone coming out completely for the first time. All the diversity is gone now and everyone is in the same mode.

From s learning perspective I find the exam concept very interesting and useful as long as the student is mature and balanced. It raises the stress levels and if you are able to control it from crossing the limits, the stress will make you put up extraordinary effort to fare well in the exam. Precisely that's what happened to a bunch of us. Because of the increased stress we have decided to get together and though there was no additional incentive, we shared what we know to each other and learned from each other. At the end we have much more clarity about the concepts. What happens in the exam is a different thing but this process has definitely increased the bonding between us.

One thing definitely separates a great place from a good place - The focus and committment of everyone to achieve the best in every circumstance and I can see that here in each student at ISB. It's like each one of us is on a mission and we are ready to support each other and I am confident to see great things happening at ISB once again.

I have volunteered to be a part of the Admissions Task Force and I am looking forward to that part of experience too.

Weather in Hyderabad is getting more and more hotter but this year I have already spent more than 3/4th of the summer without even realizing how hot it is. To be honest I am totally disconnected with the actual Hyderabad from last one month. The usual problems like water scarcity, traffic, power cuts are almost nonexistent. Thanks to ISB for building such a wonderful campus with excellent infrastructure.

Finally I urge you all the readers to Wish me and all my batchmates - Best of Luck for the exam

It's a cycle and it starts again

Last year around the same time, I started writing queries to the isb-pgp yahoo group to understand how am I places to get admission into ISB. As you all know it's that time of the year when people start getting geared up for their GMAT and then to the applications. Behind each aspirant you would find ambition, dreams, calculations and even frustrations before they decide to go to a B-school while having a successful career.

Life is all about learning, learning what has already been learnt by the human race, at temptingto use that learning to handle present situation and trying to see what is going to come and trying to see if we can add something to the comon body of knowledge.

The message from Prof. Stine reminded me again that the human race has been successful because it has been able to form societies and successfuly support the common objectives. It is important to keep in mind that whenever you succeed in soething, sharing the success and rewards with everyone is what keeps this human society going. It is important that we expand our circle from - me, my family, my extended family, my friends, my caste, my religion, my village, my town, my type to my society and then my co-inhabitants, my ecology ad then to my earth. As of now I can't think beyond my earth, though, may be there is something even beyond.

Another thing I was mulling over was, what's the difference between learning from an expert and an ordinary prof. At ISB we have the the profs who are experts in their field and this question came back to me. From what I have seen, it's the macro perspective that they can give, the clarity that they provide, the wide exposure they have and also the fact that they gave so much for the subject instead of just trying to earn a livelihood, matters a lot. I fell this is what is you miss in the corporate world. There are only very few who give their everything for the cause. May be the corporate cause is not that appealing or may be it is not clear to all those involved.

It is important for all of us to realize that we are living a life and that itself is something great and that whatever we do is not done in vaccuum and therefore affects everything as a whole.

At ISB, we have finished the first half of the first term. We are more or less in an isolation from Hyderabad and we are on a mission. Things are moving pretty fast and in the right direction too. I am getting a feeling that I'm getting into the groove and slowly started enjoying whatever is happening.

First monthly anniversary

We have been at ISB for exactly a month and most of us are already feeling that it has been much longer than a month, may be even a year. There has been a lot of reading that happened this weekend due to the upcoming midterm. Despite that some souls have found time to party, even we did but that was on Thursday, a weekday. All those who I know were absolutely busy reading all about regression, confidence intervals, control limits and so on.

Most of us would complain that we have very less time to do the reading, I would be one of them. But on a hindsight I would agree with the argument that whether you have one day or one week or one month, the average amount of work that each person would put in would be more or less same as the average of the batch, with 95% confidence. Now don't blame me, that's the effect of Bob. After listening to Bob for five sessions you would start thinking about everything in control limits, confidence intervals and p-values. He is a phenomenal prof that we have got.

But it is nice that we have got some fantastic professors in the Term 1 and the same prof was teaching all the six sections shows that ISB cares a lot and the professors are highly interested in teaching the complete class. I'm not sure about other sections, but our section definitely made the most out of the classes. There were some outliers, though.

To sum it up, last three days have been hectic but definitely worthwhile. I am able to overcome my fear about stats and developed a reasonable level of confidence.

Let me share some nice pics from the Thursday Party:

Distribution Strategy

Dance Partners

Beedi Jalayile


Jaane Kya hoga Ramaa Re


Working Hard on the assignment

Learning a skill

Last four years I had been working in the Learning and Development area and had been discussing about the cycle of learning a new skill. After a long I have started learning a physical skill - swimming. The first thing I have learnt is about the importance of a coach, the right kind of coach. Second the importance of feedback, unless someone tells you what you are doing wrong, you would never know about that. Third is conscious practice, you seem to get the knack almost immediately, but to be able to do that is not easy, you end up doing the same mistake till you consciously start observing what you are doing. Even then at times when you become weak you resort to your natural ways. It's a great learning, particularly because I have decided to work upon one of weaknesses. I always knew that it is a weakness but I have never admitted it consciously to myself and therefore never really worked upon it. But based on the 360 degree feedback I have received I felt it is time for me take it up head on.

I want to use the insight that I have gained while learning swimming to this goal too and I'm sure it would shorten the cycle.

Yesterday we had a great party - we had biryani, music, dance and booze for those who drink. We had invited our Faculty and they did turn up. They were very sportive and had no reservations to shake a leg with us. It was really nice. I shall post some pics a little later, right now I have to catch up with my MGEC assignments.

Dr. Dunked

Fun continues at ISB and this time its my studygroup mate Dr. Viswa's Birthday. Dr. was a willing victim. We led a procession from SV1 to the rec centre. There was a proposal to dunk the mascot, monitor aka maneater, and me (highest CP in marketing. I tried to divert the focus onto others. When we reached the pool excitement was so high that people forgot the birthday boy and went after the monitor and the mascot.

Later they turned to the doctor and he got dunked gracefully. After that they indeed turned to the studygroup mates and me and the other two got dunked and what followed after that sheer madness and by the time the madness ended everyone except the one lady who scared of water got dunked. Then we did a rang-de-basanti type trust dunking. The cake was rightfully used to smear Dr's face completely and in the midst of this some people discovered another secmate is the twin brother of Dr who got separated at birth and did the cake smearing to him too. He must be wondering why that special treatment was given to him. As someone said brothers need not be born under the same roof, after all.

Some pics for you to share the fun:

Sleeping in the class

After the three hectic days that were spent in attempting the assignments I was really tired on Monday. And as the Statistics class was going I was slipping into a state of sleep despite all my attempts to be awake. While all this is happening our official photographer Mr. A managed to get couple of snaps and followed it up with couple of more snaps of mine speaking to the prof and he also gave them some funny names. Have a laugh at my cost :)


Caption: Sleep_Best


Caption: You had doubts after all that

Let me know if you have any other comments.

Credit for the nice pics goes to Ashish Naredi.

An inspiring day

A Philippines corporation has suddenly become more popular than HLL and its CEO is the new visionary for all of us. In one day we have learnt a great deal about this company.

It was inspiring thing to see five people sitting in one room with full commitment and continuously work more than 12 hrs in a focused way despite having so many differences and arguments. Somehow I never saw such a committed effort in all the five organizations that I have worked. I always tried to remain committed and focused but got distracted by inability of people in agreeing to disagree and focusing on the objective. I think the key difference is the incentive and the stakes involved. Here everyone has a very high stake and we were all tied together.

This is a great example and I am sure I can find use of this experience in the corporate world to improve performance of individuals working in teams.

Some interesting words that I uttered due to excessive exhaustion - cossing the toin (supposed to be tossing the coin), and that coimbatore is 16 km from Hyderabad (I meant hrs but km is what I uttered. Nevertheless this is nothing new and I had this knack proving myself as a complete fool in the midst of serious happenings and that appears to be my contribution to the general humor

Some random thoghts

Each of us have some common/uncommon thing that we tend to to do whenever you find having lot of time but nothing to do. I too keep doing a slightly uncommon thing. Like a painter who keeps doing some sketching, I too do thought sketching. By thought sketching I am referring to verbalizing what you think others are thinking by reading from the non-verbal cues. At ISB it's very difficult to have that vaccuum, but I found sometime during today's session and did some interesting mind sketching. I am reproducing whatever I have written down, it may sound foolish even to me now, but I still want to just share my instinctive mind sketches. Here we go:

Let me take a backseat, I really don't care what is happening around, let me listen to others, why the obvious questions are repeated again and again, I know everything, what everyone else is saying I know that already, I am better than everybody, I am different, How good is the speaker, let me validate what I already know, I won't talk but I want to be a part of the discussion, can I, I'm better off without an MBA, but I'm here just to prove to others that I too can do something, I slogged hard, I'm start, I have certain desires, hope they get fulfilled without much effort, I hope I can utilise my seating advantage well, Why the hell I'm sitting here, do I know why I'm here, am I wise enough, looks like something important, let me take notes, they are talking non-sense let me take vengeance, let them know that I know, when would this end, how should spend my time this evening, I have been doing certain things and they are working great for me, I'm unique, all the others are very boring, why did ISB make this a graded course, do I need this, what would be served for lunch, do I have a 5 rupee coin for the coffee machine

I also managed to go aroung my SV and take few pics. I could locate a beautiful hibiscus, red chameleon and a peacefuly coexisting rock and tree, take a look at the pics:

First week passes

The first week classes of Term-1 is over, but wait the work and reading are not yet over. There are two assignments and one quiz pending apart from the huge list of pre-reading work.

A sudden change of habits has definitely imbalanced by me. In the second class of Managerial Economics, the prof was doing some calculation and suddenly I opened my mouth and uttered six, don't ask me why I said that and where did that number came from, and the prof went silent for about 10 sec and said "Dude". It was a shocker for me and I couldn't quite understand why I uttered that word. I might have definitely appeared to be the biggest fool for him. Fortunately there is no CP for this course.

Despite being a voracious reader all the time, the amount of reading that I attempted would be almost equal to almost a year's quota. Normally I would borrow or buy and then for about a month or two would eat and sleep with it. But now, I don;t have that luxury anymore.

Lots of crazy things are happening in one of the courses. All those who made it to ISB are highly smart and also very competitive ad this makes CP a very big challenge. Some one raises his hand and prof says that he would only give him a chance if it is a question and the guy starts with, "I think." I never quite understood how can a question start with I think. Another guy starts doing all the math that he learnt with the prof and the prof unsuspectingly falls into his trap and the whole class misses about 5 min of valuable time. Finally all sorts of things are happening in this class. Only good thing is that we are all doing our reading and discussions and the prof is able to reasonably complete the part before the 2 hrs end.

And finally the rain god also seems to have understood that it's time to chill everyone and sent a downpour onto ISB. I wouldn't be surprised of it rained only at ISB as the heat last week, both the sun and the studies, went into it's all time peak for this year; it's quite common in Hyderabad to rain at place and be totally dry at another place that is about 5 km away.

It's time for me to chill and enjoy the long weekend. Will be back with some nice pics.

Of spam and spam filters

Sorry for spamming, that's how most of the mails in my ISB mailbox start with. On the other hand we were trying to decide whether to accept a spam filter based on one test in the stats class. With so many formulae around the difficulty seems to be in picking the right one.

As people are becoming more and more acquainted the sorries are coming down and demands for action are going up. People seem to be finding solace in airing their views directly on mail addressed to everyone in the world and expecting that the concerned party takes a note of popular demand and take some action. But the action is to be taken by a Business Manager not by a club presidentship aspirant.

That brings me to another point, consider the amount of money spent by politicians during elections. Wouldn't it be a good idea to auction the political representation by the amount of money one can donate to a certain fund and then allow the top three bidders to share power for a certain period. That way the money will find a better use.

Also wouldn't it be a good idea to have a rating system for all political parties based on what they do on a daily basis. That way the political leaders can find some useful ways to score points for their party and not hang around the party chief's house. If the human resources engaged in the political arena are utilized for some positive purpose I'm sure we would be doing very well as a country. May be involve them in cost benefit analysis of a regulation supported by economists and that way we can expect them to be sensible and contribute to the regulatory process in a positive way.

Hope Chandrababu Naidu's, and S.M. Krishna's are reading this.