Chicago the Movie:
Watched Chicago the movie yesterday, have been trying to see it for 2-3 yrs now but never got past the first fifteen minutes. Yday though I sat through the whole movie. Very well made I must say and great acting by Rene. But the movie is a peep into the dark side of humanity and the ill effects of Jazz and Drinks.
After I finished watching the movie I wrote this poem, I guess a side effect of the fights I saw in the movie.
The Row :
Will it ease your pain if I show
How much I am hurt because of this row
My fast heart beats and my numb legs
Can stand testimony along with my mind which for peace begs
But what good is it to know that we are both hurt
What do we achieve by finding who to whom was curt
Alas it wasnt meant to be and this is how it ends
May be the roads of life are meant to educate us with these bends
If we manage to maneuver out of this
Perhaps then again we can search for bliss
Now that we know our roads are headed different directions
It is time I guess to do the course corrections
Its easier for me to be the bad one and to take all the blame
Especially if it saves you some of the shame
I am a poet and a poet needs his pain
So I guess from all this fight the pain is my gain
Only because our destinations were different
At this crossing we had to become indifferent
That doesn't mean I cant wish you only the best
For the rest of your journey and all your quest.
Cheers,
--Badri--
While there are several theories such as Aura, Creative Visualization, Butterfly effect , Power of the mind that directly or indirectly state that the state of mind of a person can affect that of others around him.
Even if one doesn't believe in those theories and completely disregards the very ability of a mind to affect another, Its hard to reject real life scenarios where one sees for oneself that the state of others can affect him/her.
I have been noticing for a while now that when people shout near/around me, when they are angry and heated and yell for a while I start feeling weak, even shiver at times(even if the shouting doesn't involve me), I shout to hide my weakness or because I don't know how to respond.
Similarly, when people are very calm around me and sulking, I feel lazy , sleepy. When they are describing some problems with feelings, singing with great joy, reading verses of thiruvasagam often I feel like crying or tears trickle down my eyes, etc.
A more interesting observation is that as I grow older my threshold for shouting, loud noises is rapidly decreasing and I am starting to avoid huge functions, places with lot of crowd, loud pubs and starting to like more casual intellectual discussions(In school and college I preferred heated debates), mild music, silent places, parks etc . Is this because of thermodynamics ? Is this because of just the way we think/feel about these emotions? Or Have I become too soft a person suddenly.
--Badri--
This post is a continuation of my attempt to write a short story in 4 parts, the first part can be found here, if you read the first part and were waiting for the second part, sorry for the delay, between work pressure and football matches, couldn't find much time for Her ;-)
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The meeting on the bus was nothing close to what I planned. In my mind I walked into the bus, our eyes met, she got struck by my charm(I said in my mind) somehow I managed to strike up a conversation and I managed to invite her for a coffee.
What really happened is this, I boarded the bus, the over friendly driver insisted I was in the wrong bus and the bus route dint go anywhere close to where I stayed(The perils of being known), everyone in the bus was staring at me, I managed to silence the driver with some hushed words and took the only seat I got which was some 5 rows behind her.
I had to resort to plan B, it was risky because I hadnt planned it completely yet but I wanted to talk to her today. I got down at her bus stop, she noticed me and smiled, "so what brings you here, the driver was saying this is not where you stay" she said, perhaps she had guessed my intentions, after all I spent the last one hour in the bus watching her.
"Well I had to meet a friend, she lives around here" I used the cheap trick, you are at some place at 10pm to meet a "she" friend and you hope someone whom you have barely met is intrigued by it. She wasn't intrigued, if she was she hid it well with her "Oh ok".
"Btw Ruchira , about the project, I read the details, its very interesting, when do you want to discuss it, any time is fine with me, I even work weekends" I rushed through my long sentence, it was important that I let her know I was working the weekend and it was important I liked her project and yes it was important that I said her name.
"Oh but I am going out with my friends this weekend, we were planning to go the select city walk mall. Can we discuss the project on monday if you dont mind", she said with all sincerity and professionalism. Damn you gal cant you sense my emotions.
I took a deep breath , one last attempt , God pls pls pls "Oh ok I generally work weekends from the coffee place at Select city walk, If you are around and free , we can catch up there for a bit and get started on the project, can I have your number please, will call you if I am there".
By now I had already walked some 40 steps with her, perhaps she felt connected , she gave me her number and told me that it would be ok to catch up while she was waiting for her friends. I wished her good night, she wished me a pleasant evening with my friend and I watched her leave, it was painful, sad songs were playing in my mind and then suddenly Lionel Ritchie came to the rescue and sang Hello.
I picked up the phone and called her, A beautiful english song which I had heard before but couldnt recollect from where, was her caller tune, "Helloh...." she greeted and I forgot all that I was going to say, "hellllloh "she said again , stressing now on the l, I recovered, "hi this is badri just checking you number, sorry if I bothered, good night" . "Thats okkk Baddriii, is this your number" Thank you god, thank you she said my name in such sweet fashion and for the first time I liked my name, I did have a cool name. "oh ya it is, please feel free to reach me on this whenever u want to", "sure", "good night", "gooood nigggghhtttt" I dont know why her english words had more alphabets than mine but I liked it that way.
The next day morning was busy I had to assign work to my team in the morning staus updates, "So Navin what are you busy with" I asked still lost in thoughts of Ruchira but wanting to chug along at work, "Nothing much just the new project proposal, anything important I must look at". Nothing much, just the new project proposal, this guy was going to be the reason why I was going to get fired, the new project proposal was the only important thing my team was working on, "Hmm,,, I was wondering if you could help me with something, its for a competition, the lines go something like this "....." I need to get some details about the song, like OST where it appeared, the lyrics etc, you get the point" I asked in a bossy but help seeking way. "Who is the gal dude" he smirked , Now he gets smart, when I ask him about the proposal he is dumb god save my team, "no one important man just a friend" I said with a serious face trying to make him think it was really no one important. "Sure will bounce you the details ASAP" he said while leaving the room, he came back for a bit, smiled and said "All the best boss", I suddenly liked him now, I smiled, I had to remember to give him good ratings in the next appraisal what a nice kid.
I called the concierge kid, he was famous for being the babe magnet at work, "Shashank, can you please come to my cube for a sec , need some help". I asked him about select city walk, places of interest there, gifts to take for a gal whom you are meeting "casually for the first time", he was very helpful.
Navin replied with the data he had gathered about the song, It gave me a few ideas for a conversation. I called and made reservation at one of the best hotels in the mall. I ordered a bouquet of 3 red roses and a few roses of other colors, I was all set.Tomorrow was going to be a wonderful day...
Disclaimer : I call them Write-Ups, you can choose to call them Short stories if you want. But anyways the point is its been a long while since I wrote one that sounded ok and that was way back in 2005. The last one I wrote was incomplete and largely garbled but even that was 6 months ago. So I figured it was time to get over the writers block , so here is my "attempt" at another write-up. I plan to write this in four parts(Please bear with me :-)) and this is the first of those four parts
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Her - Part 1:
"No it will never work" that was the first thought that crossed my mind when I decided to approach her. She had just entered my office floor and was talking to some of my colleagues. I had never met her before. But something in me told me I had to go talk to her. But something else said "Look at her and look at you, she is so pretty , so good looking , forget it she is way above your league". But luck had different plans for us. She walked up to me and said "xxxxxxxxxxx". Well I couldnt hear what she was telling me, I was so overwhelmed by the fact that she approached me when I was planning to approach her that my mind went blank, well almost.
Her eyes dark and deep, her skin unblemished and pink and her glowing lips moving up and down to reveal her beautifully lined up white sparkling teeth flooded my mind with images of her. It was like my mind was a high speed camera taking tens of thousands of photographs. My eyes were so overworked that my other senses had to momentarily shutdown.
"Excuse me, are you Badri?" she interupted my photography session with by increasing her voice and by change of expression that made her eyes looks bigger. "Cute" I blurted out what my mind was thinking. "Whattt..." she reacted with a lot of emphasis on the t.
"I said true, ,meaning true I am Badri" I said trying to manage the situation. "Well I am Ruchira from the RND department and I was told you can help with a project I am working on, could you please let me know of a good time that we can meet up, I have a lot of questions to ask" she said adjusting a thin strand of hair which I thought was deliberately left in front of her ear so that she can push it back while talking to guys like me and make us notice her model like profile, anyways I wasnt complaining.
"Well, err... Hi Ruchira nice to meet you" I said extending my arm for a handshake. She extended a folded palm and shook hands like a Pomeranian dog would. Hah the soft palm, the smooth skin - My mind went into another blank. I shook her hand for what looked like 20 seconds when she pulled back her hand and said "Same here so when can we meet".
This was my chance, I had to say the right words and something good could happen, think Badri think ..... "Can you please give me your number I will call you back when I am free, I am kinda busy right now" I said quickly pressing windows key + D on my laptop to hide the freecell window. "Oh ok, my number is on the LDAP do give me a call when you are free, thanks" she said and smiled. I nodded, she thanked me again and left.
God bless the RND guys I said in a hushed tone and opened up the employee directory to search for her. Ruchira Sharma , born 21st Feb 1989, Marital status Single, Address : XXXXX , Ph. NO xxxxx. There were advantages of having admin access to some portals. You just could see more information than others could.
I saw that she took the office bus route 31 to go home. Of course I stayed 30kms in the other direction from her place but like so many other times before when I had met good looking gals, this time too my mind was telling me that she was the one and this was my chance. So I called the transport team and booked a seat on route 31 , her destination was today mine.
To be continued.....
--Badri--
Disclaimer: I have not used this service nor am I sure about how it works. Also I do not work for them(make money from them) directly or indirectly.
An year a close friend of mine from ISB started this venture to help ISB aspirants with their application to the school. From my conversations with him and from my conversations with a few candidates who used the service I understand that the venture is pretty good and has helped a few candidates successfully get ISB admits. So if you are an ISB aspirant and are looking for some guidance you might want to checkout
www.thinkisb.com
Cheers,
--Badri--
One of the best things that Google does when there is a GMail service outage is that it gives users detailed technical info about what is causing the problem. 
cheers,
--Badri--
Wanted to commemorate the first anniversary of my passing out of ISB with a blog post titled "The true worth of an ISB MBA one year into the market" but my first principle of blogging (Do not blog unless you have something interesting to blog about) that I seldom adhere to kicked in and I missed the anniversary date of Apr 5th 2010. But now that the force of the principle has worn off and I am really sleepy I think I can drop my guards and start my ramblings so here we go ......
I have always thought that school is where you learn to assimilate a lot of data about various domains. Its just a test of you retention skills and of course your ability to reproduce what you learnt. But as you go higher somewhere around high school we start learning a little bit about applying what we learnt. In an undergraduate unfortunately at least where I went too you assimilate more data about another domain which you were previously unaware of, you can think of this as specializing too a little bit of applying what you learnt in school but with more focus on a particular domain. Yes there are practicals that test your application skills in UG but then they are more a test of pleasing the prof and reproducing what was taught by the prof who himself/herself knew very little about the subject, as it was taught to you.
Masters again is specialization , learn more about one domain and retain as much as possible , you also get to apply a bit from all that you have learnt before and a bit from what you are learning now but then no great shakes. Was ISB any different , I dont think so.
I dont blame the school for my being clueless, But the moment you figure out its only a test of retention and presenting whats retained in exams the brain just refuses to work harder than its required to (at least mine does) and you go through the curriculum taking the shortcuts without learning a thing. I experimented with the subjects I liked a lot and scored B grades in them. Soon I learnt that retain, render and appease prof in class to score A was the way to go, and it was easier and more rewarding(grade wise) to do than to try to apply what you are learning and score B. Its a one year course and irrespective of what they day grades do matter so to finish with the 3.5 on 4 that I did I had no choice but to sacrifice learning and resort to retaining.
But as soon I entered the job market I found my worst nightmares come true. Senior managers like one quality and just one quality more than all others in their subordinates - The ability to think of a good experiment to conduct, define the approach, conduct the experiment, analyze the results and make a pertinent conclusion. Why was that a nightmare two reasons i) It dint require me to be a MBA I could have that even when I was in UG ii) It was analysis and application and my 12+4+1 years of education laid more stress on retention.
I was going to write off my ISB as a sunk cost while all the case studies I did kicked in and started helping me. Even though the Class Participation, Study group and the short duration had taken their toll on my learning from the case studies, the case studies had taught me an important thing - how to analyze a problem in a structured way , how to look at a problem from different angles and how to test your conclusions. The time I spent with a study group consisting of people from different skill sets helped too, it taught me how to present my ideas in such a way that people would buy it. And finally being a graduate from the 12th best B-School in the World made me more confident about myself.
So am I saying ISB was totally worth it. Not really , if you can solve 100s of case studies by yourself, read a few management books or science books and learn how to analyze problems, find a group of friends to exchange and test your ideas with and find confidence within yourself I dont see why ISB is necessary.
Of course there is the case that you are being part of an institution that selects only an 'elite' few, the fact that you had good experience, acads and GMAT score to get an admit there and the fact that you worked you as$ off to succeed there, could send really good signals to an employer who might be considering hire you. But thats the bane of the market today, employers select for the fancy degree and not the underlying qualities because a good degree acts as a good filter, especially when talent is easy to find.
So to summarize was ISB worth it - yes it was it taught me skills that I would have never learnt by myself either due to laziness or lack of exposure,
Could it have been better - yes I felt there were more tests of retention than case studies and applications and the one year format made things harder to absorb, there was more adsorption than assimilation.
Would I recommend people do an MBA - not really if you can figure out how to analyze problems, break them into small easily conquerable pieces, work the internet to find solutions for these pieces, present your solutions and findings in an impressive way to others you are good as long as your employer realizes your worth. If thats not happening then you might need a MBA for signaling reasons. And if you need a MBA ISB rocks, even though the one year makes learning difficult I am convinced from my interactions with MBAs from other B-schools in India that one learns way more in ISB than in any other B-school in India (as long as you are looking for a general MBA, I dont know about specializations such as finance and marketing)
Cheers,
--Badri--
