Krrash !!!

The moment we entered the hall about 10mins late there was an ominous feeling… a sort of eerie emptiness that you can actually feel inside (and also see outside)… u get a feeling that you are probably in the wrong movie… maybe you should have stayed back and watched that re-run you have watched about a million times on the same channel already… or probably have read that book you have been fighting to finish… or maybe it is time to look at your dismal grades… or maybe just rolled under the cozy blanket and caught up on that much needed sleep… so many things that could have been done and you were here with about 8 others like you – 4 of them coaxed into it by you and 4 others who succumbed to peer pressure of simple majority…

Well ok, now there was no going back… we are here we are here… so let us as well enjoy the movie while we are here getting our money’s worth… there are some fringe benefits of watching movies in Mumbai cinemas especially those that charge a premium even for those late night ones… once we saw a well known actress (I am not mentioning her name here to protect privacy – mine that is)… well we “casually” kept bumping into her (well not literally you know, our paths just crossed… that was a just a figure of speech I used… no need to get jealous already) until her bodyguard or dad (can’t say which and we could not do any post situational analysis as we were not looking at him, well who would with better options… wow that is some language skills 4 words starting with “w”… oops sorry for digressing, will save it for some other post, maybe titled W… wotsays?)… I think I will remind you that we were at the bodyguard – and he gave us a sort of stare and we decided to move into the hall and keep an eye on her in the darkness… she had this great makeup which showed up well in the dim light too…

But this time there was no such distractions... Hey now where was I… thought I was talking about some movie… yeah let me start with the title… Krrish – hey why the rr? Is it for the sake of numerology or for the number of hrithik “r”oshans on the screen… well can’t say but I have not come across the emphasis on the creaking sound for Krishna… Krishna – now isn’t it simple to spell ? and say too ?

As for the cast, Rekha seems younger than preity and probably she was expecting a meatier role… maybe opposite the younger hrithik… but since the role was awarded to piggy chops, she seemed overcome with professional jealousy. There is absolutely no life in her dialogues, or maybe it is because she is actually playing hrithik’s overly overprotective old "grand"mother… man I have never seen anyone get so shocked when the principal wanted to take an IQ test of the child hrithik… she acts as if the principal wanted to take a dna test (well actually that would have been interesting as papa hrithik is away for nearly 2yrs in Singapore with wife in India when baby hrithik is born… and in the end jaadoo is thanked… very fishy…) well she plays the typical young grandmom and watched over her grandchild through her thick glasses… (well actually above the glasses, and I still can’t figure out why she wore it, she looked very old).

Now piggy chops also affectionately called priyanka chopra, is the babe who sizzles as the woman in red, yellow, blue, black, mini skirts, mini tops but no swimsuits… (don’t remember seeing her in a saree as in aitraaz, but still ok wardrobe). Man what a babe, and what a dumb babe… I remembered the joke where adam asks god why was eve so beautiful and dumb… anyways some new thing I learnt was that glass walls can be occasionally opaque, especially when you are talking ill about someone and they are standing right in front of you, but the other side of the glass – u simply cannot see them ! (try it if you dare to prove me wrong then we can both sue the roshans).

Now coming to the asli hero. One serious doubt – is hrithik planning to enter politics? If we calculate his entry into politics would be in about 20 years time and the kids who watch his movies about jaadoo and superspiderbatneomorpheusphantomandwhatnotshakti-man would be grown up to think that their superhero hrithik would save India as the prime minister from all the bad people in the world and also outside it. My deduction is that hrithik would follow on the footsteps of one such role model in the US and is trying to get a man-machine interfacing movie sanctioned from papa… quite costly, but then we should look at the long term holistic picture… (maybe rekha can be requested to play the harassed gun toting mom who is considered insane as she sees people from other planets and time…)

Now if you guys would excuse me, I would dedicate this paragraph also to hrithik bashing as rekha stole the limelight from the previous paragraph… well hrithik seems to be catering to his kiddy fans so much that he is turning out to be a kid himself… his expressions, actions and dance steps seem to have that fluidity of a skinny kid who is trying to dance… now I am not saying that he is a bad dancer and I certainly did like his dance steps in his adult only movies like KNPH and lakshya… but in these movies when he speaks and jumps around waving his arms especially with that stupid expression on his face… that is too much self degradation when he is not even getting the money (remember papa makes the movies and the money comes from the family corpus… )

Naseeruddin Shah’s moment of truth has arrived in this movie and probably he would be honoured at the Oscars or at least our local film festivals organized by that paanwala every year for being the best villain role performed… sad to say except for one line which made me smile, the rest of his show was stupidity… (wot people do for money and friendship sakes…)

Overall, the film seemed to have catered to its intended target segment… well piggy chops was never seen in a bikini or even a swimsuit was she? or did I miss it in those 5 minute powernaps during the songs (well if I did miss it, parents can just probably keep quiet about it or take their kids out for pop corn)… to me it felt like it should be certified “below 10” – that is can be viewed by people under the age of 10yrs (some exceptions can be made on the basis of mental maturity shown by them)… but since the kids cannot be brought in without their parents, I am sorry the parents would have to grin and relive their old days of reading indrajal comics…

I don’t know why I sat through the whole movie… but on second thoughts, maybe I will have to endure such movies pretty soon…

PS. Do not let guys from the IT sector watch it. They will find too many faults with the execution.

PPS. Maybe Pamela Anderson can audition for hrithik’s grandmom in the next movie… just give her a chance guys, she uses make-up too…

confessions of a deviant mind

To save my head from hitting the table
I cup my hands to support my chin
and wedge my knees under the table
wearing my trouser fabric thin.

His voice is droning in my ears
affecting me like a sleeping draught
I am not to be blamed later if
my above posture resembles a deep thought.

My almost closed eyes form a thin veil
and the blur that is the prof says out aloud
“this is a final reminder for those in cyberspace,
kindly close your laptops in 5 minutes around.”

Despite being so close to the wall
he uses the laser to point onto the board
either he won’t further dirty his chalk dusted hand
or he wants a hole through the stone bored.

I feel a sharp jab in my rib
it is the attendance register being passed
I put in my compressed squiggle
before it got onto the front row tossed.

Now that I am wide awake
I decide to look at the others
why am I not very surprised to find
that no one actually bothers.

This guy whispers to the girl beside him
I smile when they both laugh inside
but I am woe betide when my glance fell
upon the closed laptop at my side.

I dream about writing my blog
I dream about writing a book
If I wrote my chapters as posts, I worry
if it would be called a blook.

The girl in front of me is vigorously taking notes
with the absence of any internal cacophony
but I am not able to fathom how in the world
she is able to understand his illegible calligraphy.

My fingers yearn for their lost lover
and the entrapped lover seems bored
the separation I am talking here about is
between my fingers and the keyboard.

The girl takes a break from the pen and
pulls the rubber band from her tied up hair
I realized she is human too when
when she pulled at them in despair.

Some people are still half awake
But really most are abject
But blessed are those sleeping with their specs on
due the tube’s light they reflect.

There is a sudden chill in the class when
the asked question makes the silence deafening
slowly with zero response from the batch
the prof has his hour of reckoning.

The prof says “my submission to you
so be it even if you got to use poke-a-yoke
to teach you how does a CEO think
and by the way that was a joke”.

The class is stone faced even now,
but realize that from their side the prof expects
some sort of active reaction
and certainly they cannot be now tongue tied.

So out pops a hand to break the embarrassment
in a desperate attempt at class participation
the mouth asks a vague question with words
from the visible slide, a universal solution.

My head swivels towards the clock
only to spring back in exasperation
as had happened a million times before
the hands were not even moving in slow motion.

Later seeing the murderous stares from the class
the coco realizes that time has flown by
decides to raise the alarm and pull the plug.
I could have kissed the coco, only it was a guy.
________________________________________________

What can one do when the prof in the class is a dictator and makes u shut your laptop and listen to his droning lullaby… well this post was written during that terrible 70minutes today and is dedicated to all those 70 minutes that have been endured by me and my batch… I am sorry but you got no choice but to grin and bear my new found talent and also praise the post in your comments. And frankly speaking, if a dolt like me could bring this out in 1 hour, think of what creative people can do in this inspiring lecture…

Somewhere I read that the average attention span for an average human being is around 20 minutes… that is after 20 minutes, say in a lecture, your mind starts wandering off thinking of things that are more interesting to it than the balding old prof standing in front of the white board… Now I got a valid research backing to say that I was never at fault…
(After reading this poem I don’t think I have to separately crib about the lecture.)

The chewing gum under the table…

I have the habit of sitting comfortably… that is I don’t mind stretching, slouching, compressing, leg crossing, putting the leg up on the adjacent seat and adjusting my posture into one of the innumerous positions I can shift into in the middle of a class… that is just my daily bit of exercise for my tired muscles… an average person has about 21 sleep positions… I would have about a 100 at least while sitting…

Now one of my favorite postures is to tuck in my legs under the table such that it is firmly positioned between the table top and the floor… sometimes I even cross one leg on top of the other to gain the necessary height from the floor and also for some comfort… now this serves as a sort of fulcrum for the chair on which I sit is a typical software engineer wheel chair – you know the one with the barest minimum of plastic so that your butt is just supported and your back pains but they provide the flexibility of sliding away from the desk when you are least expecting it… but I still enjoy it – as such events provide me with my much needed exercise and some distractions to my otherwise engrossed batchmates…

Now coming back to the issue at hand or should I say on my knee… on this particular day, I was wearing my favourite formal black trouser impeccably and smartly dressed for the presentations… and I tuck my legs under the table to get a more comfortable position to view the great visual effects that we MBAs are so good at making… that is when I found that my favorite trouser seemed to have another great property – it had the highest coefficient of friction with respect to the under-surface of the table-top (???)… (a small explanation for my non-engineering friends – the higher the friction coefficient the better the grip… it is something like saying higher the NPV, better the project; neither of us understands each other)… I wowed at my trouser’s ability to understand its master’s needs and it became more favoriter…

It would have been drunken bliss at this realization had it not been for the break that our prof declared… I got up to get myself a cuppa-coffee and I found that my trouser was behaving very naughty… it remained stuck to the table… I bent down and pulled it out carefully to find a huge off-white lumpy sticky ugly dirty yucky patch on it… immediately I realized without putting it into my mouth that it was the by-product of the sleep deprived’s desperate attempt to keep awake – a chewed chewing gum…

Now I am totally intolerant to such initiatives (or rather the lack of it)… and I do thank god for making legal guns so expensive… well on this particular day I could not lay my finger on the person who did this… then I would have laid my whole hand then maybe a foot before actually stuffing the piece of shit, that was stuck on my trouser, back into his mouth…

After doing something that is the most obvious thing to do about it, I came back with an embarassingly large wet patch on the right side of my trouser and sat down in class in a new place (this time I was careful to check under the table). But I could not concentrate partially due to the anger that my favorite trouser were affected but mainly because of the irritatingly cold wet piece of cloth sticking to my thigh… that is when my mind wandered off into getting material for this post to crib about…

Now what had this guy who had chewed the gum done wrong… if you think nothing is wrong, you can stop right here and appreciate my agony and my English language skills and I won’t waste any more of your time… but for those who think that he is guilty, I dedicate this post to you…

How many of us take the trouble to find a trash can, to put in the chewing gum covered in its original wrapper? Instead we are so pressed for time that we just take it out and stick it wherever we can find a surface it would stick to… now it is not your genius or divinity that makes the gum you chewed stick to the table… but it seriously creates problems for people like me who have only one favorite trouser or a pair of favorite footwear…

How often do we actually encounter such instances… at the railway and movie ticket counters where everyone wants to be the first to be serviced, while the harassed ticket issuer after some vain attempts to bring some order just walks out for a tea break despite all the shouts from his customers…

or when there are 2 people washing their face bent over close to the water pipe, the third person gargles and spits the water from at least 2 feet away from the hard surface that it splatters the two guys (who will need more than water to wash their face now)…

or in your deepest of deep concerns to save electricity, this guy switches off all the lights and cause the occasionally blind people (those who cannot see in the dark) to bump into the innumerous objects that have been strewn across the floor… or worse still you leave someone in the dark when he is in a precarious position (I would not add more to this experience, as I don’t want everyone to know what actually happened. You are free to imagine the worst, I won’t give it in writing.)

or when everyone is moving in an orderly fashion at some queue for example say lunch buffet, this fellow either barges in the middle of buffet table upsetting a couple of dishes onto your shirts or walks along in the opposite direction filling up his plate in the reverse… or the worst, he carried a full plate precariously balanced against your back while your shirt is soaking up the liquids from it…

or when it is already 15 minutes past the class end time and that everyone is hungrily waiting for the lunch (not that the food is something great to look forward to), there is suddenly a desperate class participation question that would get the prof carried away and continue the lecture for another half an hour as he has to come back to the topic he has digressed away from thanks to this insightful question…

or when there is a huge wind blowing and the doors are banging, why not use the door stopper… especially when somebody enters a quiet lecture hall, to bang shut the door… or to pull a door open when it says push, or vice-versa… or to push open a two-way door without caring about giving the person on the other side, though foolish enough to stand so close, a bloody nose…

I think you get the point… I don’t want to join the category I am talking about…

Is it is a sin to think about the repercussions of your action before actually doing it? Would it take us so much time to assess the situation and act a bit more empathetically and not stupidly ? One of my profs in school used to repeatedly say in a sarcastic way to a couple of dumb people in class – before you say something, think about it for a 100 times and then don’t say it… he could say that and get away with it because then he was a powerful grown up man and those listening to him were just kids… today, I would like to say this to every damn bugger who irritates me in these and many other ways… “think a 100 times before you do something, then don’t do it…“

Or dear god, please give me a gun and a license to kill…

the monk and the marketing

(for those who don't know me yet, i call myself "the monk.... ". i won't discuss the rationale for this now... maybe later)

I had always assumed that I was born for marketing… I thought that marketing was plainly based on creativity and since I considered myself to be damn creative… I could sketch a little during my school days and had won a couple of prizes in competitions too… I had also participated in a couple of elocution contests and debates and won some prizes there too… I had also had a nickname of “scrap engineer” as I used to make a lot of new things from things that were normally considered scrap… some poster contests too where portrayal of ideas mattered were also added to my portfolio… I could write poetry too when I was in my second standard (some of the characteristics are still visible occasionally)…

So I thought I was damn creative and that I could manage stuff like marketing easily… or could I ?

But there was a small twist in the tale… I was brought up in a conventional middle class family that said risk taking was taboo… I joined an engineering college while a couple of my creative friends had the audacity to take up non-conventional subjects in media, communication and design… engineering college went off in a breeze and I could not showcase my creativity… mainly because I did not find time for it from the innumerous hours I spent playing carrom, watching TV and sleeping…

And of course the sheep mentality was followed in joining an IT company where I was put into the drabbest of technology with the barest minimum of colors (I still can’t think of any more than 4 colors that were used and one of them was black…). After 2 years I thought enough is enough else I will become color blind to the other millions of colors in the world…

I decided to try my hand at an MBA… mainly because I thought a b-school would house crazily creative people who are not afraid of experimenting… I thought that rules would be disregarded and creativity and practicality would rule…

I decided to do a specialization in IM because I thought I would leverage on my work-ex – a decision I thought would hamper my creativity, but then I had to somehow get into the b-school (in fact this was a decision that I consider pretty smart now)… I wanted to go into marketing – creativity was calling me… you are killing a creative genius by restricting me into a conventional mould… marketing should give me a breather (or so I thought)… my aim – after the first year take a shift into marketing specialization…

But then, my first year with marketing was not a happy relationship… after hours with the green colored marketing bible written from the sayings of the great god of marketing I could not absorb anything of marketing concepts… the 10 commandments from the bible were stringently followed and any deviations like me were deemed a heretic… and instead of burning me at the stake they branded me one – giving away alphabets that one was not very proud of…

I was beaten and broken – I was speechless during the lectures where I found creativity flowing in the form of thoughts and ideas from my peers… I failed to understand why a bike was a bike was a bike, or why a mundane purchase could only be a toothbrush (nowadays they cost a premium you know), or why the competition was always between coke and pepsi and not between a tata and a volvo…

Every prof would say don’t bombard your customer with jargons that only MBAs know the meaning of… In marketing this was an exception – you knew jargons you survived… I could never remember the number and the corresponding alphabets – for example the 4As, 6Bs, 7Cs, 3Ds, 12Es, 13Fs, 4Ps and so on… there was a number for every letter of the alphabet and it was many to one mapping function between the set of all letters and the set of all natural numbers… if at all I could remember the names then it would be difficult to remember the context – you know actually the 4As and 4Ps are the same but the context is now different because the consumer’s attitude has changed… really ?

After a year long futile crusade to find my lost creativity in marketing class, I fervently thank god at every single opportunity for knocking some common sense into me at the time of filling the form – for allowing me to leverage upon my core competency and the learning curve achieved over the 3 years of my stint at a global MNC…

But the fight is not over yet… looks like I have tortured the marketing faculty beyond the limits for making them read and also evaluate my answer papers… ideally they should feel like hanging themselves, but considering the welfare of the greater number of students, they will have to hold on…

I have been d-graded… I still have to fight one last battle… I am not sure where victory will shower her blessings, but I am fighting for a cause – my honor… back to the green bible…

13 posts

I like bringing in some play with words… I find it very amusing to make a rhyming word which can be associated to something existing… it usually turns out that whatever I churn out is in good context to what I want to say and I feel that it brings in that extra punch just because there is an existing word… like if you look at the pirated sony which are called soni or soney, the first 3 letters seem to lend the much needed credibility to customers even though they know that it is a pirated cheap product…

Anyways getting back to the post, it is rhyming with ghost… remember the movie 13 ghosts… amusing isn’t it? (correct answer = "yes of course, it is !!!") Thought I would use the wotever this tool is called in English (like alliterations or puns)… if you probably not guessed what this post is about – well it is about superstition… fear of the number 13 and many more such things that I find funny… (another reason is I don’t want to take chances that I may never find the interest to write another blog post if I don’t break the 13 posts barrier)…

I often have fights with my parents whenever their seemingly superstitional recommendations clash with my convenience… I agree that my parents are my well wishers and they want the best for their son, but is it not potentially irritating if you had to consult the panchangam (an astrological book that gives the great dates to do some tasks) to check if it is the auspicious time to do something as mundane as going to T-Nagar and buying some necessary stuff (for non-chennaiites, T-Nagar is a shopoholic heaven in Chennai and an agoraphobic’s nightmare)… but my mom gives a consideration to shops that are local – distance from home less than 4kms (actually T-Nagar shops are just beyond 4kms and we never go to any shop that is between 500mts to 4kms anyways). Ok now, the normal trend is that we will leave at a time that is delayed by 1hr and 30mins due to raahu kaalam, the ideal time for some mythological demon called raahu who swallows the sun and the moon during their eclipses… (don’t ask me what he does to release them once the eclipse is over ). Since now we have left at the auspicious time that is past this raahu kaalam, we find that there are no buses at this time of the day… normally Chennai buses are never on time and additionally when there are no buses scheduled, the probability of seeing a bus on the road becomes very close to zero… but we are stubborn and we wait silently (my mom criticizing the Chennai government for not letting more buses and me criticizing raahu…) for the bus to arrive, which finally does after about an hour, picking up all the stubborn shop goers like us from the previous stops and crowded like an exaggerated fevicol ad. We board the bus and are promptly separated, and since unlike those shown in movies, we don’t have a family song, I constantly keep watch for some sign of my mom. But eventually over the slow journey, that is interspersed with innumerable stops for the conductor to distribute tickets between stages, takes a toll on my concentration and I start dreaming. After a few nice dreams I am rudely awaken by the guy next to me as my mom is calling out to me… my dreams unfinished I am a bit groggy and irritated and I am welcomed by an elbow jostling crowd against which i must make my way with my mom… by the time we are finished, I am famished – mentally and physically and all I want is to get back home asap and have a cup of hot mummy made filter coffee… but the ordeal that awaits us is a repeat of the step beginning from the wait for the bus to arrive till we arrive at the destination, only this time it is the peak traffic hour and hence more people on the buses and more time for travel through the traffic.

Now, one day it so happened that we simply forgot to factor in Mr.Raahu and just left. We reached the bus stop, and who should be waiting for us, a practically empty bus. The driver had probably trained under Michael Schumacher and the conductor under mother Teresa, we found that we had a short and sweet journey to T-Nagar. The moment we reached there, we quickly finished our purchases and were back on a similarly empty bus and we were back home… it wasn’t even coffee time yet… when we reached home, we realized that we had left at the beginning of the raahu kaalam and were before it was over…

Notice the difference in size between the last 2 paragraphs? Probably we were lucky the second time because we didn’t remind Mr.Raahu to make life hell for us… he was happy and we were too… if I tell my mom this, she says it was a freak accident and next we should be extra careful to remember this mistake… I have long given up…

Now why does everyone say not to cross the path of a black cat (or not let a black cat cross your path – I have always been confused which of the two it is as are many of the superstitious folk I have asked)… well my guess is if you accidentally trample the cat, you are bound to get scratched probably… but then why would you trample the cat anyways…

Spilling salt gives you bad luck – unless you continue to lick the spilt salt with the dirt on the floor, I can’t think of any reason why that particular quantity of salt is going to be angry with you…

I have done quite a lot of important things on the 13th of the month and many of the 13ths have fallen on Fridays too… I have not faced any major problem that is attributable to the day-date combo… and Friday the 13th appears at least once every year and unless we are going to the movie, nobody need fear any loss…

And there are more for which you can look up the following site (it gives it categorywise a belief associated with different objects on this planet) http://www.corsinet.com/trivia/scary.html

There are just too many, but I will keep fighting them… as and when possible I will question them… not to break their belief, but to understand the reason behind the belief and if necessary change myself… but I will not go down without a fight…

why do an mba (a sequel to the rg-giri wounded)

why do people come to do an mba... this is a question that i answered for myself before quitting my job as a software engineer in a prestigious mnc...

it was high paying so money making was not the only criterion... considering the job insecurity that most places were facing we didn't have that worry...

it was a well settled business model and our jobs were very secure, unless of course you had some great inborn talent of getting into trouble and fired... so no worry about layoffs or stuff like that which put you under constant necessity to upgrade yourself and be better equipped with new technologies…

life was chill out there – regular weekend parties, movies, music, biking trips, games, sleep and whatever money and mastercard could buy… didn’t have a care in the world spent lavishly ate the choicest foods at the swankiest places… the restaurant manager even became good friends of ours. So why leave this heaven and do u know what…

considering the fact that I am “lazy” by nature I could not bring myself to put in that regular schedule per day of studying for CAT… I did try to force myself to attend the coaching classes and paid a hefty sum for it too… but then classes are meant to be bunked and this was no exception…

so after all this why the hell did I and probably many more like me land up here to get a mirage called MBA… for the benefit of the uninitiated, it is called PGDBM (post graduate diploma in business management). Yes sadly it is a diploma and not called a degree… though people do recognize it as on par with the other PG degrees.

Are we here for the grades which we could not make in our engineering and that we are going to compensate for the 4 years of romping around in an unshaven countenance and dirty shorts… is that what we “executives” from top notch companies are here for… the answer is a big no…

Let us assume for a second that our grades are the most important take aways from a b-school education… then wouldn’t it be like companies would just come look at our cgpas and recruit us just like that… why the hell do they go through the elaborate process f scanning our resumes and interviewing scores of people before settling on a handful… I can quote numerous examples from my past experience where the bottom of the class gets placed at a company and profile higher than that of the topper… and it is normally the batch topper who takes the longest time to get placed (sorry guys this is just an observation based on many samples and I pray to god that it does not happen).

So now that we have hopefully agreed that the quantitative evaluation is not the single most evaluation criterion let us try to understand why anybody like me or those in the batch who are better than me come to this situation.

An mba is not a destination it is a journey that begins with the decision to do it. Then there is the first step in grooming a manager – the CAT… striking where it is easy and matters most. Attempt the easy questions and leave the hard ones – basically survive. Just achieve the basic objective so that you may enter the next level which is the interview call. Once you get into the interview room they really test your smart thinking and ability to communicate your thoughts and I would like to believe that they are at least 90% accurate.

Now that you are inside, you think you were a lone profile, but when we look around we find that everybody here is a unique person – just like you. The batch is so diverse in terms of background and work-ex that is just amazes you to see such high diversity packed into a small batch of 150 students. And since each one has gone through the same rigorous process of sifting the pebbles to find the diamonds, you can rest assured that each one is stud in his own way…

Now what do you do in a mba class – you share experiences from everybody’s lives… a quick journey in learning from others mistakes and achievements… as an mba you don’t have time to go through all the same mistakes again (just think of how many man hours would go into repeating all those mistakes and learning from them.)

But learning from each other does not make all the 150 into a similar person at the end of the 2 years… each one still maintains that individuality or else what is the use of specialists… some of us are naturally creative – we learn a little bit of creativity from them and in case we need more we know where to find it… some of us are born speakers and we learn the art of making small presentations and maybe a little bit of public speaking too… some of us are born writers and from them we learn the framework for what makes a good document… some of us are naturally studious and from them we learn the theoretical concepts…

it is totally unnecessary for the big guy sitting up there to make each one of us different… else he could have just used a standard die cast.

The concept of RG-giri

Two guys are out hiking. All of a sudden, a bear starts chasing them. They climb a tree, but the bear starts climbing up the tree after them. The first guy gets his sneakers out of his knapsack and starts putting them on. The second guy says, "What are you doing? He says, "I figure when the bear gets close to us, we'll jump down and make a run for it." The second guy says, "Are you crazy? You can't out run a bear." The first guy says, "I don't have to out run the bear. . . I only have to out run you."


That is the story of relative grading in a b-school… which I have consistently failed to understand. Not that I am a hypocrite who condemns a system even though it has actually helped me escape sure fail grades in many a courses. But then the whole logic evades me.

When you select people into a particular course you do what is normally called a normal curve fitting. The idea is that the set of people who apply are so large that they can be considered to be a normal population. Say for example they apply to a college that they know would take only based on their marks and that the application fee is a significant sum. I don’t think a sensible guy who has perhaps made a low score would apply. But still the population who apply is so huge that they fit the normal curve… ?

Ok… let us assume that they do satisfy the normal curve condition, that is some stragglers do apply for that college and form the tail end of the spectrum. Now what is the selection process that is normally adopted ? the top 1% or at max the top 10% are taken in for the course. Now where would that fit in the normal curve ? ( it is the shaded area)



Well actually most of the colleges admit in the top 1% only and that normal curve would look like this.



For ease of understanding and clarity of vision let us use the top 10% curve.

Well, so now we have a group of people who are actually top in the merit list. Of course the bottom of the group is bloated because they are not actually the worst of performers. I don’t think I have to explain the normal curve here. Only thing that needs to be understood here is that even the last person falls into the 99 percentile category and is a very intelligent student.

But what sadly happens is that the grades are probably decided by non-statisticians or we just blindly follow the theory of company policy and we try to fit a normal curve for these 1% of highest performers in the country. Will it be a good fit let us see in the figure below…



As we can clearly see the gap of white area that exists that does not overlap the actual distribution of the students and we have to somehow fill in the blue paint into the white area… now are we doing justice to the low lying areas of the original curve by pulling them up and calling them average, or are we doing enough justice to the people in the bottom of the blue layer who have been unlucky enough to be left out in the tail end. Of course I agree that they scored low marks in a couple of tests, but then was the older blue normal curve wrong should it have been a series of normal curves – like a sinusoidal pattern ?

Anyways this is something that is probably not going to change in a while and since the affected parties are also quite happy with this kind of distribution I don’t think I can do anything about but crib whenever I make a bad grade and feel happy for myself and offer my sympathies when I find that I was “lucky” enough that there were some people who have been pushed to the tail end…


Well what is the solution ? one simple solution is to have absolute grades. this not only keeps the toppers in the top and the bottomers in the bottom, it also gives a clear measure of the student's understanding of the concepts in the course... ok well to some extent as some of you may argue that the student would just mug up stuff and vomit on the paper... but then isn't that what is happening ? what is worse currently is that you do all that hard work of cramming crap into your head and manage to score a mark of 95 out of 100 say... u mite still be behind a 100 people who seemingly had more space in their head and could cram faster and hence make a C grade...

disclaimer: i am sorry for using the crammer word for toppers, but it is only an expression and nothing personal against anyone in particular. i myself wud sit in the bottom end of both spectrums - it is lonely at the top and the bottom too...

Half filled vessels travel the farthest…

Everybody would have heard this age old saying “empty vessels make the most noise”… and it has often been my retort when some wiseguy’s wisecracks have left me tongue tied… I am not here to dispute that… but then today I discovered a new thought provoking statement…

“half-filled vessels travel the farthest”

Well how did that happen ? I got damn thirsty and went up the stairs to fetch a bottle of water… and my great big bottle was taking a real long time to fill… a 2 ltr bottle fills at the rate of 2cc per min, then how long would I have to hold the bottle and also press the nozzle… suddenly some color on the floor, reflected in the beautiful moonlight brought me out of the reverie of solving this IIT-JEE level complex problem… they were some of the 500ml plastic bottles probably left over from some forbidden party, though the party animals have done a good job of making it look like an innocent birthday bash… I picked up a bottle and was in no hurry to get back to my room and into bed… so I decided to fill up the bottle and throw it. I seemed to have understood somewhere that the bottle if it were empty would not travel far, and would probably fall right next the hostel-guard sitting right below the 6 floors… this understanding of physics was not what made me fill up the bottle, but it was the understanding of the guardian angel in me which often got neglected when I landed in trouble… so I filled the bottle – a transparent bisleri-type (it had some weird name which I didn’t bother to read)… then making sure that there was no one on the roads at this time of the night, I threw the bottle as far as I could with all my might… (hey that was an accidental rhyme, I always thought I was a born poet, maybe my next blog I should focus on poetry…)

Well the bottle landed somewhere just beyond the walls of the hostel compound… actually translated to engineering terms, would have traveled a horizontal distance of maybe about 10mtrs… well I could clearly understand that it was a futile throw and I was clearly out of the competition for any shot-put events and so was getting that defeatist attitude… the second bottle was almost lucky, but then I thought “wot the hell, I am already bent halfway to pick it up… “ so I took it and started filling it, but then I lost interest halfway and decided to just throw it away fearing the unlikely event of some poor thirsty soul drinking the dirty water… so I decide to throw it in the similar way as the previous bottle but in a half hearted way…

But wonder of wonders… the bottle crossed the wall and did not stop there… it soared over the road and the gutter on the other side of the road, hit the wall of a neglected landspace and stopped… now I am practical enough to understand that god did not decide to give me such great strengths to throw the lighter bottle so far so that I could enter the shot-put contests… that is when some weird physics logic dawned upon me… the water in the half filled bottle seemed to focus the light bottle to travel that extra mile (er… I mean that extra 5 mtrs…) and the bottle was just light enough for that flight and just heavy enough to travel the distance…

What is worse than the physicswala funda striking me at the wrong hour (if only it had come sometime in my engineering days… not that I would have won a nobel prize in physics, but at least I would have appeared to be alive and thinking in front of my physics profs out there… ) anyways what actually struck me was the parallel to life that I could draw… now my dear readers, I am a daydreamer or visionary as I would like to call myself and I relate anything I think of to the philosophy of life (whatever that means). So you will have to bear the parallelisms of life I write about here… even if it sounds like utter crap please don’t break my blissful ignorance that you are all enjoying my blogs…

So what is this great “tatthuvam” (tamil word for wise sayings of life defining themes)… well let us assume 3 different kinds of people – one who has little or no knowledge, the other a little bit of knowledge and the last is an expert in the domain… let us call them novice, intermediate and expert for the sake of typing convenience…

now the novice knows that he does not have much knowledge and the real fact that he has not much knowledge about the topic cannot achieve anything great in that field… basically he cannot ask intelligent questions and nor can he know much by himself… hence like the empty bottle he makes a lot of noise and also does not travel too far… practically buffeted by other forces he lands in the same place and makes a loud uproar…

the expert on the other hand knows more than the novice and the intermediate and hence would certainly be expected to go far more than them… he does too to some extent… but he falls short because he fails to ask the right questions mainly because he already “knows” the answers… thus he may not get what the customers are actually asking for… instead he gives them what he “knows” they want… and since he is heavy with knowledge, falls flat due to the downward force F = mg which is higher for heavier masses.

the intermediate on the other hand is like the half filled bottle of water… light enough to use the external forces to guide his path and the little weight to provide him the required focus to travel that extra distance… to go out of his way to please the customer and gains in the knowledge… and who are these “half-baked” professionals ? of course we MBAs… we know the right questions to ask our customers and of course the customer is the king…

“wow, dude, you are one of the greatest thinkers this world has ever produced…”, I hear an inner-voice telling me… and I also hear some external voices shouting my name… must be my thirsty roomie. Well some sacrifices have to be made after all such strokes of brilliance don’t come very often… say only about once every 5 minutes…