Searching for Activity!

Vinay Krithik gaping at Nature's gifts on display at Totos!

Thats my classmate Vinay on the left, and your's truly on the right. He seems to be an ideal foil, in terms of having the interest to roam around Mumbai on the local trains. Both of us are trying to involve ourselves in some learning activity or some form of entertainment post office hours. We have been debating, but havent really got into action. A couple of things we thought would be to see Theatre plays at NCPA, catch the usual flicks at Theatres, learn French/Spanish, get into some creative workshop or make quick trips around Mumbai. I mildly kicked things off last week, I made a quick and dirty trip to Daman(the place you would have last heard in class 3 geography). Vinay couldnt come for the trip, but Logi came for that crazy night trip. Will post more on that in the coming week.

It feels good to pro actively involve onself in some activty than living a mechanical and mundane life catching the crowded local trains back home!

Mulling over Club Mahindra

For the past 2 months, the sales team at Club Mahindra has patiently asked me for appointments and I somehow was not in a frame of mind to talk numbers and sign a cheque for them. They called me again last week, and we agreed meeting on saturday evening. The guy who came to meet me, forgot his laptop charger, so we decided to just talk over some sheets and pictures. In a way that was good, as he could have easily made me melt with his pictures and Club Mahindra does look attractive for famly holidaying over the years, but the only thing holding me back is the guilt list of places, that I have built over time collecting travel magazines. Club Mahindra has expanded to 23 locations in India and have some of the best properties, but still there are so many more hotels that are there waiting to be explored all over the world.

Its a tough choice to make. Club Mahindra does have RCI affilation, which allowes members to get to other hotels at a much lower cost than if one were to go on our own. Right now, I really dont care about facilities at places where I stay. I would gladly sleep near the toilet in an unreserved compartment, stay at a lonely beach shack for 50 bucks, walk mountains with luggage on...but once marriage/family comes in, it could be a different ball game.

I would use the better part of the fortnight to talk to members, and people who have used this to understand the actual money spent on holidays as a member( includes EMI, Maintenance cost, travel, food etc). Some more careful back of the envelope calculations would reveal whether I sign a cheque for them, or invest my money in "Impulse" holidays (the way I generally holiday).

Being a hardcore fan of a move like THE BEACH,signing up for a holiday timeshare is a little hard to digest!

Evolving

Trying hard

• to get some order into life(predictability)
• to wash clothes on time
• to wash them much cleaner
• to get up when the alarm rings and not pass it off as a song playing in my mobile.
• to go to the swimming pool and gymn in my apartment complex
• to enjoy food and get a 'mmm' and 'wow' experience once a day(Right now, to do that I rely on Mani's lunch home or Krishna Boarding Udupa retaurant in Matunga Central Line)
• to try and finish reading the 3 newspapers that I buy. Hate seeing a virgin, uncrumpled form of newspapers piling in the house.
• plan an inexpensive holiday that can be done over the weekend.
• plan for an impromptu holiday, out of India(when I get the time)
• to get my new cot repaired
• to buy some furniture for the house
• to watch some television programmes.Whats the point of buying a new TV worth 13,500 if I dont watch anything on the television? I felt the same when I splurged a 115 k, in buying a 6.1 hometheatre system,with a 43 ' Projection TV in Dec 2005. Hard earned money, u see!
• to Complete reading all the books, I bought in the last 16 months. I've started all, but never managed to complete. Still, whenever I pass by Crossword, my heart itches to buy some atttractive book.

and ya finally... to leave in time to catch the FAST LOCAL back home to Mulund.

On My Own Trip!

After watching "THE BEACH", I somehow felt that aimless travel had a supporter in me. I would love to escape to some place thats not found by many, and just aimlessly laze around there. Will I be able to find my Utopia? Someday when the project is in a stable state and the folks above me are not greedy enough to launch more products, I just want to take off, on my own trip.

I have always felt, trips should never be too organised, it should be impulse driven and aimless and should be the mind's way of connecting with the culture of the land that I go to. It shouldnt be about booking an accomadation before starting. I have started doing that in most of my trips when I am not with a very 'safe' minded person.

a) Did a impromptu trip last october, when I felt bored of my classmates during my Internship in Bangalore. Did a quick trip to the Majestic bus stand and took the first bus that was empty and going anywhere north. It turned out to be Gokarna, and the bus had too many holes, so I was dripping wet, with the only set of clothes that I had.

b) Did another impromptu trip to Goa, November 17/18/19 last year, when I felt like travelling by unreserved all the way from Chennai.My friend joined me a day later from Chennai. I did that to celebrate the fact that I got a D Minus, as against F grade, in Prof Venkat's subject, last year. When you are competing to fight for grades that are in various levels of failure(, D, D- and F), even a D Minus seems like a war dance.

c) Another impromptu trip happened in February, after placement season, when I went with two friends to Goa again.

d) 4 days before convocation, another impromptu trip to Havelock Island(Andamans)

But most of my places that I had visited are run of the mill places, so my next impromptu trip, would need a little more planning and research on the web, to search for the unfamiliar.

Some of the places that are part of my bucketlist are

1) Europe- Greece to Spain
2) Russia to China on the Trans-Siberian express
3) Thailand, in the lesser explored regions(that Lonely Planet Thailand advises me)
4) Borneo, for some adventure like Ananconda 2
5) South America- For some Amazonian adventure
6) Need to read more of Lonely Planet to complete this list!

I will finish this post with some of the best scenes from T H E B E A C H.

Kabhi Kabhi Zindagi Mein Yuhi....

One of the things with working hard, is that you forget that there's a world outside of work, and you start feeling that indulging in other hobbies starts looking like a crime. My house is messed up as usual. So I am tryng to quickly restore santity by washing clothes, sweeping the floor, purchasing basic furniture for the house, and other domestic pending tasks(Like..... collecting my ironed clothes after a week). I guess life would start being a lot better, as I would start feeling good, of having the innocuously small joy of properly managing a house, if not a business :-)

Cricket In the Midst of Terror

Catch my latest article at Crickblog here

Its that time of the Year- L'Attitude 13 05

A year and a half back, the sequence of numbers 1305 made no sense to me until somebody pointed out that 13 o5 was the latitudinal location of Chennai, and that was how the name stuck for Great Lakes annual B school fest. Preparations started 4 months before towards end of July, and that's when things were looking really hazy. The man core committee was chosen on the basis of how people had contributed to some of the intra event that had taken place in the first three months at B school. Obviously some were happy, some were peeved that their name didn't figure, but guessed right that irrespective of whose name is there or not there, the ones wanting to contribute always would.


It was remarkable seeing the way things unfolded on the day of the event, which underlies the hard work that went into making an event like this. Commitment, they say is when you work when no one is watching and that was imminent all over the campus, as you saw a bunch of people in one corner deciding on how could we make the poster, what theme should we go about with, who would fix the venue, what size of backdrop do we want? A thousand questions spread across a motley crowd of 20 odd people, and the challenge wasn't to just cut through the chaos, but to preserve the quality of work, even as chaos surrounds.


Just as the pace of work increased, came September and October, where internships took a month of our time, and to come back after that and start was the feeling of starting from 0, after scoring a hundred in the first innings. Though it was tough to resume work all over again, thanks to some amazing teamwork, we were able to put in double the amount of effort.But as D-day neared, people who were no where connected with the event started helping out, and the events committee started to make internal events to drive the festive mood home. It was tough playing jekyll and hyde, with one part of your mind is on the festive mood, and the other part of your mind trying to meet deadlines with subjects and assignments. As the proverb goes, cometh the hour, cometh the man, we had enough adrenalin to cope up with the barrage of educational rigour thrown at us, to emerge victors. I guess words can only sum up little of the times then. Even though I was not somebody who worked tirelessly all though, I do know the core team that worked its heart out to put together a great show.

I'd suggest you have a look at a video that we made, which would aptly summarise "The Making of L'attitude 07". L'attitude 08 , the Annual B-School fest of Great Lakes Institute of Management is happening in Chennai on the 20th of December 2008. To know more click here and read the L'attitude blog here

Orkut Consumer Behaviour

I was thumbing through Orkut and chanced upon this. This happens to be a typical software engineer from Chennai, who's orkut intro page I have shown below.

Orkut shows this person as sexy, and cool, but look at the introduction. It says a line that he is friendly and then talks about the topic that the person is most comfortable with(programming, of course!). That pretty much explains the other rounded items in red below the 'about me'.

I guess most software engineers(Read: the kind that you encounter en masse at a company when thousands of people charge outside the office when the 5 15 pm bus leaves for home) are short of confidence and feel shy to express themselves, so end up putting something in the 'about me' column that they are most comfortable with, which unfortunately happens to be programming. I am not saying that people who have better looking intro's got laid instantly, but still the way the 'about me' part of orkut is written, reflects a lot about yourself.

Looking at the various kinds of intro's , there are the 'attention grabbers' who put their CV there or in order to show that they are intelligent, put some not-so-easily-understandable poem. Some use various symbols to show that they are rebels and are 'belonging' to a group, while some cleverly copy what they think will potray them in the best light. Some guys even use Orkut for hitting on women, and doing it relegiously. I knew a guy from Faridabad( who studied with me) who was a porn-ivororous animal, hunting down images of all the girls he saw in orkut in his laptop folder, and using it to fantasize. By the way the guy had a 2% physical sales conversion of all the girls he managed to scrap in orkut, and his 2% was quite high in number, so you can see the effort he put. So Orkut does help you connect, but there obviously is no right way for an intro or a wrong way, but its interesting taking a peek into the consumer behaviour of social networkers.It depends on the convergence of your target market, your sales techniques and the leads you get, or if you havent succeeded at this game, dont worry you can pay money and do the same at any of the marriage portals :-). Else tell the priest in the temple near your house, and finally gain Moksha! and even if this fails, try a Gtalk status of " Single and Ready to Mingle".

Ok, so where are we heading and what do I want to convey? Nothing much.... saw the orkut intro and a few thoughts were running through my mind, so thought I shall put them on my blog.

PS:

1) The guy who's orkut image is pasted is a good friend of mine, so nothing against him. Just found the intro funny.

2) The pornivorous friend doesnt read my blog, so dont have to worry much. If he does, I shall treat him to some Hyderabadi Biryani to pacify him if he does find out.