Author: SK

Early reports tell me that more than a 100 people have been placed on “day 0” at the Summer Internship Recruitment at IIMB. In our batch (2 years back) 26 people got “day 0 summers” and that was considered huge. It’s grown four times now! Thankfully this is a larger batch – has 270 odd people so there will be enough people left over for day two (where most FMCG’s recruit). If this were our batch (wiht 180 odd people), even day one companies would’ve had a tough time.

What is happening is that the number of foreign recruiters and domestic “high salary recruiters” is growing exponentially. From 3 day 0 firms in our senior batch to 7 for our batch to around 30 for this batch! It seems like the IIM brand (which was largely restricted to India over the last forty years) is finally being recognized abroad, especially in investment banks. And that the market everywhere (both india and abroad) is strong leading to heavy recruitment.

Regarding the larger implications, soon “day two companies” will figure out they are not getting good enough people from campuses. The only capacity expansion in IIMs will be because of the OBC quota (all IIMs have expanded in hte last few years so unforced expansion is unlikely). And with foreign firms pouring in like never before, these day 2 firms will have to probably push up the salaries that are offering, thus pushing up salaries across the board.

Once they increase salaries for freshers, they will realize that this salary would be good enough to buy alumni, who started off at much lower salaries. So the demand for us alumni is going to go up, and we (at least those in “traditional IIM jobs”, unlike me) can expect better pay.

On other fronts, IIMs I, L and K will join A,B and C in the investment banking fun, and can expect to take off now.

The rest of the world, looking at the demand for IIM grads, will want to join IIMs, and more people will write the CAT. Of course, seats are limited so it will be fight. Perhaps more B schools will become better to join in the race. Right now the gulf between the top 20 b schools and the rest is huge – it might become huger.

I’m dreaming

An old friend is getting engaged tonight. And she tells me that she’s met her guy just a week back and hasn’t talked to him for too long. “Met him a couple of times, he seems decent enough so going ahead with it”, she told me yesterday.

Sounds quite scary.

I told this to my mom later yesterday and she was of the opinion that in the end, it doesn’t really matter how well you’ve known your spouse before the wedding. Problems occur independent of that! so it is actually better to have someone set you up with someone so that if things go wrong you have someone to blame!!

On another note, it is a kind of awkward feeling when you see people you’ve known from childhood getting married. You’ve been close to them for ages and now there is going to be someone new in their lives, and your relationship with them is going to change drastically.

In a similar case, i used to be really really close to this cousin of mine. but after she got a boyfriend we suddenly started drifting and i’m not that close to her anymore. and she’s getting married in a couple of months and i think we might drift further.

strangely i haven’t noticed this kind of a feeling with people i’ve gotten to know much later in life, irrespective of how close i am to them!

orkut has provided a new tool by which all my orkut friends get automatically added to my GTalk list! and i happened to use it and my friends list has grown from 50 odd to 700 odd!

finally google seems to be making use of the fact that it owns orkut, and i believe this move will enable google to race ahead of Y!M in markets where orkut is strong (brazil, india, pakistan, iran, etc.).

on the flip side, now all my acquaintances have gotten added to my GTalk list (earlier it was friends alone) so i can expect a few unsolicited pings. small price to pay however!

Our office has one pseud coffee machine on the first floor (which doles out pretty good coffee) and a lousy lipton machine on the second floor (which dishes out horrible “cardamom tea” and pathetic “tomato soup”). Given that i sit on the second, i have to make the long voyage down several times every day to keep my blood flowing (mom says this “arrangement” is a blessing in disguise since climbing up and down stairs will help me reduce).

Now this machine (on the first floor) is made in Italy and hence doesn’t know what a power cut is. So whenever the power goes off, this machine goes off to sleep and takes its own sweet time to come on after the power is back (thankfully we have a generator here so that restarts the coffee machine).

Four times till now I’ve gone down for coffee today and three of the four times, the power has gone off just when I had picked up the paper cup and was about to place it under the machine – leading to inordinate waits on the first floor doing nothing. On the fourth occasion, the machine had shut down for maintenance so the guys asked me to come “after five minutes”.

Don’t know if either the machine or BESCOM (bangalore electric supply company) has anything against me today. Is it because I told my mom (who used to work for BESCOM (then karnataka electricity board)) that she didn’t make enough ragi mudde this morning?

These misadventures when i’ve gone down for coffee have completely thrown me off gear today and I haven’t done ANY work since morning.

I’m pissed.

Thanks to the anticlimax of the Champions Trophy finals yesterday (where the only thrill after Gayle got out was regarding the weather), I got a chance to watch two excellent London derbys on ESPN. Both resulted in upsets. Both had their share of umpiring errors. And both were extremely thrilling to say the least.

In the first match, West Ham beat Arsenal thanks to a near-last minute goal by Harewood. Now that the Argentinians are being kept out, West Ham seem to be getting back to their original winning ways. It would be interest of Mascherano, Tevez and the club if the two of them are sold during the January transfer window.

The second match was a real thriller, with Tottenham getting the better of Chelsea. Terry was unfairly sent off but what resulted was perhaps something as close to Total Football as we can get today. The Chelsea players were all over the place, and kept going at Spurs in search of that elusive equalizer. As one of the commentators put it “Carvalho plays back, Drogba plays forward and the rest play everywhere!”

Chelsea, when a goal down is a treat to watch as they throw all their players forward in search of that elusive goal. A similar show was on display in the FA cup semis earlier this year when they played a 2-7-1 formation a goal down to Liverpool. And it almost worked this time as Arjen Robben rattled the goalposts once with a Maxi-level (2nd round Argentina-Mexico FIFA 2006) shot from the edge of the area.

Anyways, it was refreshing to see Mourinho take the defeat sportingly and hug Jol after the match. This was after Wenger had refused to shake hands with Pardew and had even gotten into a fistfight with him midway through the second half.

The other day on Kannada Rajyothsava, a bunch of random guys on bikes came shouting down our street. Seated three on a bike and carrying the yellow and red flags, shouting and generally creating nuisance. They soon moved on to the nearby ring road. Even if their activities got violent (don’t think it did) the police wouldn’t have been able to do a thing since the hooligans were “celebrating suvarna karnataka” and any action against them would be seen as being anti-Kannada!

suppose a group of hooligans, claiming to be hindu nationalists, goes and burns a church. the BJP and other likeminded forces are forced not to disassociate from them – for that would be seen as dissociating themselves from hindutva!

there were huge riots all over bangalore the day after Rajkumar died. No one could do a thing – “this is all in mourning” they said.

so my dear rioters, all you need to do to escape the law and gain support is to be vocal and identify yourself with some “noble” cause – be it language or religion or trade unionism or the poor or whatever. i can assure you you won’t be punished.

Yesterday I had been to the third edition of the Landmark quiz in Bangalore. To my utter disappointment, she didn?t turn up. Even if she did, she looks very different now (in which case I don?t have the crush on her anymore) and I didn?t recognize her. The fact that I didn?t qualify for the finals didn?t help matters either.

The landmark group, by way of its annual quiz in Chennai, has come up with a new brand of quizzing ? one that tries to fill the gap between the ?quizzers? quizzes? of Bangalore and Chennai which emphasize on logical reasoning and the more knowledge-based yet ?popular? quiz shows promoted by Calcutta.

Currently the world of quizzing has been fragmented into quiz shows and quizzes. The former try to keep the questions simple and answers complicated and the latter does the vice versa. Quizzes are careful to ensure that most questions are ?workoutable?. And not much care is put to ?trivial issues? such as marketing and formalization. It has a ?community? sort of feel and crowds aren?t too large. Quiz shows try to be showy and involve the crowds, dole out huge prizes and hog the papers and TV channels, but the questions are either downright obscure or downright easy.

The landmark quiz (and its cousin the Odyssey quiz) tries to marry the two formats. It tries to retain the intellectual and reasoning-based nature of traditional South Indian quizzing, while also making an attempt to take quizzing to the masses. Efforts include aggressive marketing in terms of newspaper ads, radio announcements etc (as against the traditional mailing-list and word-of-mouth publicity for other quizzes), a sense of professionalism when it comes to stage settings, organization etc., huge prizes and an attempt at formalization and standardization of processes.

An attempt is made (unless, of course the quizmaster is Derek No Brain) to make most of the questions ?workoutable? yet understandable to the masses. Questions are usually shorter than at normal quizzes. There are also few questions to make sure the quiz doesn?t go on for too long. A few ?audience-oriented? questions are thrown in into the prelims to make sure everyone scores and to keep audiences interested (which can at times seem really inane and vague to the average quizzer ? ?aeroplane paaandi? in Odyssey 2004 comes to mind). The better questions in the finals have something that a large number of people can relate to. There are a large number of audience prizes (which are usually books ? a big improvement over the Eclairs and five-stars handed out in normal quizzes). All part of an effort to keep the audience interested, and to maintain a full auditorium until the end of the event.

I would be grossly mistaken if I were to say that the format has not clicked. The Landmark and Odyssey quizzes have become part and parcel of the average Madrasi?s social calendar (they are strategically placed on national holidays; in fact the IIT Madras Open quiz was recently moved to Gandhi Jayanti to capture the ?national holiday? crowd). Entire families land up at the Music Academy, complete with picnic baskets for an afternoon of quizzing and socializing. One has to register his/her team several days in advance in order to get an opportunity to participate ? limited seating space, you see (the Music Academy is one of the largest auditoriums in Madras). There is a huge crowd and queue at the entrance of the auditorium with volunteers having a tough time controlling the crowds. Enthusiastic schoolkids jostle to get up and answer the audience questions ? to win the much-needed publicity and the generous gift hampers. And the average decibel levels are several notches higher than the usual quiz.

Several outstation teams make the torturous train/bus journey in order to take that shot at the prize packet, and the glory that goes with it. Competition is cutthroat, and the relatively (compared to normal quizzes) easy prelims don?t make matters much easier. Cutoffs are ridiculously high, and even a seemingly minor error can prove extremely costly. Every half chance ought to be taken, and that could make the vital difference between the place among the elite eight on stage, and being consigned to the back rows of the audience. And one needs to be concise and accurate with spellings ? unlike other quizzes, the papers are valued by non-quizzers (the scale of the quiz demands it) and there is no recourse to a revaluation. Once the answer papers are submitted begins the ardous process of announcing the answers and distributing audience prizes (the process is painfully slow, but this is necessary to keep the crowds in), which is by far the most torturous period in the quiz!

It is usually regular quizzers that make the cut, but there is usually at least one non-regular team that makes it, springing an upset. Stakes are high and competition fierce. The lighting (rather the lack of it) adds to the tension. The crowd is noisy and loud cheers and applause are the order of the day. The odd blooper by the quizmaster goes unnoticed. Finals questions are usually tough (compared to the prelims), and there are a few ?special rounds? thrown in to make the thing more audience-friendly. The prize distribution ceremony at the end is brief ? there are thankfully no speeches.

This form of quizzing has created its own set of celebrities. For instance, the Madras crowd goes orgasmic when it hears the team name ?Q.E.D.? (fact that the team has changed 100% – not one member from the original team remains ? is another matter). Few women qualify and teams with women get special treatment too (interestingly a large number of women attend these quizzes ? again unlike normal quizzes; and some turn out to be interesting). Also with a usually large outstation representation on stage, the ?local? teams get huge support.

The audience can?t have it better. So what about the ?players?? The ?serious quizzers? for whom this is yet another quiz and not a social event? The level of the quiz is compromised in order to appeal to popular sentiments. The ?community? feel that is so present in normal quizzes is totally missing. The quizmaster is this distant figure unlike the bloke who does the ?normal quiz? on rotation. It is way too formal and rigid for comfort. There is no guarantee that prelims papers have been valued fairly. The crowd is unwarranted and too noisy. Of course the prizes are great. As is the footage the winners get in the next morning?s The Hindu. And the opportunity to show off.

The standard of these quizzes has been brought down significantly in the last couple of years by way of introduction of non-quizzer quizmasters such as Derek No Brain. They have become too much of a quiz show and too little of a quiz. Sick formats (such as teams being progressively thrown out), inconsistent questions and quizmaster?s histrionics have crept in. The number of ?known faces? I saw yesterday was significantly lesser than usual. Amends should be made soon so as to preserve the format.

There are also other quizzes which have tried to fit into the space between a quiz show and a quiz. Askqance (by the KQA), the QFI open and the IITM Open (co-founded by yours truly) have tried to bring in the crowds without compromising on quizzing standards, and have met with reasonable success. However only time will tell how successful these formats will be in the long run.

?this is not a quiz show, this is a quiz?
– Quizmaster R Mohan at the Saarang Main Quiz finals 2003, while trying to explain a set of utterly complicated and incomprehensible rules before the finals.