Author: SK

Have noticed this strange spoonerism while typing. I?ve noticed that some fingers of mine are much faster than others, leading to common mis-spelling. I often type ?dinfing? instead of ?finding? and I don?t even count the number of times I type ?teh? for ?the?. and “gatline” for “tagline”. interestingly a lot of such mistakes happen when my left index ginfer is involved!

Another common mistake I make while typing is using the wrong hand. On a number of occasions I type S (left ring finger) instead of L (right ring finger) and vice versa. Similarly I keep interchanging E and I!

Dear All,

Our request for restocking of food coupons has been processed. The new stock has come in through the Main Gate but not yet reached the Receipts desk. It will need to go through counting and inspection before it can be despatched onwards to the end users i.e. us! So, please bear with me for the next 20-25 mins by which time I will be certain of the transit progress of the coupons.

Shall send you an “update” as soon as I know of the availability.

With best regards,
M

Our client gives us food coupons which can be redeemed at their cafeteria so that we don’t go hungry. So this is the “processing” that the coupons go through before they reach us! God bless these large companies.

Executive Summary:
1. The quality of your weekend determines the quality of the following week
2. How much you enjoy your dinner depends upon how much you enjoy the company of the other people at your table

Now for some globe
For the first time since i started my job, i had a free weekend in Bombay. For a change there was no work, and managed to just laze around and consume coffee and read stuff and meet up with people.

Feels really good. I think the key to having a good week is having had a good weekend before that. Why don’t more non-European employers understand this? Really sad that my first such absolutely free weekend (where the only connection to work was my boss making a brief appearance in my dream yesterday) had to come after I had submitted my resignation!

Yesterday there was a MAMU (mumbai alumni meet up). 20 people turned up for the dinner at Sheesha. Was a strong get-together. Considering that most of us were seeing each other afte 4 months, there was really a lot to talk about and it was a lot of fun. Reminded me of term 1 actually, when everyone used to freely talk to everyone else, without any “gumbalization”. Sadly, fragmentation started happening in term 2.

Sheesha (in Bandra) is a strong place. we were seated on mattresses and quilts cross-legged (a la congress working committee) and thulped heartily. Hope we keep having such get-togethers. they’re good fun. Though i’m sure as time wears on frequency will wane, and finally this will get merged with Anusmaran.

an important thing people ask us to look out for while looking for a job is ‘people’. people who you are going to work with are definitely important to the quality of life at work, and an important thing to be kept in mind while looking for a job.

one thing, however, i was thinking of the other day – “good people” might not exactly imply “good people to work with”. people might be great to hang out with, nice to talk to, but not necessarily good people to work with. others would be people who you can team up with really well, whose styles of working might gel with yours, but you won’t be able to talk about cricket or politics, let alone philosophy, with them.

think when you say “people”, you actually need to look for “good people to work with”. life at the workplace is much more important than life outside (if the former is screwed up, the latter is also screwed) and you can always have friends outside of your workplace for the philosophy and cricket!

Update
Now that i’m looking for a job, can someone give me guidelines as to how i can figure these things out in a single interview session? As to whether the people at the firm are great human beings. And whether they’ll make great co-workers.

Following tuesday’s blasts, somebody opened a thread on one of the IIMB discussion boards where Alumni in Mumbai were requested to confirm their existence. Thankfully, there have been no casualties from our batch, and none from our immediate senior batch.

Block:
While on one hand i’m relieved, on the other hand i’m not at all surprised. For, the blasts took place on trains all of which left Mumbai’s commercial district before 6:30. Now, tell me which MBA gets out of office so early? All of us were in our offices when the attack happened, and thus all escaped unscathed!

Moral of the story: Do a MBA, you’ll not get bombed

Tackle:
It is only a one-off case that the bombs were on the train at the normal peak hour. However, there is no guarantee that terrorists might attack the commercial area in order to create a greater impact. What if there is a WTC-level attack on Nariman Point? Thousands of people will perish, and a large number of them will be MBAs.

If you are an MBA, there is a greater possibility of you working in places like WTC, Nariman Point, etc. than in other less pseud business places. So given that there is a huge possibility of a WTC level attack, it is better if one doesn’t do a MBA.

Everyone knows that time today is better than time tomorrow. And that money today is better than money tomorrow. The latter, of course is the reason we have something called interest rates, based on which ibanks are making millions. It is a concept that has been beaten to death, loads of authors have made millions on it, it is the ‘in thing’ in bschools today and all such crap.

Currently in my early twenties (i’m not yet 24, so i can still be in this bucket), I have a strong feeling that time today is much much more important than, say, time 10 years down the line. And I personally consider it to be more important than money today against money 10 years down the line.

different people, i believe have different interest rates for time, which makes it untrade-able (maybe thatz the reason no markets exist for this). and the rates of interest that people attach to this probably determines the career path one takes….

We moved into (what was then) this village in (what was then) the southern suburbs of Bangalore twenty two years ago. There was only one other house on our road, and parrots and butterflies used to frequent my parents? carefully tended flower garden. The nearest bus stop was ten minutes? walk away, and was served by one bus an hour to the city market. And there were only a few village shops nearby, as a result of which my parents would fetch most of our groceries all the way from Jayangar. How they used to carry all that (as well as me) on that faithful Bajaj scooter is still a mystery.

Life for the first few years was largely quiet, and we used to run to Jayanagar or Gandhi Bazaar for every little need. Our house was broken into once, and steel grill doors duly installed. The place was being connected by the newly built ring road (a 100-foot wide road to our area, such joy ? we had observed). and soon our road had few empty sites. However, autos would still loathe to ply to that area around the time we moved out (1996).

It seemed like a whole new city that we moved back into four years later. Anant Nag (the actor) had purchased two adjacent sites and built commercial property. First to occupy the complex was a Food World and the retail revolution had begun. A Madura garments factory outlet followed soon and Kathriguppa has never looked back.

People soon started selling out their houses for commercial property. Land use laws were put aside and residential sites shamelessly used for commercial purposes. A number of people who lived on the ring road built a commercial complex in the front part of their sites and continued to live behind that. From 2000 to now perhaps there hasn?t been a single day when there hasn?t been at least 2-3 construction projects on within 200 meters of my house.

Upendra, probably currently the best-known Kannada actor has constructed a house right opposite mine, and a Big Bazaar right next to his house has completed the ?development? of Kathriguppa. Or so we thought, until we were told that a PVR is coming up in the site next to the Big Bazaar.

There is a factory outlet of every conceivable clothing and footwear brand in the area, and three different pizza outlets have opened up within 100 meters of my house. Add to that the two mega retailers (and a Fabmall a little down the ring road), and restaurants of every possible cuisine. I first saw the impact of IT on the common man at small vegetable shop near my house ? the guy had installed an electronic weighing-cum-billing machine way back in 2002.

Living in this retail haven has completely spoilt me. Despite living in what is supposed to be one of the better localities of Bombay, I find several shortcomings. There aren?t enough restaurants around, I have to walk at least 10 minutes to find a medical shop, all shops close at 9, I have to go a little distance if I?ve to buy clothes? the list goes on.

There might not be parking space outside my house thanks to Upendra and Big Bazaar. We may find it tough to take out our car on Saturday evenings. There might be too much traffic on the roads leading to the place. The roads might be bad. Still, two months after moving out, I still miss Kathriguppa. Though I?m not sure I?ll want to settle down there in the long run ? I think I?d prefer Jayanagar for that.

the other day was cribbing that i haven’t written anything about my job. frankly, i haven’t had the time. this job is intense, extremely high pressure and at any given point of time there are at least half a dozen people bothering you with different things. the hours are long, and sometimes i’m made to work on weekends also, giving me little time to do the things i like to do, such as blogging. today my boss is on leave, so i’ve managed to take a few minutes out.

currently i’m a ‘data monkey’ and spend most of my life writing sql queries. there are a hundred different people who have a hundred different requests and me being in charge of the database have to design the appropriate query, pull out the data, put it in the appropriate format and give it to them. trouble is not too many of these people have used sql themselves, and thus don’t have even a faint idea of what it takes to pull data out of a complex database as i’m doing now. and expect me to meet impossible deadlines which i can’t. and i get badgered from all directions.

every day i wake up and ask myself why i’m doing what i’m doing. i find no answer. two paychecks have been deposited into my bank account, but have made no difference to my life, despite them being fairly substantial. the kind of work i’m doing i know i don’t want to do after this particular assignment is over. i’m not getting the time to do anything i want. i dream of excel sheets daily. this thing seems to have consumed me completely.

the other question i ask myself is, “if not this, what?”. and i’m afraid i can’t find an answer to that also, and that is exactly what keeps me going. i’m getting a fair idea of what i want to do and who i want to be 10-15 years down the line, but i have no clue what step to take right now to get there. the long term goals are the same as they were 7-8 months ago. which was when i decided to chuck my second investment banking job and try for this one. something has gone wrong somewhere.

people say it’s a problem with me that i’m not liking this job. “there are so many others who are uncomplainingly doing the same job”, they point out. “you don’t have the right kind of attitude”. maybe. maybe there’s something wrong with me. or it could just be the case that i’m not fitting in properly. need to figure that out, but don’t have time to stop and think.

my working style is very different from that of most others i know, and this job doesn’t seem to be suited to my style. i’ve talked to my bosses and asked them to cluster work and give me rather than giving it in bits and pieces. “i’m a compiler, not an interpretor”, i’ve told them. no avail. they say they’re the bosses and i should listen to them.

Most people are like Sri Lanka. At least the rest of my team is. When there is a target to be chased, they go all out in the first 15 overs and try to finish off the match by 25. Wonderful method. I’m more like Pakistan in 92. Keep wickets in hand, settle down, reach 100 in 30 overs, 150 in 40 and by then you have enough momentum to get to 250. Difficult to do it efficiently though, when you have someone behind your back who keeps telling you after each over that you’re behind the asking rate.

And yeah, of late Jayasuriya has been getting out early and sri lanka seems to be losing…