Category: general

We had our “day zero” on Friday. As I had told you before, I had interviews scheduled with four big consulting firms. Had a total of fourteen interviews on the day, including 11 “case interviews”.

Must say that I did pretty well in at least 9 of my 11 cases. However, I slightly goofed up when it came to “personal questions”. All of them asked me exactly the same questions and I turned in almost exactly the same (practised) answers. Stuff like my weaknesses, people i look up to, what significant stuff I’ve done, what makes me happy, what makes me sad and similar kind of stuff.

One question, however, with which three consultants stumped me was “Given you JEE rank it seems like your CGPA is very low.” Had a tough time defending that. Once again, I have the same answer everywhere but didn’t seem to have much impact. Guess I’ll have to live with this fact for the rest of my life. I haven’t quite lived up to expectations.

Coming to other things, the papers are awash with news today that 65 people from IIMB have got “day zero” offers. They talk about daddu who set the record for the highest salary for an IIM grad. They also mention the names of all the day zero recruiters and AT Kearney finds a little bit of space there. On account of this news item, there have been quite a few incoming calls today, both to home and on my cellphone.

My mind goes back six years, to the day when we had our “graduation ceremony” at National Public School. Our principal had then said, “now that you people are leaving school, you’ll cease to be a name. you’re just going to be a number. a statistic”. Can’t disagree with that one! I don’t matter. I’m just one of the 65 who got placed on a particular day in IIMB.

Mulk Raj Anand, in his short story “Old Bapu” had written something to the effect of “when death is near, all significant events of your life start flashing in your head” (don’t remember the exact line, this is approximately correct though).

Must say today has been a day of heavy day-dreaming. Shut all my books at noon, and am “trying to chill”. going home, going on a long drive through the busy traffic in the middle of the city, playing wing cricket, eating lots of curd rice for dinner… yeah i know i’m bullshitting here but who cares!

Coming back to the point i was trying to make, I’ve been remembering lots of stuff that have happened to me over the last few years. some great, some good, some that makes me stab myself with an imaginary knife, some that make me want to jump out of the corridor here…

Anyways, I’m telling you perhaps for the third time that placements start tomorrow. Hope to sleep well tonight.

And as they said in a recent movie, “Some people die screaming… some die silent… but then there are these people of a third kind… “

As I had told you guys earlier, our campus placements begin on Friday. Till yesterday I was quite peaceful, and wasn’t letting that bother me too much. No “exam fever”, no stress, no tension; just plain chilling out, playing wing cricket and stick cricket, and the occasional mock case interview.

Last night I was chatting with a friend from IIMC. He has been placed with Phi. He started telling me about the interview process at IIMC, and how Phi, Ksi and Omicron have all made a good number of offers there. Just hope that they keep up the numbers here also, and hopefully increase it.

Somehow, it’s now sunk into me that ‘the process’ has begun. I feel the twang of tension. Have started stuttering like a parrot ever since. Hopefully I should be able to maintain my cool on the D-day.

Our placements begin this friday. I’m hoping to get into a management consultancy firm. Applied to four of them, and all of them have shortlisted me. Hoping to do well on the D-day.

Anyways the point of the post is about the hardsell that these companies are doing prior to the placement process. They seem to be going out of their way in order to make sure all our doubts are cleared, so that we make an “informed choice”, and all that jazz.

Company Phi has allotted “buddies” to each fo the shortlisted candidates. These buddies help out in the preparation and are responsible for answering the candidate’s queries. The buddy typically happens to be a not very senior alumnus who is not a part of the recruitment team. So we can “feel free” to ask him/her anything. My buddy happened to be somene I’ve been in touch with over the last few months regarding my career, so it was all the more easy for me.

Company Chi sent a mail regarding their process and also a “podcast” with some more info on their India operations (haven’t heard it yet). They also had informal “information sessions” on campus where some consultants clarified doubts. They’ve also said that we can expect a call from one of their more junior members soon so that we can clarify our doubts.

Now, the problem here is that there are so many people who offer to help you, after a point of time you feel you don’t need any help. Still you have occasions like this afternoon when I was woken up by an abrupt call from a consultant from Company Ksi. It was an ISD call btw. It’s not a nice thing, you know, to tell someone that you don’t have any questions. So I ask him the same questions I’d asked some 10 people before this, and got the same answers!

Company Omicron, in order to “differentiate themselves”, “treated” us at the Taj West End today. We were ferried back and forth in Lancers. Booze was also served, but I didn’t want to put arbit CP so abstained. Gorged myself on orange juice. Starters were also decent. And the horrible dinner was compensated for by decent desserts.

Now, the thing is there are 35 of us “shortlists” and 5 consultants. An average of 7 of us crowd around a consultant and ask him/her “pertinent” questions. The same 20 questions which we would have asked every consultant we’ve met in the last few weeks (and we’ve met quite a few of them). And they give us “pertinent” answers. 20 practiced answers for our 20 practiced questions. Halfway through the event, we had all become consultants. Now, we can all give perfectly valid answers to each of those 20 questions, both on consulting in general and Omicron in particular.

These consultants love to talk!! And they don’t mind saying the same thing over and over again also, as long as they’re saying something.

And yeah, I still want to be a consultant! And all you consultants who are reading this, hope this won’t adversely affect my chances at this friday’s interviews!

Supposed to be inspired by the Chakravyuha in the Mahabharata. A test of strength, stamina and endurance. Seven men taking on seven men, or you can say one man taking on seven men. One of the main reasons for my joining the RSS. The main reason India features (rather, used to feature; bastards scrapped it) on the medals tally in Asian games. Yeah, the title says it all.

I’m writing about it because of the unusual teamwork I’ve seen in this game. When a guy from the opposite side enters your half, holding his breath, six of the seven people form a chain, and the seventh guy stays away from the chain. Now, it is the seventh guy’s responsibility to somehow lure the opponent deep into the court, so that the other six can can quickly converge on him and trap him. There are these occasions where the opponent quickly runs from one end of the court to the other. Now the “defender” at the other end breaks loose adn the original loose guy joins the chain.

What I’m trying to hint at here is that there are occasions where ALL members of a team should not stick together but there should be one guy who stands separately and works independently, while striving towards a common goal. I know this idea sounds pretty lame without a practical example, but I’m not able to come up with one right now. Tell me if you find any.

Yesterday, walks into my room when I’m blogging and says that given the volume I churn out, I should rather try and write a book. He went on to say “just a 1000 words a day and you can probably become a bestselling author, a la Robert Jordan”.

Problem with writing a book is not that I can’t write 1000 words a day. It is that I can’t write 1000 words every day on the same damn thing. I would rather write 1000 words a day, on three different topics every day. Maintaining a general blog like this gives more freedom to my thought!

A month ago, I had thought of opening another blog, and segmenting my posts topicwise. I can classify most of my posts as Personal (today I got a crush on someone types), Descriptive (where I write about what I had for lunch), Topical (where I write about “issues”) and General, which doesn’t fit into any of the above three.

I think the audience for personal and descriptive posts is vastly different from that for Topical and General posts. So it would have made a lot of sense to maintain two journals. However, that would put constraints on the number of posts I put on each; I’d force myself to write in one of the journals even though I didn’t have any good ideas for it; the flow would’ve been lost.

So this is the way the journal remains. A chow-chow of many different kinds of posts. If not anything else, It will give freedom to my thought.

And yeah, in my break between placements and starting of job, let me see if I can come up with some good ideas for longer prose.

This season’s weddings are scheduled to start next Friday. We have around 180 brides to get married this time, and it is special because I happen to be one of them. We hear from our elders that the number of grooms coming this time is much more than last year, so we’ll have greater choice.

Having had a look at various grooms who came to show themselves off over the course of the last month, I have taken a very serious interest in five of them. One of them (people say he’s a little mad) has rejected me but the others seem to be interested in me. I have also told six others that I might be interested in them, though I’m not particularly interested. Hoping for the best.

There seem to be a lot of changes in our village due to the impending weddings. There seems to be a pall of tension and gloom all over the place. It is not very surprising, given that it is a matter of our lives. There is nothing worse than getting stuck with a bad husband, though I must say that in our community, divorce is fairly common.

In order to make themselves more attractive, some of our girls have been visiting the witch who lives in the end of the village who can change the way people look. They say that a visit to her is important in order to improve their chances of finding the husband they want. Some of them have come back looking much better than usual, though most of them have started looking really funny. Maybe the grooms like them this way, who knows. I, however, am not interested in this witch business and am hoping to make an impression by other means.

Maybe I was really immature last year, but I had written that ours is a very united tribe. However, a year later, having come of age, I beg to differ. Girls here seem to have changed overnight. We are all competing for the same grooms, you see, so there is no reason for us to cooperate.

People have generally started ignoring me. Some of them will be discussing about some groom, but when I reach the spot, they abruptly stop talking. Then, our elders have passed on some ancient manuscripts reading which is supposed to increase our chances of impressing the grooms. You don’t know how tough a time I had locating it. Finally one kind elderly girl shared it with me. I’m so grateful to her!

It is so funny, so weird. We all grew up together in this village, played together, did everything together, but now they don’t like me. In fact, I don’t think they like each other also. We all came to this place to find grooms, they say, and if we think you might beat us to our favorite groom, you have no right to be friends with us.

Anyways, I’m eagerly awaiting for the D-day. When my four favorite guys come here to pick brides. I sincerely hope at least one of them likes me. And yeah, I guess I need to get back to those manuscripts less the other girls beat me to it!

PS: You can find the full story of the weddings here.

Ten minutes ago, I mailed the second assignment of Financial Time Series analysis to the Prof. What has followed is a mixture of emotions… jubilation, relief, sadness, nostalgia… not able to describe accurately how I’m feeling right now.

Yeah, my MBA is over. Officially. Only evaluation (i’m sure of passing all courses) and the convocation remains. It’s been a good two years. Never once regretted coming to IIMB. I would be wrong if I say that I’ve never felt bad, it’s been quite a roller coaster ride.

There have been these numerous occasions when I’ve felt I’m a misfit in IIMB. There are these occasions where my topper mentality (even though I’m not a topper) has resulted in some unpleasant differences of opinion. I’ve succeeded in pissing off a large majority of my batchmates, for various reasons, at various points of time. There have been these occasions when I’ve sat on the parapet near my room, head hanging, wondering if I have a future at all.

Then there was the class picnic to Shivanasamudram last August. And the advertising competition the day after, when I directed a “mad ad” for the first time ever. The inter-section sports. Scholarship. Summer placements. England. G Base. J First. “Wing fart”. Wing Cricket. Tsepak. Futsal – 3 parttimers beating 3 institute team players 14-3. Basketball at L^2. Parties at L^2. Getting drunk – twice. Some of the people here. Blogging.

Apologies for whatever I’ve missed out from these lists.

Sniff Sniff