Pertinent Observations

Having been to two schools with a strong campus lingo, I find it difficult to talk in “normal English”, and often break off into a combination of IITM and IIMB dialects! only saving grace is that a part of it is common to a number of other campuses in India, so people do understand me.

The other day I was telling God that every new school you go to, your vocabulary expands. He counterd by saying that it could even contract and there’s hajaar polymorphism in most lingo. For example, the number of meanings “put” has in IITM can even rival “set”.

Of course, I’m extremely proud of the fact that I’ve been party to introduction of a number of new words to the IIMB lexicon. Words like “are” (means really good or really awesome), or “jai” (borrowed from RVCE which in turn is borrowed from gen Bangalore Kannada slang, but given a whole lot of new meanings). Are.

Anyways, I’ve put enough cock now, so I’ll tell jai. But wait, just have a look at this arely are MA thesis (came out a year back but don’t think i’ve linked to it yet, so doing it now):

Click to access MAthesis_EvelynRichter.pdf

PS: two of my most popular “tags” – general and arbit are campus lingo!

I would like to call it the ability to see the lighter side of things even when the situation is bleak.

Some others call it as being frivolous, and not being concerned enough regarding the bleak situation at hand.

During an ego-surfing binge yesterday, I found that searching for “pertinent observations” turns up this blog as the first result. And googling for “skthewimp” also yields similar results.

Of course, having a common name such as Karthik or having an english word such as “SKimpy” as a nickname does complicate matters – my blog shows up nowhere in the first few pages if you google for either of these. My oldest nickname “SK” falls in the same category – again too common a set of initials for me to be significant.

My other nickname “Wimpy” yields better results though – notwithstanding popeye and the burger joint. This blog ranks seventeenth (as of yesterday) in all searches for “wimpy”. However, searching for “wimp” doesn’t yield much luck.

Combinations of names of course yields much better results “karthik wimpy” and “sk wimpy” both lead to this blog. interestingly “karthik skimpy” throws up my defunct blogspot account (which i use only for commenting) as the first result, with this being a close second! maybe it’s got to do with google’s bias for blogger!

Anyways the search threw up some other interesting stuff. For example THE’s description of how i got my nickname (it’s a long and painful post, ctrl+F for wimpy to find the relevant part) and some of my other posts.

Oh yeah, the search also led to the first ever twisted shout story written by kodhi. Good stuff. Unfortunately for reasons unknown to us, we stopped that journal in the second year. Else I would’ve had another nice bullet point in my CV!

It’s happened twice in two weeks so it’s not funny. Two sundays back, I bump into Vyshnavi and Kavya at the Deep Purple concert. Last monday, I see Kuku (as in arvind, not ) and Ranjani at a Barista. And each time there are three of us simultaneously asking one another “how do you guys know each other?”

Ranjani was my classmate at NPS and Kuku was with me at my JEE coaching factory. As far as I remember, I can’t think of any “affiliation group” they are both part of. She went to RV, he to BMS. They haven’t worked together, they haven’t been to the same school for sure. So I ask them “how do you guys know each other?” And it so happens they choose the very moment to ask the rest of us the same! (for the record, Kuku and Ranjani didn’t know each other till ten minutes before I met them, and they were at Barista meeting a common friend)

Vyshnavi and Kavya were my classmates in two different schools. So I meet Vyshnavi at the concert and see this girl with her who looks extremely familiar but I can’t place her. Since I know vyshnavi through “the SAMS affiliation group”, I search in the SAMS list in my head to try and place the other female. I can obviously not place her since Kavya was not in SAMS – she wsa my classmate at NPS! So after a round of apologies, I pop the usual “how do you guys know each other”! (as it turned out, in this case too those two had met ten minutes before i met them – they had come to the concert on the meherbani of a common frined who had supplied them passes)

Interesing “social graph” these occasions display. A very strong “rectangle” (consider me, the two friends i’m meeting and their common friend to be the four nodes) and a “weak diagonal” (my two friends who had met ten minutes before) and an even weaker second diagonal (on both occasions i’m introduced to the common friend).

I’m wondering about the incidence of such “diagonal less rectangles” in our circles..,. probably i need to get data from orkut and check it out…

I hear that Turkmenbashi Sapurmurat Niyazov’s successor as president (or king or whatever) of Turkmenistan is the one who looks closest to Turkmenbashi! Though the logic may seem weird, i’m not surprised at all. One thing turkmenbashi did during his rule was to erect thousands of statues of himself all over the country! and given the madness of these guys, his successor is expected to do the same, costing enormous amounts of oil dollars! `

but with a successor woh looks like his predecessor, there is actually no need to put fresh statues! all they need to do is to change the nameplate!

amazing stuff! our politicians should learn a thing or two from these central asians when it comes to costcutting…

When Satyendra Kumar Dubey was shot last year the papers were full of “IITian killed”. He got loads of footage in the TV media, and a lot was made of the fact that he was an IITian!

Now, three days back when Adeep lahiri gets killed in bangalore, he has been downgraded to a “techie”. Some papers even went to the extent of calling him a “BPO guy”. Only some painful reading of the detailed news items revealed he’s a graduate of IITKgp.

So does that mean IITKgp isn’t as IIT as IITK (dubey’s alma mater)? Does it mean that an IITian stands to lose his IIT status if he does MBA at SPJain? Does it mean that an IITian is not an IITian if he’s in Bangalore but he is more IITian if he lives in Bihar (of course, IIT has greater brand value in bihar htan in bangalore – i’ve had embarrassing situation where people asked me if i joined IIT because i didn’t get a seat in RVCE… or if i’m studying at ITI… etc.)?

My disgust iwth the media remains.

had my year-end performance review late last week. surprisingly for me, it turned out to be pretty good. my bosses seem to be happy with whatever I’ve been doing and have asked me to “keep up the good work”.

given the A T Kearney fiasco, which had (among other things) totally shattered my confidence and had led me to ask myself if i am fit at all for the corporate world, this provides for some relief. the review may not be as good as the one I had got at J P Morgan during my internship, but good enough to let me know that I am doing decently enough to carry on, and hopefully get a decent bonus.

right now though, I’m waiting for tomorrow evening. My vacation starts tomorrow evening and will go on till the 1st of January. Don’t have any concrete plans yet, apart from making up for all those lost hours of sleep, and catching up with school buddies, many of whom will be flying in from different parts of the world during the next ten days.

I always used to wonder about the concept of “playing for lunch” – you might have observed that when there are only a couple of overs left for lunch, the batsmen give up on their efforts to score and just try make sure they don’t get out. I never understood the logic behind that.

Now I do. Two days to go for my vacation, and “no enthu da” is happening. Just spending eight hours in the office, making a deck out of whatever i have worked on in the last couple of months. That’s it. I’m not attempting to score. Just making sure i’m at the wicket and not doing anything silly!

And while on the topic, I’m really thrilled by India’s victory in the first test. And also, i’m damn happy to see dada back in form. And I know the secret behind his success – have you noticed that red bandana under his helmet?

Red bandana ki jai!

Yes, it’s official now. Sabre Holdings has been bought by two Private Equity firms – Texas Pacific Group and Silver Lake partners. The deal has been valued at over USD 5 billion and as a consequence of it, Sabre (ticker symbol TSG) will be taken off the New York Stock Exchange coming quarter 2 of next year.

The move to take the company private has set off a sort of panic in our office here, with a number of people fearing for their jobs. Reports have been heard about employees saying “our company has been sold out, we’ll lose our jobs”. Thankfully, yesterday the top management of the Bangalore office called for an all employee meeting where they formally communicated to us the deal and tried to assure us that nothing is going to change.

For a start, with most of Sabre’s competitors in the ticket booking business (Worldspan, which has been recently taken over by another private competitor Travelport, etc.) being private, probably top management felt that we might be disclosing too much by being a listed firm and in that sense, a delisting was imminent. However, given Sabre’s holding structure, with a large number of owners holding small portions of the firm (in other words, without a “promoter”), the process of delisting would require that someone takes on temporary ownership. And this is where, I think, the PE firms step in.

From my personal point of view, the fact that PE firms have taken over signals that they expect our cash flows to improve significantly over the next 2-3 years, and that Sabre’s valuation in this period will grow at a rate much higher than the market rate. From the entire firm’s point of view, it sounds really good. What is not so good from my point of view is that I belong to this company called Sabre Airline Solutions (Sabre Holdings, as the name suggests, is a holding firm and has three firms – Travelocity, Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions under it), which is not exactly the cash cow of the group. In fact, a number of products of Airline Solutions are loss-making, and TPG has explicitly said in some news reports that they are interested in Travelocity. Given that PE firms typically will want to go in for some kind of reorganization, there is a possibility that we (Airline Solutions) might get spun off. Still, in the short term (next year or so), I don’t think there will be significant impact.

However, this is the first time I am seeing PE firms buying up 100% stake in a firm, so it is going to be interesting to see how it goes. Hopefully it will all be for the better. And I won’t lose my job!

The views expressed here are personal and do not in any way reflect the views of my firm. Also, I am nowhere near the top managemnt of my firm, so I have had no part to play in the takeover.