Pertinent Observations

I’m so glad i wrote CAT when I did. No way in hell I would’ve been able to clear it this year. Too few questions. Too much time. Too much negative for wrong answers 😀

Add two extra spoons of sugar to your cappuccino but don’t stir. Drink the cappuccino – down to the last drop (a stirrer which can double up as a straw helps). The “residual” caffeineated sugar tastes too awesome. And is at times capable of giving you a maajor high (don’t know whether there is actually some chemical reaction which produces some “substance” or if it’s just all in the mind). The stronger the coffee the better.

I woke up this morning humming this arbit song from “A saucerful of secrets”. Really funny, given that I don’t listen to this album too much and the last time i listened to it was about a week ago. And half an hour after I woke up, I was humming “It would be so nice” from “Piper at the gates of dawn” – another Floyd album i seldom listen to.

Among other things, I had a wonderful dream this morning and woke up really happy. However, I’m just not able to recollect what the dream was about. Hellllppppp!!

It’s a question that has been bugging me for a long time, and I’ve blogged about it before. It is now more than two years since I started this journal and many posts and many hits later, I’m wondering what to do with it.

Thing is i write a variety of stuff on this thing. Right from profound analyses of businesses to why I got depressed last night. From deep insights on relationships (:P) to arbit PJs. I’m wondering if I’m spoiling it all by putting it all into the same pot – like making Bisibelebath. Sometimes I start wondering if I should cook the rice separately, dal separately and vegetables separately and then give the reader the choice to mix them and eat.

The last time I had popped this question, I had been advised to carry on in this bisibelebath format, but tag my journal. I have followed the advice to a T, and now tag all my entries. I classify my entries under “arbit“, “general“, “business“, etc.

A fair arrangement – people can come to my journal and depending upon the tag decide to read the post or not. However, a new problem has cropped. Recently my father figured out that his boss reads my journal! Now my parents want me to keep all “personal” entries out of this journal and instead stick to just “funda posts”. “Don’t waste your writing talents (!!??!??) on such useless stuff”, thundered my mom, “and write about issues only”.

One option would be to make all personal posts friends only, however there is a large number of people who visit my blog for the personal entries and don’t have a LJ id. Another is to start another blog (on blogger or wordpress or something) and move either “funda” or “personal” posts there. However, the “brand” of Pertinent Obeservations has been built on all kinds of entries, so I might lose “marketshare” if I end up splitting it. Another option would be to say write all personal posts on another journal and then provide a link to that from this journal whenever i post on that.

Advise, please!

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.