New Year and all that!

New Year another January, January was named after Janus. One face looking backwards in retrospection and the other forwards in anticipation. 2008 has been a very eventful and exciting year. On the personal front there was culmination of and exciting year at ISB; a life changing event in every sense of the word; excitement about a career in FMCG and a steep learning curve that followed. The World too went through huge changes the Global meltdown was of course the one that dominated the news channels and has impacted many lives, George Bush got booted out of Iraq and the World agreed with the treatment, George saw the man's sole but he would have done better had he seen the soul of the man in the mirror- not a very pleasant site- Mr. President. Barrack Obama became the president of USA- amazing; what a guy. I hope Obama is all that he promises to be. Ten guys held the country to ransom by attacking Mumbai but the NSG commandos and the policemen did us proud. Kashmir elections went off well- hope for the future. So an eventful year 2008 was.

The year ahead- challenging and exciting enough to stop me from sleeping at this hour. Never thought chasing sales targets can be so much of fun. So a very HAPPY 2009.

Mumbai- A turn for the worse

It is a week since the terrorists struck Mumbai. It was telecast live across the world and those ten men struck fear in the hearts of the everybody who witnessed the senseless violence. What was obvious was the extraordinary preparation of the terrorists and the extraordinary levels of unpreparedness of the Mumbai police. The police leadership was completely out of sync with the situation and the entire top brass was wiped out in the first hour of the attack. Why was senior police leadership in the line of fire is something nobody seems to have asked. Was it perhaps because they did not believe in their men, their systems and their preparedness? Or they had no way of judging the seriousness of the situation. Anyways India did lose a few good men. Men who would have perhaps done more for the country by staying alive.
Our archaic systems have failed them and perhaps the irony is that these men were so much the part of the system. I only a few months back was a regular commuter on Mumbai's local trains with CST an everyday destination and origin. Everyday I travelled in Mumbai's local trains I felt completely exposed as the quality of security measures at CST were shockingly mediocre. For the economic capital of India it is shocking that we are again and again subjected to security lapses. The politicians are too busy raking up issues that are irrelevant to the people of Mumbai but the Marathi Manus gets seduced by the jingoistic blabber of selfish politicians. It is time that we demand more from our politicians more that changing names of cities, more that some AK-47 fodder (the police officers) and more than Marathi taxi drivers.
We need a cleaner, greener and secure Mumbai. Mr. Politician and Mr. Bureaucrat can you please just do that and we shall continue to vote for you, we after all vote you in year after year for scratching and kissing your collective behinds for most of the five years you are in power and scratching your heads when some nuts decide to go on a killing spree.
In the meanwhile the wait continues for "CHANGE"- true change please!

Yeh Hai Mumbai Meri Jaan

Landing at the Mumbai airport and you get a draft of humid breeze and all the smells of Mumbai, you wonder whether it is the sea or the millions of human beings trying hard to survive and a few others who have a time of their lives. I know now why foreigners are so fascinated with Mumbai's poverty and my feeling is that it is so juxtaposed to extreme wealth that one wonders how can there be so much poverty where there is so much of wealth. The grime and dirt is all pervading and a turn into Dharavi while travelling to South Mumbai from the airport makes one wonder the reasons as to why people choose to live in such misery. The famed Mumbaiya spirit of adjusting and smiling in adversity is not what I see. I see a crowd of people living the way they do because they have no choice and the scam of the famous Mumbaikar attitude is pulling wool over the eyes of multitude of humanity that lives in sub-human conditions. Every other day a building collapses in Mumbai killing a few, that shakes up a few people to shout hoarse about the need to bring in building reforms, every other day a person falls of the local train and all that it attracts a tut-tut from the multitude of people who carry on their journey and their fateful ends on this fast local called the life in Mumbai. The problem perhaps is that the Mumbaikar is adjusting and takes in his stride all the stories that are spun around his spirit, THEY ARE FOOLING YOU MAMU. Please do not adjust, please demand basic civic amenities, please demand a right to safe drinking water, please demand better land usage, please demand protection to heritage buildings in Mumbai, please demand better quality of life. Please get mad, really mad and stop adjusting, and believe me the Vada Pav will be as good in a cleaner Mumbai as it is in today's Mumbai perhaps even tastier.

ISB "These are some of my favourite things"

The past 2 months since I joined HUL have been a lot of fun. I have clocked some serious air-miles over this period. I have been to Gurgaon, Mumbai, Varanasi, Balia, Jaunpur, Renukoot and Bangkok. Each of these places was an adventure. The fun of being in a FMCG marketing firm and especially HUL is that one sees all those Kotler fundas unfold real time. But that is a different subject the aim today is to write about what all I fondly remember about ISB. Come to think of it this is more to bring closure to the experience called ISB. The things that I remember from ISB are a mixture emotions and sensory experience that ISB is. So here goes, the LRC at 8 A.M with the spiral staircase bathed in the sunlight filtering through the glass dome on the top, the satisfaction after entering the last line on an assignment, watching rain drops fall in the ground outside my studio while I sipped a cup of piping hot tea, the open drapes in the class room while Prof. Rajeshwar Upadyay went over Lessons from world literature, a great sense of achievement just walking up to the Academic Centre from my quad, a sense of a welcoming home while heading from the Academic Centre to SV2 and the late night (I mean really late night) walks with Rano, the lunch group (Srav, Karthik, Jaggu dada and Sneha), the offer from HUL, the graduation day, the squash court and the twinkle in my parents' eyes when I graduated. ISB was a blast- a source of lifetime memories.
The year at ISB will keep coming back to me every time a cue gets thrown at me like the raindrops knocking at my office window right now!

ISB MAKES A SPLASH IN FT GLOBAL RANKINGS

28/01/2008 is one date that everybody from the batch of 2008 will remember. They would remeber what they were doing when they got to hear the news first. The news was the huge splash made by ISB in Global Rankings. ISB came in at 20th in the global rankings in one of the most respected rankings- The Financial Times rankings. It is no mean achievement. To be part of ISB at such a time and see history unfold is something that I will cherish forever.

There was a celebratory lunch at the Atrium and the entire batch broke into an impromtu chant- "ISB ROCKS" "ISB ROCKS" "ISB ROCKS" and rock its does. I have a feeling that celebrations would continue for some time to come.

It is also time to think about the power of a dream accompanied by a zeal to achieve it. The sense of achievement the pioneers of ISB must be feeling must be awesome. The collective conciousness of the ISB must be rejoicing. The support staff, the faculty, the Governing Board, the student body, the spouses, the alumni and the recruiters have all contributed to create a way of life that ISB represents.

So thank you all those who preceded me at ISB and welcome all those who would join the ISB dream in years to come.

Congratulations!!!

LEARNING BEYOND THE CLASS- AIKYA

Has been a long time since I wrote a post. So here goes- yesterday was an eye opening experience. We were invited by our Aikya family for dinner. Aikya family is the family away from home. These families are the elite families from Hyderabad's social circles. This gives ISB students an opportunity to interact with the finest families of the Hyderabadi society. The one lesson my Aikya family patriarch gave me was- "Never, Never associate yourself with a looser". The negative energy of the looser is strong enough to bring you down. Reminds me of the STAR WARS funda- "May the force be with you". The force here is the positive thought that you generate and the positive thought that those around you generate.

The other aspect was how small the world is. Six degrees of freedom hit home yesterday. One of the business partners of my Aikya patriarch is arelative of mine. This is an amazing coincidence. So I am a huge convert to networking. You never know which happy coinincidence you would stumble on around the corner.

Dean Deepak Jain at ISB

Dean Jain's visit to ISB was quite an event. Khemka Hall- the auditorium was choc-a-block full, a week before the end term exams this was quite an event. The entire student body was looking forward to the event and Dean Jain did not disappoint the audience. The first thing that strikes you when you meet Dean Jain is the complete absence of any accent. For somebody who has stayed in the United States for such along while this is quite an interesting feature.

Dean Jain narrated a story (it happened during the Tsunami that hit Thailand) of an elephant in Thailand that broke the rope it was tied with and ran away just before the tsunami hit. The rationale for the Elephant's behaviour was that because animals are acutely aware of their surroundings and can pick up shock waves through their legs, they can feel seismic activity before humans do. The lesson- be firmly rooted to your roots and you shall not only survive you will prosper. No doubt Dean Jain does not have an accent.