some lines dedicated to my batch-mates (:

As I’m sitting & thinking on my way towards my home-town,

At times I feel overwhelmed as de emotions make me drown;

It all started even before I came to Trivandrum and we’d got the ‘stuff’ by snail-mail,

Somehow I got the feeling that it’s not gonna be a cakewalk n I became ready for the hail;

I chatted with some of my batch-mates and sought each and every piece of info on college n Trivandrum,

Some good conversations actually happened on Google Groups including the one on Green Revolution;

All set, I landed at Thampanoor, met Saneesh Cheta, the only medium of conversation was sign-lingo,

But dats okay, I thought majority of my interactions would be inside college, that too in English so…;

I was comfortable until I got out of the Ambassador and had a view of Kenton Leisure,

Gosh! This is a hostel or a three-star hotel... anyways I completed the formalities major;

Sridhar knocked the door, “Hi! We are your seniors.” I went to their room with a bit of anxiety,

In few minutes they made me feel comfortable freeing my mind of most of the things nitty-gritty;

Next morning Hareesh knocked the door as I was doing yoga on the floor,

Later he told me that he had the illusion of me being a person religious & pure;

We were welcomed to ASB on the first day by offering each a rose,

Followed by the lectures of different stakeholders, man! That was a dose;

How could I forget that lecture, where jotting down the points was given so much of importance,

He he he... but nobody jotted down the points of the lecture on the initial day and hence...

After being scolded repeatedly, we seemed to have understood the importance of Jot Down,

And therefore the name of our local Google Group was none other than Jot Down;

Then the Foundation module started with much stress on English, Maths and Analytic thing,

And we learnt a lot of things, besides the wide-wide usage of the word 'thing';

Oh! How can I forget the Outbound Training also known as OBT,

10% training 90% fun I'd say, to explore my batchmates, it was a good opportunity;

Also the fact that one good for nothing [me] and one good for everything were made Class Reps,

One too good an activity before each of the english sessions which was supposed to remove communication gaps;

Semester one came & for each of courses we're formed into groups,

Before this I'd never worked in groups, no wonder… some uncomfortable factors were there in loops;

Three friends of mine took me to a tea-shop n lectured me for 2 hrs. on how to socialize,

Don't know if it made some difference but it was a nice time-pass with tea and fries;

A stupid person like me used to put status message like “Nobody wants to sit with me”,

Further, Hareesh had a problem with my turning on the lights & turning off the fans in the hours early.

This was all I was able to write in the long train journey. :)

Pondering Post-PGPM...

The enthusiasm inside me forced me to write the complete blog in verse,

But coming to the second line, I’m searchin a word to rhyme wid verse;

So you see, this poetry has become such a boring dose,

It would be much better if I continue writing in prose.:D

I had an opportunity to visit (one of the Batch-5 students) Thomas K K’s hometown deep down in Kerala. We started at 1400 hours from the Trivandrum Central and had a combination of one train, two buses and one auto to reach his home at 2030 hours. It was quite interior a part of Kerala. What surprised me was the presence of good roads and constant power supply, despite being far away from the metropolitan life. Next day early morning I and Thomas left his home to meet some of his relatives and to have a look at his rubber plantations.

It being a sloping area, the path either tended upwards or downwards. For a North Indian like me, it was a peculiar experience. We also used some extremely steep shortcuts to skip some walking distance on the main road. For the first time in my life I saw staircases made of stones. What made the rocks stuck to each other was what I was unable to understand. One of the Thomas cousin’s (of approximately Thomas’s age) knew Hindi besides some 17 other languages. I happily interacted with him in Hindi for about 15 minutes. Then we went to see his rubber plantations. I observed the cuts on the rubber trees (which were there to ensure that the flow of rubber plant remains consistent) and the cup to collect the rubber-milk.

In the last blog I wrote about the Marketing Research Elective. Then we had a CII Project in which we’re supposed to get a Membership Value Assessment Questionnaire filled by the top-executive of several companies and consequently analyze it. Initially, the impression given by the faculty-members was that we had to travel around Kerala to get this job done and that was a major factor which attracted me to volunteer for this project. Rubini, Deepa, Lekshmy and Nishas were also with me for this project. And we were promised 2 additional credits for this project [I’m still looking for those 2 credits in my Grade-Sheet L].

Anyways I got a good opportunity to talk with several CEOs and MDs to get this form filled. We were given the database from the CII Office. I got a response rate as low as 5% to the questionnaire. The itineraries of people at the top management often clashed with the time of our call. I learnt a good deal of following-up. But all the activities of this project were encompassed by the black TATA Indicom Walky. No travel!

Then we had this Integrated Cases 2 for three credits. On the pattern of ‘The Mummy Returns’ I named the folder for this elective ‘Integrated Cases Returns’. This was a core elective which meant that we did not have an option to discard it. I’m pretty sure had this course been an optional one, hardly one or two students would have gone for it. The impression of Integrated Cases (in Semester 2) was pretty good on my mind and I was expecting IC2 to be that much interesting. But may be because of the pressure from other electives or several other activities (including the placement ones), things didn’t work out very smoothly.

In International Business & Logistics teams of three were announced and each team was supposed to make a presentation on some specific topic followed by five case-discussions lead by each team. Then Bhaskaran Sir came into picture. He properly illustrated us what American tourists are good at. I still can’t forget those moments. J

Valuations, Mergers & Acquisitions was one elective I was eager to write about. The only thing I seemed to have learnt from this elective is 2 + 2 = 5 [logically also it’s incorrect, you see! just kidding]. Frankly speaking, I felt that I didn’t extract much value from this course, not to say that the elective or any of its component was irrelevant. Obviously I don’t blame anybody else other than me for this. But I think that the course would have added more value if the teaching methodology had been more white-board oriented than ppt oriented. Also, I was a bit confused as to which book should I access as a background material.

I didn’t opt for Contemporary Trends in Marketing but I got to know that the first case of Rural Marketing was contraceptive-marketing which made me interested to sit in the sessions. Luckily none of the CTIM sessions clashed with the sessions of any of my electives and I pursued one-third of that elective.

Actually while selecting the electives I was a bit confused between Services Marketing and CTIM. Both had 3 credits and CTIM was supposed to be taught by three faculty-members whereas Services Marketing had its own charm of being kind-of non-physical product. Finally I decided to explore Services Marketing [later with the number of tests CTIM students had to undertake, I gave a pat on my back for not choosing CTIM; though nothing to suggest that Services Marketing proved to be a cakewalk]. And with the sessions of Services Marketing, memories of Product Management (Semester 3) were back. There were four students in total and every day presentations were supposed to be made by at least two students. Again the presentations by me made me realize that I need to be a bit more confident while making one.

There ends the story of electives. I don’t know about other colleges but we had an active Postponement Committee at our college, the constituents of which kept changing according to the needs of the hour. Project-deadlines, Tests, Term-papers and what not came under the purview of this committee. I had the privilege of being an active member when it came to make our final Product-presentations (Product Management) in Semester 3. We submitted the final report and just wanted to defer the presentations to the last day of Semester 3. And I can’t forget the smile on the face of Rakhee Ma’m (while our gang of seven was approaching Satheesh Sir) and Satheesh Sir (when we requested him to postpone the presentations).

While exploring my phone I activated the built-in email client and put the Gmail settings. Now, if I put the Inbox-update interval to five minutes; after the interval of every five minutes my phone will connect to check if I’ve got a new mail. Not exactly the Push-Mail Technology (the one which BlackBerry has), but quite similar. Then I thought to put some interesting signature to mails sent by the phone. Normally when you receive a mail from a BlackBerry set, the signature is

--

Sent from BlackBerry

I know this is stupidity but my Nokia phone is black in color, so I made my phone’s signature as

--

Sent from BlackNokia

using DoCoMo

I’ve been least interested in Cricket; the last match I watched dates back to Wills World Cup 1996. But the business potential this Indian Premier league promised was phenomenal and made me interested, not in matches per se but the business value. I read somewhere that the brand value of IPL has raised from $2.03 bn to $4.13 bn. A very impressive growth of more than 100%, that too in a very new business idea! You see, IPL is satisfying all its stakeholders [in the sense sponsors are getting attention, public is getting entertainment (pun intended, most welcome to take whatever way you want to take it), organizers are having an overall profit]. But the recent happenings simply proved that every coin has its flip side.

My room-partner Nishas has got a massive database of Hindi, Malyalam, English, Tamil (I think there are more languages…) songs and when I felt like listening any specific song (in his presence in the room), the maximum I used to do is to either sing a few lines of the song in my sore voice or just hum the tone of the song. Nishas pleasantly used to take over and I start enjoying the song in his wall-breaking but melodious tone.

I always wanted to visit the Kovalam beach but things were not falling in place. And on the very last weekend of my stay in Kerala, one of my Keralite friends proposed for a trip to Kovalam. Now this is what I call hitting a six on the last ball when one needs just one run to win. Then I love riding. And I love rain. And in VM&A we’re taught that 2 + 2 = 5. So as we’re going to Kovalam, it started drizzling. The combination of the rain and the ride was superb. I felt like riding and riding in the rainy rain. But as we reached Kovalam, both the act of riding and rain stopped L.

There were some huge rocks on the sea-shore and the waves were continuously coming with great force and hitting the rocks. The result was formation of very fine particles of water in the atmosphere of that area and that was what made sitting pleasant there. And I was wondering if this energy of waves could be amassed as the process of waves keep hitting the rocks goes on for 24 hours.

Strategic Infl… Wat? Gimme a BrEaK!!!

As I was crossing the Sharma Dhaba to take the elective-Marketing Research Final Test, a thought struck my mind. The MR Final Test was supposed to be held in soft form (so the answers were supposed to be typed on a computer and then the file was supposed to be transferred to a pen drive; nothing on paper). Hitherto, except some one-day competitive tests, all the tests I’ve taken were on paper and not on computer. During my stay at Delhi in the years 2005-06, I happened to go through the book ‘Only the Paranoids Survive’ by Andrew S. Grove. He coined a term ‘Strategic Inflection Point’ which he explained as a time

in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. I was wondering if this Final MR test is actually such a point (in the examination system) when the mode of taking test slowly transubstantiates from pen to keyboard. The last time I wrote a personal letter and sent it through good old India Post was in 2005. The telecommunication system had slowly superseded the personal letter. And similarly the computer is slowly creeping into the examination system (from just putting the schedules on computer to this point when the answers are typed and not written).

Pen-power cannot be substituted by key-tapping,

De feeling simply comes that something is lacking;

Aha, here comes de i-Pad with virtual keyboard,

But I doubt if even that can undermine de pen-sword.

My last blog was about the Public Systems Project. The 4^th semester followed. In the third semester I opted for eight electives (in a nutshell I went for each and every elective except the two HR electives). That semester was kind-of exhausting one. Now, I haven’t ever taken a New Year resolution. I actually wonder at the logic behind waiting for Jan 1 to venture a good habit or to leave a bad one. So, having experienced the hectic schedule in semester 3, I took a semester-resolution to take bare-minimum electives and I did that. But on the first day itself, the Marketing Research elective was there and I having no other work thought to explore the session.

I took the permission from Mr. Harish to attend the sessions. Now he was a bit different (I’m not sure how to explain in what sense) while explaining concepts, giving live examples, citing his experiences (directly imported from Canada & places around there), making us do group-tasks etc. Impressed and having the minimum credits for the semester 4 I thought to audit the elective. Overall, the 24 sessions (some of my elective-mates said that technically it was a one day course) of MR Elective were like a cool breeze acting as a warm-up activity for the 4^th semester.

It’d been 8 years since I attended any marriage in my relations. And during the break between semester 3 & semester 4 (in Dec), I wasn’t able to visit my home. My parents were coming to attend a marriage at Jamshedpur, so I thought it’d be a good break to attend a marriage and to meet my family at the same time. So, I took the train to Jamshedpur (the train journey from Trivandrum to Jamshedpur takes around 55 hours). When the train reached Rourkela at 0500 hrs. on Monday Morning (I left Trivandrum on Friday at 2330 hrs), it was continually being announced at the platform “No train will proceed to Jamshedpur before 0900 hrs”.

Some of my co-passengers expressed their doubts that Maoists had declared ‘bandh’ for 3 days starting from Monday and this halt of train is somehow related to that. Tired and a bit frustrated (3^rd day of my journey and the destination still seemed to be far off), I talked to the people at the platform when I got to know that Maoists had blown off a part of the only rail-track between Rourkela and

Jamshedpur. After the rail-tracks had been restored, the train restarted and on the way a vendor showed us the actual place where the rail-tracks were blown off. 5-6 RPF Commandos were there in my coach to tackle any untoward situation and butterflies were there in my stomach… The forest around the area was very dense (which would have acted as a haven for Maoists) of which I took the picture on the left.

I don’t know if I’ve observed it correctly but with the dominance of networking websites, I wonder if people have started criticizing more about things like ‘Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’, ‘iPad’ or ‘Buzz’. I don’t know which one is new? My observation of people criticizing more or people have actually started criticizing more! I learnt ‘Consumer’s Sovereignty’ concept in B.Com, but it seems that this case pertains to somewhat a ‘Networker’s Sovereignty of Criticizm With a Narrow-Mindset’. Google’s Buzz has been criticized by many people on the ground that Google is trying to compete with Twitter. But how do people forget that when they think of Google Account, they’ve to just worry about one username and one password. Everything else (be it contacts, online documents, selective news etc.) is integrated!

So if you manage to read till this point, I hope you won’t mind going through some rhyming lines J

Dis world, its each element is an illusion,

i better be not trapped in dis confusion;

yes! I mean what i just wrote,

it's not simply taken by some quote.

Y m i so cheerful today,

Is dere a bad news on its way?

Ah! Here aligns de rhythm,

after a hiatus, comes de poem.

Poetry doesnt seem 2 b a cup of my tea,

Whatever i write turns out to be silly;

But this hasnt deterred me enuf to stop dis 'silsila',

For i remember a line in malyalam 'njan niruthilla'.

Silsila (Hindi) means series, and Njan niruthilla (Malyalam) means I won’t stop.

On PSP Report submission-

Submitted de PSP report,

Felt like conquered a fort;

Not sure it'll make any sense,

but m ready 4 de CII project coming hence.

The night before the MR End-term-

Difficult 2 believe dat tomoro is de end-term,

Lets c wat marks m goin 2 earn;

I introduced myself 2 de book saying hi,

But 11th hour mein kuch bhi samajh mein na aaye :(

The night before the International Finance Mid-term-

In a least mood to study i'national finance,

But it being a mid-term... Cant take a chance;

It’s a bit boring to study by ppt,

But have got no other option, u c.

On the train to Jamshedpur…

Nature’s beauty is being adored by me,

Wondering if any other job is better than dis;

So many colorful aspects to see,

Esp. when the dawn & the dark kiss.

Poetry has to be natural, it can’t come by force,

Some event, some reaction & it automatically soars;

Wow! I wrote it as I had no other subject in mind

Was wondering if by not writing can I be a bit kind (to de readers) :D

On the Crisis (still in the train!)-

Investors across de world had perfect confidence in the US sphere,

Despite the int rates being less than 1, they invested in govt. securities dere;

Investment Bankers thot dis is de correct time to sell wat dey may not later refund,

Very innocently, dey named it High Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leverage Fund.

A Journey from +8.1 crore to -13 lakh and it has not ended… :)

Probably one reason why the third semester ended quickly was that we had a Public Systems Project next. So, the old Product Management team got a bit split, in the sense that Rubini and Madhuvanthy were in one team and I was teamed with Hareesh. Aravind, Sreehari and Anish were also in our team from Batch 5. One good attribute which I found common across nearly all the teams was the rapport between the team-members. Obviously the credit goes to the people involved in team-formation.

After a meeting with Mr. Sivasankar, Director, Tourism Ministry, Kerala; our

project came up to develop a business plan for an Arts & Crafts village at Iringal in the district Kozhikode. This village is under construction and is slated to be completed by April 2010. We met the Planning Officer Mr. Unnikrishnan and got an outline about the project (including a hand book named Kerala Tourism Statistics – 2007 which proved to be a bible for us).

I happened to have a glance of daily-logs of Madhu and Ruby’s team and was

astonished at the length of it. I didn’t feel jealous and all but didn’t know why later that night I dreamt that somehow I destroyed their daily-logs in google-doc. Next day while chatting I disclosed my dream to Madhu and she said, “Nikunj! How mean!!!” Ruby even threatened me that she’d share this incident with her project guide Hari Sir.

Our next task was to visit the site-in-construction. We reached Vatakara and

stayed at the Municipality Guest House. The charge for non-air-conditioned room was Rs. 100 per day and for air-conditioned room it was just Rs. 200 per day. Vatakara is a small town with majority of the business happening in textiles and jewels. Mr. Joshi (the contractor of this project) picked us from the guest house and took us to the site which was around 12 kms far from Vatakara.

The site was a rocky terrain on some abandoned mines. I snapped some pictures

with my new phone. The Tata DoCoMo connectivity was sound through out the journey which helped me sending my updates on Twitter. The brick which they used for the construction seemed to be a bit bright and therefore appeared extraordinary in the sun. The site also had a boat jetty on the rear (with backwaters). We’d discussions with the contractor and the site-engineer and we also went through different maps of the site. This site is hardly 0.5 km from the National Highway 17.

Having made our observations, we caught the bus to Uralungal Labor Contract

Cooperative Society. I’ve availed local bus-services of at least 10 diverse cities of India but nowhere have I seen so rash a driving. Accelerator and brake seemed to be changing places in no time. Somehow we reached safely to ULCCS office and had a long discussion on its inception & functioning with various officials over there. In the evening we roamed in the street and had continental dinner at Hotel North Park. Nice food there!

Later our team-mate Sree Hari visited the Iringal site. We also visited Dakshin

Chitra, another centre for arts & crafts at Chennai. We met the Manager of Madras Crafts Foundation and sought several pieces of information from her. Those 3 days at Chennai were one of the hectic days of this PGPM programme and I got a feeling of professional life. I visited Greenix which also is an Arts Centre at Fort Kochi. My senior (at ASB) Manu helped me in a great extent in getting accommodation, roaming around the city etc.

After returning to Trivandrum, we started working on the Revenue model. The Yearbook already had the influx-population of domestic as well as foreign tourists from 2003 to 2008. We calculated the growth-rates of different years and selected the least amongst them to extrapolate the influx for 2010 to 2014. This was a pessimistic approach to extrapolation.

We divided all the districts into three regions and accorded the weights to the

tourist-influx depending upon the distance of the regions from the site. Initially we gave a weightage of 75 percent to the nearest region and after considering all the expenses, the annual profit came to a whopping amount of Rs. 8,10,00,000. Hareesh patting on his forehead said, “This project was supposed to make loss in the initial years, so that it can be funded by the government until it breaks even. And it is showing a profit of eight crores in the first year itself!” I grabbed the juniors from our team, showed them the status quo and we started decreasing the percentage. We also decreased other sources of revenue. Finally we settled the percentage of tourist-influx to an average of 2 percent. Still it was making a profit of approximately 7 lakh.

We proposed the Business Plan in the form of a Power Point Presentation to the

faculty members and both the batches. Still the revenue from the Parking Charges was very high compared to the other sources of revenue and was questioned by the faculty-members. Later we found out that we’d multiplied the parking-charges twice (instead of once) with the number of vehicles. The moment we rectified it, the 7 lakh profit overturned into a loss of 13 lakh. We shared a satisfactory smile. Now the tourism ministry had some financial viability gap to fill!

[Sorry for the interruption but as I was writing this, a message flashed on my phone which said that now one can directly recharge one’s phone by logging into the WAP browser (in the phone itself) and providing the Credit Card details to mChek. Re-charge on the go with your credit-card!]

Recently I discovered a new person inside me who can write a couple of lines which somehow manage to rhyme. Calling him a poet would be too much. So, for the past 6 nights I have been writing some lines and posting it on various social networking websites. I’d put my best to make the lines sound reasonable, however some outliers seemed to manage their existence. Here goes the first one…

Itne zakhm mujhko mile hain,

Shikve na koi gile hain;

Registan mein har baar hi fool khile hain,

Aur isi ke silsile hain.

[If you don’t understand the above lines in the first go, please don’t give it a second try. There are many interesting lines ahead]

Somebody suggested me that writing the lines in English would be easy-reading. Fine! As it pleases you…

It’s a new kind of emotion,

I want 4^th sem to pass in slow motion;

Dese days r not gonna be back,

N I’ll never 4get de girls’ cab.

When I was trying to recite this, someone asked me to shut up. So the next one went like this…

Because I was asked to SHUT UP,

De budding poet seems to have died a natural death;

Hey! De lines r rhyming again,

N it seems 2 b a case of no-loss-no-gain.

The next day I was busy on this blog…

Nothing constructive m I able to think,

Oh! By de way a blog is on its brink;

Very soon it’ll say hi to u all,

Till then plz don’t let your patience fall.

Once again the ephemeral emotional part of the mind became active and…

3 months for 2 years’ fun to end,

Then only jotdown’ll b dere 2 njoy de dividend;

Let’s study hard play harder n well!

Don’t forget Wal-Mart n Dell.

[Jotdown is the name of the Batch 4 group and the logic behind putting the name of Wal-Mart and Dell is understood by each Batch 4ian.]