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.]

just like that!

The third semester passed too swiftly to be noticed. Officially this semester lasted for less than hundred days. This being the only semester in which I hardly saw 5-6 movies (that is my way to measure semesters, you see...). I've sooo many things to talk about…

First things first! Why this blog is coming after this big a delay... why not? Now I'm an active user of Twitter which has given me the freedom to let my thoughts be known to others by pressing few buttons on my phone. So is Twitter a blog-killer? Well, actually it doesn't make much sense to wait for a computer to type and publish my thoughts (on a blog) when I can directly do it from my phone/computer (on Twitter).

Now some lines about the electives... PM alias Product Management better known as Presentations Management as it had one presentation by a group in each of its sessions (excluding the first session). The number of students-opted-for-this-course was 7, a prime number and therefore the constituents of different teams kept changing. At times some people had two different presentations in two consecutive sessions by being a part of two different teams. I had the wonderful opportunity of working with nearly all the 6 people (except Lekshmy, I guess). The team with which I enjoyed working most was Madhuvanthy's & Rubini's team. We discussed two cases- Kevlar Aramid and Innovation at 3M in the class. The peculiar thing in this group was that more conversations happened in Hindi than in Malyalam/Tamil. Obviously English was the dominating language. I left a message on Twitter during the discussion- PM Case Discussion: Ruby de dictator, Madhu de typewriter, me de spectator. Product Management had glimpses of different subjects ranging from Marketing to Finance. Sooo many presentations by me (and consequently poor marks) made me realize that something is wrong with my presentation skills and I worked on to improve that.

I recall the 22^nd session of Integrated Marketing Communications (totally there were 30 sessions so around 70% of the course was complete) when Hari Sir asked about the role of Accounts Executive in an Advertising Agency. Despite having passed the time in 70% of the sessions I was not comfortable with this term. But the creative initiator inside me extracted some sense of words 'accounts' (as in Accountancy) and made me raise my hands. I said Accounts Executive is the link between the Management and the Accounts Department. Hari Sir, a bit stunned silenced everybody and asked me to elaborate. I having got the cue, elaborated blah blah blah... Other students screamed no, no... Accounts Executive deals and manages different clients of an agency (something like that). Hari Sir put his hand on his chest and asked me, "Did I do something wrong?" I hid my face with my hands.

Energy and Bills of Material are what come to my mind when I think of SCM sessions. Citing another incident, once Bhaskaran Sir asked a mobile phone from us to illustrate some Strategic Sourcing concept. I was the first to hand over my 3¹/₂ years old (it's not that old phone, you see!) Black & White LG phone. I've rigorously used that phone and all the metallic shine, alpha-numeric symbols etc. had faded. The screen had sustained a crack and though it was not, it seemed to

be in a dilapidated condition. So Bhaskaran Sir took the phone from me and posed the question to the class, "Where do you think you can get the back-cover of the phone?" "Not even in the museum" replied somebody. A laughter broke out in the class. Bhaskaran Sir had a thorough look on the phone and asked me, "Nikunj! Which museum did you steal this phone from?" The left picture is of that phone only. =)

I had never thought that brands would be playing such a dominant role in making a purchase-decision. Moreover, in the sessions it was fun to see one particular team repeatedly making presentations and criticising other teams' presentation (they didn't criticise by their own; obviously they were asked to criticize by Balki Sir).

One phrase and one word namely 'single version of truth' and 'integrated' were the two take-aways from ERP sessions. I started writing this blog on 29.12.09, the day when the Trivandrum city came to a halt. So you see, strike is not that bad.

I bought Nokia 6303 Classic a couple of months ago. Here goes the review of the same- first the +ve factors- 3.2MP Camera with Auto focus and LED Flash; 2.2 inch QVGA screen with 16 million colors; metallic cover and superb battery life. Where will you get this stuff in 6.8k? Though the drawbacks are that the volume of the speaker is a bit low, you may miss your calls in a noisy environment (I’ve missed a couple of calls), the lens is not a Carl Zeiss one, so if you compare the pictures with the ones taken by N73, you may be a bit disappointed. It got launched in the second quarter of 2009 and therefore has got some of the latest features (for eg. You can synchronize your contacts OTA [Over the Air] with Nokia Ovi Suite on a GPRS Connection and it’s very easy).

With ‘3 Idiots’ I finished my hattrick of watching movies at Athulya theatre. Though people said that it was an air-conditioned theatre, I don’t know why I didn’t feel the chill. The rates of Balcony are 1/3^rd compared to what I used to pay at malls in Lucknow (but that’s okay in the sense that I was earning those days). People hoot too much here and in the case of last movie (3 Idiots) the row behind me was fully occupied by girls and surprisingly they were also hooting.

I also got a chance to volunteer in the inauguration of CII office at Trivandrum and the summit titled ‘Changing Role of India in Global IT Business’. The entry fee for delegates was a substantial amount which we got to attend free of cost. I remember those two days when the CII-cab came at 0530 hours at the hostel and left us back to hostel by 2030 hours. I happened to listen various captains of different industry and ultimately the Finance Minister TM Thomas Isaac and Minister of State for External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor made it to the summit. Last but not the least, the food was also good.