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.]