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.