Moved to a new blog

I have changed loyalties and I now blog at
http://shivangisays.wordpress.com/

Please visit the new blog from now on and leave your comments.

Thinking aloud

We work to live or we live to work?

This thought reminds me of a debate I participated in my 9th standard at school - "Education is for life or livelihood? " That time I had just asked my elder sister to write a prize winning speech for me without actually understanding what livelihood would mean later on. She wrote, advocating that education is for life first. I delivered the same and won the prize from judges who were teachers educating us all for their livelihood ..(or life ?)

But the question still remains unanswered and changes its meaning at every phase of life. So sometimes you do something to follow your passion, which you later on convert into a profession to make money. In few lucky cases both passion and profession come out from the same place, but most of the times they dont belong to the same stable. Boman Irani (the actor) said on an awards ceremony once - "I get to do my hobby and get paid for it". Wow. But that is not true for so many of us. There would actually be 3 types of people - first like Boman Irani - for whom passion and profession are 2 sides of the same coin. They don't fall for things like job security and a calculated life. They risk and are willing to toss all their energy & efforts on one bet. 2nd - like few of us - where both these Ps are poles apart and one (profession) is done to support the other (passion). This category of people would want to keep the distance this way, so that they can do complete justice to both individually. They dont take many risks in their life but have their own bouts of adventure. And 3rd - like many of us- whose life is devoid of any passion and they work, to live. So these ones are surviving life, but not actually living it. Life, for sure, is very simple for them and follows one single track.

And here, like a consultant (which actually I am not - either by profession or passion) , I have given a 3 pronged framework here, which may or may not mean anything to anyone :) And left my original question with the universal answer- "It depends".

Ya, right.

I am here to stay !!

So you all thought I was dead and gone ?? ...not so soon..I am as alive and kicking as Jeetendra is in the 'mast baharon ka main Ashiq' song. CUCKOOOO!!!

I was in the middle of what is called the "placement season" at B-schools. How much of an Autumn-like season it was...we poor souls only know. So I took a job in a media company..and I am all YIPPEE,HURRAAHHHHHHHHH, OOH AAH, YESSSSS, WOWWWW about it !!! So there is nothing to do now - chill , chill and more chill..before I graduate in another month.

There is nothing I have to write today so just came to dust my blog after a long time . And oh yes in the last 10 days I have read 3 books - one good, one bad and one ugly.I was starving to read this entire year but never could get time.

1. The ugly one was mother Anita Desai's 'Fasting Feasting'. Now I dont know why she wrote that book and why it got shortlisted for Booker some years back. It is as cliched and as predictable as a software engineer's job of the day. And there are two stories in it one after the other - having common characters but no link in these two at all. So there is one Indian conventional family with 2 daughters and a son and one girl is pretty while the other is considered to get misfortune and all that blah. Anyone, believe me, anyone who has read NCERT's Gulmohar English Reader in class 7 would be able to write that kinda stuff.

2. Anyway the bad one was daughter Kiran Desai's 'The inheritance of loss' which was actually not really 'bad' as to say. But to compare three things , the expression of 'good ,bad ,ugly' looks really cool. (I thought of using Amar Akbar Anthony first, but it was making a little lesser sense in this context). Anyway, now this one actually got the Booker this year and so I paid my tribute by buying this book - that too original print :(. This one has all flowery language and GRE words and vivid description and all but there is not much depth. Not a very bad read though as the setting and environment in the book look very well researched. The north east India - Nepal backdrop is very fresh - something I haven't read in Indian writing yet.

3. And the good one, the excellent one was Richard Llewellyn's 'How Green was my Valley'. Too beautiful and too captivating. The emotions are so well displayed and the character Huw Morgan a teenager boy is one of the strongest characters I have ever read. The book is so simple in language , infact has wrong ,Welsh english but the depth is so much. Somehow these Europeans and Russians really know how to write stuff man. You actually sip and relish each and every paragraph of the book and want to read again and again till you absorb it. An amazing read.

Anyway..that is all for now...I shall be back with more...till then keep commenting.
Cheerio

Dude, be cool…in a B-School!

I have been in the middle of many things. Totally MBA-ish stuff, you know all those meetings, projects, surveys et al (Note that matter of fact, CEOish tone when I say this). Sounds cool ain’t it ? Well not really. You gotta be here to really see what that means. Try making a questionnaire with random questions varying from ‘what is the number of times you’ve seen Simi Grewal cry on her show?- 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion ’ to ‘how do feel when you see a snake devouring a lizard? – very ugly, ugly, nauseated, confused, very confused, very very confused, what the heck’. You have to plead like hell to get responses to such questions, after you have made up some 23567456 results on your own, that is. This is most difficult when you yourself have always abused the people who have asked you to fill up such surveys for them. It really hurts, believe me. But you have to do this. No MBA degree is complete without this. Another thing that you gotta do to live up to your degree is do some 2 dozen meetings on a daily basis. The more you do, the better it is. The more you do with a different set of people each time, the better it is. And the more you get late for the next meeting and have people waiting for you, the better it is. Some fancy names always help – like ‘focus group’, ‘consulting preparation’, ‘finance domain specialization’ etc etc.
Then you have to have to have to have to have an idea in mind (better if its on a paper) of starting your own business, if not right after your MBA (which rarely is the case), then may be later , like in your next birth or something. If you don’t then you are not ‘cool’ enough. I mean you have to do your own business. How can you ever work ‘under’ someone? Shhheeeesh. How lowly. And the idea of your business has to be totally innovative – something like building a saloon that looks like a Tollywood film studio- where you can get you hair styled like Rajnikanth, Mammooty, Balakrishnan and their brothers, just by selecting a picture from the South Indian version of the Stardust. See if it is not innovative than no one will put money in it, and you will have to go back to the industry to sell detergent powder or a software company service. Dude, Get a life.
You also need to participate in some competition of the IIPM college fest, (Arindam Chaudhari fame). Make sure the competition asks you to give some high end strategic recommendations for the survival of some company, without which, the owner of the company would be selling Santa caps on the traffic lights. You need to differentiate yourself, Dude.

And while doing all this, you gotta remember one thing - DON’T EVER LOSE YOUR FOCUS IN LIFE. Even if you don’t have one, you have to stick to it, whichever imaginary way that is possible. You should know what you want from your life. In fact you should have known that right in your cradle, but nevertheless it’s not that late after all. So just do anything, get that thing in your life somehow. ..what is it called?...yes..FOCUS !!!
Or at least, if you can’t get it, don’t tell anyone that you don’t have it. So next time when someone asks you ‘what do you want to do in life’? – Just leave him confused by saying that - ‘I want to synergistically collate all my core competencies and enterprisingly join an organization where I can passionately develop a long lasting symbiotic relationship with my institution in order to strategically implement all my insightful learning and acquire the maximum possible value’.
WWooaahhhh…Damn cool , Dude.

An earnest request

All nice people who visit this place.....please click on the link below, hit the button that says 'ENTER' and boom !!!....you will find the owner of this blog spring out of your computer screen and stand in front of you !!!

Now that I have caught your attention, can you please give some more of it to me for next 5 minutes and fill this survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225X86G6UZH

It will save many lives, bring peace to the world, ban Himesh Reshammiya's songs ,wipe off Simi Grewal's tears and help Ganguly score a century.

Well, not really, but it will definitely help me great deal.

Please.

long time ..no blog..

Been a month since I wrote. Too long a period in a B-school where a zillion things happen everyday. So I got back from vacation, Diwali happened, self sale pitches written,Don kickassed the box office, Umrao Jaan bombed, Adobe's CEO's son got kidnapped, some of us got interviewed in campus, studies became extinct, B-school competitions held and I celebrated my 26th birthday.

In the middle of all that, I wrote this short story for a competition. The starting and ending line (in bold) were given, and word limit was just 300 words.

“If I hadn’t read the letter that night, I would have never known the truth.
Rahul always had a dream of becoming rich and famous. “One day you will see, I will rule the world” – he often used to say. On completing his CA he joined an investment bank. He was awarded with the “young achiever” award within the first year. Within few years, he was playing in heaps of money. A black Audi and a honeymoon in Venice had cost him a fortune.As he kept on growing, so did his wants. His wife Reena and two children would long for him to come home by the evening.

I met Reena in the Chicago downtown that day. After a long chat, I offered to drop her on my way back to home. It was 4 in the day, a very unusual time for Rahul’s car to be seen at home. For the following week, Rahul didn’t go to office and told Reena that he had resigned and now they should move back to India. Reena was ecstatic at this idea, only to know of her husband’s death in a car accident the next day.

I came to stay with Reena and while helping the children dress up for school one day, a white envelope fell on the floor. It had a letter from Rahul’s bank, saying
“The management has come to notice of your fraudulent practices. You have brought disgrace to the institution. For the sake of our bank’s reputation, we are not making this matter public and we are giving you one week’s notice to pay the amount of USD 20 million , the amount you have laundered, failing which you will be taken to court”.

Rahul did not die of a car accident, he had committed suicide and may his soul rest in peace.”

This was the story:).

By the way, one more thing has been happening - unsolicited people trying to give unwanted opinions and obscene comments on my blog. To which I have just one thing to say , that Dude, you are just hitting your head against a wall. The comments will be seen only when approved by me. But converse is not true, I can always abuse the comment writer on my blog, and he can't remove it !!...
I won't do that though, but the mere thought of it is exciting , isn't it ??

Think about it

They say we live in a much better world today. There are more numbers of working brains today than in the yesteryears. Mental faculties are getting expanded, more and more people are joining the workforce, and industries are growing.

But then, why are creativity levels dipping? Instead of one we have 10 minds to think, so the number of ideas generated should increase tenfold. We have ten different perspectives instead of one, so innovation should also have magnified in that ratio. We boast about technology to have taken a paradigm shift today. Yes, it has. How else do you think we would have been able to copy some creation so finely to make an indistinguishable twin in such a short time !!

After two successful movies, why did Farhan Akhtar have to make a remake of Don? Did he think that in his version, he would improve on whatever lacked in the original ? Well, I am not sure, especially when he’s casting SRK in Amitabh’s role. The reason is nothing but convenience – the plot, the script everything is readily available. All that needs to be done is to fill colors in the ready made sketch. ‘Umrao Jaan’ is another victim of the same ‘remaking’. Why don’t we just leave the classics untouched ? Imagine someone trying to add new sparkling colors to an original Picasso painting.

The same is happening with songs. Poor Pancham Da (R.D Burman) must be crying hard in his grave. When he was mesmerizing the whole world with his melodious tunes, little did he know that after 20 years, the same songs would turn into nothing but a blasphemous concoction of Rakhi Sawant’s raunchy dance movements with some western beats lifted from hip-hop. Not only are these masterpieces getting brutally destroyed, but they are also being presented to the audience as an original piece of work. How many of today’s generation would know that Anamika’s famous song ‘Kahin karta hoga who mera intezaar’ was actually an old sweet song sung by Mukesh as ‘Kahin karti hogi who mera intezaar’ ??? The remixed songs are liked by everyone, but the whole credit is given to some DJ Aqeel or Bally Sagoo, who have tampered with these songs. No music director or singer of the golden era of of 60s and 70s is saved of this disrespectful practice. The audience doesn’t even know the names of many of these artists and the original CDs lie unsold in the music stores.

The whole argument that is put in favor of remaking and remixing is that, it is an attempt towards adding spice to the otherwise boring pieces of art which are long forgotten. This is a totally absurd piece of logic. If we really have to give the due respect to the classics that they deserve and make people remember them always, we should do it the way Mughal-e-Azam was revived. With the help of technology, the black and white classic was converted into a colored one and marketed like any other commercial movie of today at all the major theatres. Why can’t we do that for movies like Bandhini, Sujata, Khamoshi and all other such Bimal Roy’s , Satyajit Ray’s and Raj Kapoor’s classics ?

A remake of these magnificent classics is nothing but a sad mockery of art. We have such a rich heritage of art and it is really pitiful if we don’t do anything to preserve it.