Jakarta Diary: Part I

As I sit on the 17th floor of our high-rise apartment, one of the innumerable towers that form the incredible Jakarta skyline, I am amazed by several things about this beautiful country.

The first thing that strikes you when you land in the simplistic Jakarta airport (once you clear the long slow-moving immigration queue), is the traffic, if you are lucky you could get from the airport to the city in half hour and if you are a bit unlucky it could easily take two hours. I had the experience of doing both. The irony is, there is a huge patch in the middle of every major road in the city which could easily be converted into 1.5 lanes if not two. But No-Jakartans would not do that. Instead the roads are lined with trees almost infinitely. My father says that if a tree falls in a road due to some reason, they replace it with a new tree almost every time within the same week. These are not sort of “we-too-are-green” kind of trees that I have seen in some other cities. They are all very well maintained, lush green. It is humbling to see a country so resolutely adopting to be green in spite of all the troubles that it brings with it!

If you have any liking at all for observing people from a different culture, Indonesians offer a remarkable case study in contrasting microcosms living in harmony. An Indonesian friend remarked to my father-“Our religion is Islam, but our culture is Hindu”. This is visible in the innumerable statues of Hindu Gods and Goddesses on the streets of the city. This contrast extends beyond religious beliefs into their economic conditions as well. On one side of our apartment is the striking skyline that stretches across Jakarta, standing as a shining example of a nation that has boldly ridden the free market tide (and has had serious scars to show for it-check the conversion rates of Jakarta’s currency-Rupiah), one that has successfully attracted foreign investment and managed to raise standards of living for a major section of the society. If I just walk across the room, the window opens up to a different sight-a huge slum with people living in dilapidation. Of course an enormous wall separates the apartment from the slum serving as a grim reminder to the barriers these unfortunate people have to scale to improve their quality of life.

That being said, Indonesians, even the ones I saw in the slums are among the very few people who I am truly jealous of, the reason in the next post.

A Dream for An Awakening

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122867595766686077.html?mod=article-outset-box

Will the middle class truly create the next revolution? The most frustrating aspect is that, even if we all get together and decide that we will change the country tomorrow, I cannot think of even one good leader who has the potential to be at the helm of that change. 

May be this time change will be more organic, more bottom up...without glorifying any leader in particular, having a self-policing public that does not need a charismatic leader, but makes sure that anyone who is elected will be forced to perform well..

Pipe dream? Maybe. But every change in the world started off as a distant dream, didn't it?

Marketing 3.0

Marketing, recently got a lot easier, all you need to have is an internet connection and a little creativity and you can expect to market almost anything. You could upload video demonstrations of your product on Youtube, create Facebook and MySpace communities around your product, create snazzy viral marketing campaigns that almost cost nothing.

TV Radio and the Internet:

However, Marketing also just got a helluva lot harder than ever before! Rewind 15 years, all you had was TV and radio advertising. If you were a large corporation, you had to create kick-ass commercials and you could get noticed. Otherwise you had the option of Direct Marketing, where you could mail out solicited/unsolicited advertisements to a large population and reap rewards (a response rate of 3% is considered exceedingly good in direct marketing). People even got a little smarter and started targeting their marketing efforts, by figuring out the demographics of consumers, by analyzing their buying patterns and so on. 

Even 5 years back, when the Internet era dawned, all companies had to worry about was how to add this new marketing channel to the existing portfolio, how much to allocate to it and where to advertise. It was still all about advertisements. 

Forward to 2008: 

Then suddenly something happened in the websphere, sites like Youtube became a craze, social networking became a simple way of life for a majority of the population. Web communities became a powerful driving force in many product categories (remember Jeff Jarvis's blog entries on bad Dell customer service that brought the company to its knees forcing them to act).

This is a new era of Marketing, and Marketers used to the old ways of life are not going to be successful here. Again, as is the case with any systemic change, this is also an opportunity. Companies that re-learn their basics and re-invent themselves will survive while others will perish. Here is a fantastic article that talks about the changes and how companies can do well in the new environment:  

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122792310060465901.html

The key takeaways from the article:

1. Consumer attention is the most valuable resource in marketing today, get creative in ways to get their attention and utilize it to the fullest for the fleeeting moment when you have it.

2. Do not fear the "cloud" or online communities, instead getting involved with them and even nurturing them can lead to better product design, quicker customer feedback and in the end, much better customer loyalty. Some companies are directly leveraging such communities in product design, market research and in user-generated advertising content!  

3. Pay special attention to niche communities related to your product categories. "When they're efficiently targeted, they can be highly responsive, lucrative and loyal".

4. The days of insanely successful memes are almost over, instead create intelligent "bemes" that customers will readily accept and share with others. "The best online marketing now takes place among people who know and trust each other".

5. Finally, stop thinking about Internet as an extension to your brick-and-morter operations. Instead think of the online and offline shopping experience as part of the same consumer experience continuum. Rethink the synergies between the two. Build a complete shopping experience, not just a website and a store.

Life is Beautiful...

...when you discover a gem of a mail from a dear old friend in your mailbox while idly browsing through it. 

Here is the piece, a beautiful read...

http://azhearing.com/three-days-to-see.htm

His comments on it at that time..."Wishing that i become open enough to experience everything that life has got to offer . :-)". 

It seems so easy that it would be almost dumb not to be that way, and yet, I never seem to get it. To conclude again with his words this time three years later...

"Oh dear ones unless you taste it you don't know what it is   :-)

...

...

Being so near yet so far .... waiting ... waiting ...as if they have got a eternity ahead of them ...." 

Let's Give Free Markets a Fair Chance

The second largest electronics retailer Circuit City files for bankruptcy. General Motors is on the verge of a collapse with its stock getting to the lowest point in 60 years, DHL shuts down domestic operations cutting close to 10,000 jobs. Starbucks's earnings fall 97% despite valiant efforts from Howard Schultz. IT companies are feeling the pinch in India cutting jobs, freezing recruitment.

These are just a small sample of the news that we have been hearing over the past few weeks. Can't imagine a worse time for a new President (or for a new MBA for that matter).

The dangerous off-shoot of this is the fact that Communism seems to be raising its ugly head. Here is an interesting article from WSJ talking about how this is playing out in India: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122628672919612761.html

For 43 years since Independence till the point where the Indian economy almost collapsed, we have tried communism. And FAILED miserably, we have created a few really wealthy politicians in the process for sure, but the common man has seen no progress, and that was until IT came in which was for some reason untouchable by communists and politicians and it has been successful for that one reason. Now, capitalism will have its share of failures no doubt-and we have to live through it. That definitely does not mean we get into the regressive politics of communists as a reprieve, that will only take us back to a time that we definitely don't want to go back to.

Let's give capitalism and free markets a fair chance in India-let us learn the lessons from them as global citizens, and then may be we stand a chance of becoming the power that we deserve to be.

"As long as there is a Left in India, India has no future left."-Cho Ramaswamy.

Complicating the Web Space..

How would you like it if all your favorite websites had different top level domain names, that is to say, if instead of www.chase.com you could have www.chase.bank or www.walmart.shop or even top level domains referring to brand names themselves like www.laundry.whirlpool or www.laundry.maytag? You could argue both ways-that it could lead to more creative ways for consumers to remember websites or that it would result in more confusion (I subscribe to the latter view).

Whatever your point of view is, apparently the change is coming (a weak pun intended:)). WSJ has covered the issue here and here is an old article announcing the move. And since it needs a membership to read the whole article, I will take the liberty of providing my interpretation of what it says:

1. Costs for companies to maintain top level domain names will go up. For instance, if you are Apple, what domains do you purchase-.apple .mac .ipod .itunes .iphone? What about .music or .cool or .notebook or even .jobs? What if another company took these domain names?

2. Already companies spend an enormous amount to maintain their web domain names, this move multiplies the costs of doing business.

3. The number of fraudsters might go up. What if I purchase .bank and create a site called jpchase.bank that looks exactly like chase.com and fool people into giving their account details? That again means the monitoring costs just went up.

4. What happens if I buy .life and do a bidding between insurance companies, lifestyle product companies, hospitals and sell it to the highest bidder?

5. Finally, it already takes so much effort for companies to make people remember websites, this will complicate that attempt even further.

On the other side, the justification for the move is that there are just not enough domain names for everyone-instead of exhausting the domain names, opening up the top level domain names provides an almost infinite supply of unique domain names (the names are provided by a non-profit organization remember-they are apparently not trying to make more money out of this though they definitely will).

I personally feel, it is time to make things simpler and not more complicated. We are all so used to .com .edu and other domain names and Google search is the way we find 95% of what we need; so why go through this hassle of multiple top level domains and inflate the costs of companies at a time when they definitely cannot afford any slack?

Testing Blogger Buddy...

To get out of this huge rut I seem to have gotten into, in terms of blogging, I am trying out a new gadget called Blogger Buddy, that sits right on my desktop from which I can post directly to my blog without having to open a browser or Word (as if that was the problem all along:)). Here is the tool:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=c02ee13e-11e1-4a3b-b33c-7a1b8f3b4671&bt=1

Anyway, expect more activity this point forward. Ciao.

Isha in Columbus!!!

Once again it is that time of the year when everything else relegates to the background and a beautiful space opens up for me to go back and relive what has been one of the most significant influences in my life so far-Isha.

To sum up Isha in one post (or even in words) would definitely be an exercise in futility. However I have made a feeble attempt in a mail I wrote to a friend (below).

April 9th Wednesday 6.30 pm is the introductory talk and I would be delighted if everyone in Columbus who sees this post at least chooses to take that step of spending 1.5 hours to explore a new possibility.

When: Wednesday, April 9th 6.30pm to 8pm
Where: COSERRC (Central Ohio Special Education Regional Resource Center) in Clintonville, 470 Glenmont Ave. Columbus, OH 43214
Contact: Arvind (857-207-9941) or Isha Columbus Chapter (614-235-2045).

Isha Website:

http://ishafoundation.org/

Program Details:

http://www.ishafoundation.org/index.php?option=com_program&task=details&program_id=561

E-Flyer:

http://www.ishafoundation.org/eflyers/ColumbusApr08.html

My Experience with Isha:

I did the program about one and half years back primarily because firstly I was curious, as all my roommates had done the program and I could observe several changes in them after the program. Second reason was of course that I wanted to lose some weightJ. And from the program I gained a lot more than weight loss! To say that it has transformed my life in a very fundamental way would not be an overstatement. As for the physical benefits, my sleep quota has gone down significantly and am able to be much more productive in the hours am awake, I can eat a lot less than before and still stay active, and my weight has reduced significantly and stayed at a decent level for the past one year.

But the real changes are at a subtler level. I get stressed out very easily by failures, by circumstances and by people. After doing my practices for a few months I could observe that my relationships with people had improved significantly without any special efforts. I was just able deal with events, stresses and people from a very different level, many times I have thought back to myself, “Wow, if this had happened before I would have totally freaked out! Now this doesn’t affect me!”. That clarity has enabled me to deal with situations much more effectively than I could have with all the stresses and turbulence within.

The program is scientific (for an engineer like me that is a big requirement!), it is not based on any belief system, in fact throughout the class it is not necessary to believe in anything. It is just an inward journey to see what’s true within ourselves. Purely based on undeniable logic.

After this experience, there is something within me that just won’t stop until EVERYONE around me has had the same experience! That is the reason for that poster and that is the reason for this mail. I know that this experience is possible for anyone, it is just the matter of taking the first step and that I hope you will!

Let me know if you need any other details.

Sadhguru’s talks:

Your state of Peace & Joy is the Quality of your Life:

Both Joy and Misery are Infectious:

Yoga Means Union:

P

A New Quarter...

Spring quarter begins tomorrow. We are done with two (of the six) quarters of our MBA program-time does fly fast in a b-school! A friend dutifully reminded me that I could have been graduating out of the MBA program in a week's time had I chosen to join ISB one year back. But I have no regrets. Its been a great journey so far. Just to look back at the Winter quarter...

• We were introduced to three major areas of business in one quarter-Finance, Operations and Marketing.
• Of these, quite surprisingly for me, the Finance course has been the best introduction ever not least due to Professor Rudi Fahlenbrach who is among the best professors I have ever seen-so much that I, (whose only expectation from an MBA was "Anything but Finance") am now interested in Finance!
• Marketing and Operations have altered many of my perceptions. The way I look at a supermarket now is fundamentally altered. I try to sneak into the back end of the store and see how big of an inventory they maintain. I look at the shelf space each product occupies and try to judge how these vary from one week to another. I look closely at the in-store promotions, display logic and a bunch of other stuff that I was totally oblivious to, earlier.
• We had a case competition, which was literally a 24-hour marathon, exhausting, but very revealing in terms of how to structure a problem, how to think through solutions with teams, how to (how not to) present and so on.
• I had the opportunity to work with the marketing department of a college at OSU which has been a great learning experience so far.
• Girls auctioning dates, talkative folks auctioning a day of silence, private flight ride, homemade German dinner, Indian dinner, you name it-it would be up on Fisher Follies! It was a crazy night with people bidding for huge amounts (I am guessing at least half of those were more the work of alcohol than anything else:) ). A fun night.

The best thing about my MBA experience has been the fact that every day, I do something new, or learn something new. Of course nothing groundbreaking, just simple things like talking to a person from a new country, writing a consulting report, handling a passionate team discussion, learning to wear a tie -it could be anything-the novelty of each experience makes life interesting!

Vista and Vostro-the love-hate story...

I have been forced out of the blogosphere for quite a while due to some issues in my laptop that ate away a major portion of my spring break :(. I love my laptop-I really really do and Vista Ultimate has definitely been one of the reasons for that. But of-late I am tired of searching for solutions to all the problems that have been cropping up over and over. I am going to record the best and worst of this Vista-Vostro combination and if any of you have something to add (esp. some solutions) please do so in the comments.

Awesome:

• Windows Media Center-watching movies has become a great new experience with Media Center (there are a few bugs though, like every resizing of the window freezes the player and confuses the hell out of it-maybe it was not designed for laptops and fast application switching).
• Windows Dreamscene: One sure-shot way to grab attention to your laptop is to have one of these moving wallpapers on the desktop-its unbeleivably beautiful-some videos are really soothing. (again some issues with Dreamscene crashing and stopping+making the overall system slow-still worth it for the experience).
• Games: I love the Chess and Hold'em Poker games on the Ultimate.
• Aero: Doing a Windows+Tab to switch Windows is a new paradigm and am addicted to it now-its super cool to watch the windows in 3D and choose.
• Organized: Its hard to explain this one, but somehow all the pieces of the UI and the file system are a lot better organized on Vista than any other-very intuitive and simple.

Bummers:

• My advice to all new users would be-DON'T do a clean install of Vista Ultimate on your own. I did that and the first screen that greeted me after the install was a blue-screen (crash), and to top it all, the blue screen would vanish in a split second and the machine will reboot and the system will dutifully ask-"Looks like last time Windows did not boot successfully. Do you want safe mode?" (well there was no last time that Windows booted successfully in the first place!!). And the same blue screen appears in safe mode too.
• After a lot of debugging I narrowed it down to one driver that seems to screw it up for Vista-RICOH. And since you never get to login to the system, you cannot upgrade it either.
• So I tried the next best option-reisntall the OS, and I did this 4 times each time trying a different combination-nothing worked.
• The only “solution” was to install Vista home and upgrade to Ultimate. Now its “better”
• And why only “better”-well the first reason I reinstalled the system was because ever since I upgraded Vista Home to Ultimate, Sleep function is totally screwed up. If you put the machine to sleep and wake it up a balloon that says “One of your USB devices malfunctioned” greets you (I don’t have any USB devices connected) and from then on none of the USB ports work.
• Another problem when this happens is the system cannot be shut down after the USB problem; it stands in the “Shutting Down” screen for at least 30 minutes AFAIK.
• Finally, the problem that really drove me mad was this-every now and then when the system goes to sleep, it will never wake up. All the blue lights for the CPU/Bluetooth/WIFI will be glowing bright and fine, but the screen just stays blank-never comes up no matter what key/button you press.
• Then there are minor irritants like, once your hard disk capacity goes below a certain level, hibernate function vanishes and there is no way you can turn it back on even if you free up a lot of space.
• IE crashes every now and then. I started using Firefox and the world’s been brighter since then. If you are really adventurous, try Firefox 3 Beta 4-its lightning fast, does not eat memory and has some very helpful new features.
• And today I installed Vista SP1 and the microphone drivers seem to have disappeared from the system-need to debug this tomorrow-still not sure if it’s a Vista problem.

Yahooooo...its snow time!!

There was a snowstorm in Columbus this morning and we were hit by about a feet of snow! Seems that this is a record for the month of March (broke the 1906 record for Columbus!)...
http://blog.dispatch.com/Weather/2008/03/10_inches_and_counting_in_colu.shtml

Here is a video I took from the window in our living room....




Of course we were out playing in the snow after the carnage and photos are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/toarvind/Snow

மழை (Rain)...

மழை எனக்கு..
கடவுள் தந்த காதல் கடிதம்

[Rain for me..
Is God's way of saying "I love you"]

Story of Stuff

http://www.storyofstuff.com

Came across this amazing video that analyzes what goes behind the consumption mania that we witness in our daily lives. I have never seen a more impressive presentation of the big picture underlying everything from production to distribution to disposal-some facts mentioned in the video are shocking. It definitely raised my level of awareness about what I am doing to the world around me…

CNN's Selective Reporting...

All the top headlines in Google News yesterday were screaming about the death of more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza (around 19 of them civilians) and when I opened CNN I find telling photographs...

• An Israeli woman being treated for "shock" after the attacks
• An Israeli soldier helping a wounded comrade
• Palestinian protesters burning tires and throwing stones
• Israeli soldiers firing at the protesters

And the headlines read "Israel attacks Hamas headquarters", "Palestinians suspend peace talks with Israel", " Gaza fired at least 25 rockets into Israel on Sunday; 2 civilians injured" and the very last line casually mentions " More than 70 Palestinians killed in Gaza since Friday"

20 civilians have been murdered for chrissake! And all CNN cares to report are "shocks", "protests". I am not taking sides here, the Palestine militants might have fired rockets that started the whole thing-but murdering civilians who had no direct involvement is not effective retaliation and that should at least be reported if not condemned!

Does the CNN take all Americans to be so naive that they could be led into condoning Israel for what its deputy defense minister warns will turn into a "holocaust" for the Palestinians?

It's always beautiful...

...when it snows and you never realize that...and suddenly you peek through the window to find the whole world white :).
Indeed, Life is beautiful!

dunnhumby-the genius company...

"Customers today are very disloyal; it is so hard to make them stick to us. How much ever you try, creating a loyal customer is just impossible."
"Well, maybe finding a loyal customer is very difficult, but can you tell me how loyal YOU have been to your customer?"

Now that's a very real conversation a dunnhumby consultant usually has with the CEO of a potential client. And CEOs don't like to hear that answer most of the time. But that is exactly how dunnhumby, a small and fast-growing Cincinnati marketing research and consultancy firm, is making money-for itself and for its clients. There are two things about dunnhumby in my mind that make them one of the best small companies in the US right now.

Insight

The data never lies (as long as you understand them). Many market research firms have access to huge databases, but very few of them have succeeded in creating “magic” out of it. One very powerful example they showed us was that of a huge US retailer- dunnhumby managed to show them (for the first time after 30 years of their existence) that around 2% of their customers contributed to almost 30% of their revenues and also who this 2% were. Now all the retailer had to do was to focus majority of its marketing dollars on that 2% to get the greatest return on investment. The beauty of the dunnhumby philosophy is that they go against almost every commonly (and often stubbornly) held paradigm in brand management, the most important one being-"The best way to make more money is to get more customers". They have proved that there is a better way of doing it-especially in fairly mature markets- and that is to make more out of existing customers, by really being loyal to them, by creating value for them over and over. Backed by a super-smart data analytics team they are able to achieve this goal through intimate knowledge of who each customer is (think of the granularity in a database of 40 million customers) and what value proposition would make sense for that customer. End result? The customer is happy, the retailer is happy and dunnhumby gets paid-everyone wins in this game!

People

When I visited the dunnhumby office, I could literally feel the energy in the air, every person I talked to was completely pumped up. They are so passionate when they talk about the kind of work they do. They love the impact they (as a ~300 employee company) are able to create in giants like Kroger (to see a more detailed analysis check out the case studies section in their website). The culture of the company is so open and friendly. Every employee (from the senior-most managers to the entry level worker) sit out in the open and people interact very freely with each other. The structure of the office itself is very different from a common office building and lends itself to a collaborative atmosphere. It is rated as one of the best companies to work for (in 2007) by The Sunday Times and I am definitely not surprised!

Company Website: http://www.dunnhumby.com/

Networking-An Art and a Science

One of the first lessons they teach at a b-school is the power of networking. This is one skill that can make the biggest difference between striking it big and just landing up with whatever gets thrown at you.

Networking comes naturally to most of us, though we may not be aware of it-we all like to have good company right? Some people just wait for people to come to them and talk while others just can't stop talking:). Now some people have taken this simple natural instinct and made a whole science out of it.

I am a pretty sociable person, or so I thought until I had to meet these huge set of people from the corporate world in an alien culture. Now for the first time in my life, I am just tongue tied, extremely self-conscious, searching for the right words, struggling with finding common interests with the person in front of me! This is bizarre.

Though I am a strong advocate against using "influencing" techniques with people (they are just manipulative most of the time), there are some basic things that get us off the ground quickly...(these are things I keep telling myself every time I have to meet a new person and am going "ewww..not another one...")

1. Get out of your comfort zone. If you never wanted to meet people, you could have done that pretty easily back home (with a decent paycheck as well!!). You came here for a new experience and here it is...its not comfortable the first time, but nothing ever is. So just push yourself (literally many times:)) and go out and talk to new people.

2. Quickly find common ground. With Indians it is so easy-which state are you from gets the discussion along for half hour maybe, with people from other cultures, it might be difficult to start a discussion-asking them about their country/background/company might be a great way to start. I have been amazed at how candid people can suddenly get when they talk about things dear to them.

3. Do some research. Yesterday we had a meeting with representatives from about 10 companies and I didn't know about even one of them! I failed miserably in finding common ground:(. If I had known about their companies I could have asked more insightful questions about their work and probably learnt much more from the discussions.

4. Just go up and introduce yourself. Chances are that they won't pull out a gun and shoot you (you might want to be careful in Texas though:)). Many people want to be talked to-they are just as shy as you are-so if you don't get it off the ground the plane shall never take-off!

5. Practice, this might sound gross to some people, but I am going to say it. If you dont think you are good at it and it is a life-saving skill there is only one way to get better-Practice. There was a senior manager at one of the Big 4 consulting firms who impressed the hell out of us with his talk (he looked like he started talking right from the time he was born!!) and his final caveat? "I used to practice 15 hours a week in front of the mirror when I was in b-school!" You might want to think about that.

And some minor ones...
Never forget to exchange business cards.
Send out Thank you notes, they did take out time to meet you and you learnt a new perspective-thats a lot to be thankful about!
Keep in touch in a non-intrusive way (unscheduled phone calls/visits, too many emails etc are no-no).
STRICTLY NO PERSONAL QUESTIONS.
Use http://linkedin.com

Finally all these are just starting points, what stands out in any relationship is true character. I will close this with a wonderful quote from Emerson-"“What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say."

If any of you can add more items to that list, I would be delighted!

Integration...

I have discovered the simple truth-its just too hard to maintain two blogs-the ideation, content generation, marketing, comment tracking...just too much. So I have just integrated my other MBA blog into this as two BIG posts.

The First Quarter...

Life is interesting...

Am three weeks into the MBA program and a friend put this simple question that I always dread-"so how is life?" I mean how am I supposed to answer the question-at any point of time there are a hundred things not going so well and a few going fairly ok and maybe if I got lucky one or two going pretty darn well...so I stopped at "Life is..." and thought long and hard about it (well not too hard-I never can:)) and decided "..intereting".

IMhO, atleast on a personal level, this program brings out all your weaknesses and worst fears out in the open and you have to start dealing with them! I haven't fully dealt with them yet, but atleast I have started seeing them. There are no longer things I could easily get away with in my work life (getting up 10am EVERY day for eg.). Its tough to put it mildly, but it is also interesting, I can see bluntly where my priorities are, time comes at a premium and my tendencies from the past guide my decisions about what to do with it. And whatever I do with it, there is always an oppotunity cost, pretty heavy one most of the time-and I just have to trust my instincts to get it right (or atleast to avoid getting it wrong:)). I feel like a little child thrown into a maze where there are plenty of attractive dolls at every turn, but waiting to pick'em up closes more doors down the road. Whatever it is life is definitely LOT more interesting than it used to be.

Btw, just when I thought I will sit down and write something here finally...I am reminded, my midterm starts next Monday...so off I go for another week of roller-coasters ...

PhDs can be NOT boring!

There is something about PhDs and every prof in a b-school is expected to be one...first day in class I was expecting a dull monotone and boy was I surprised!! I will talk a bit about some amazing profs who handle classes for us (I will do this before my exams start, so that I can conveniently go back and bitch them after the grades are out:)).

We have this prof who has like a zillion years of experience, he has worked with SEC, consults for top-notch companies and is the head of Finance department (or something similar I dont remember which one), and he teaches accounting. Now accounting is probably THE most boring subject to teach for all you do is take a problem crunch the numbers and you have the answer, there are very few ways of going out of the box or engage the class creatively and what does our guy do to compensate for that? He uses humor-and trust me, its not just run off the mill stuff, he can get really really funny. I will leave it with one colorful example. The whole class was drowning in a lengthy monologue of the basic rules of accounting and he was about to start a problem (again lengthy-but very important to catch on to the basics). He takes one small pause and goes-"You know accounting is a bit like sex (heads are bouncing off the tables at this point), when you are doing it the first time, you really dont know what the heck is happening (people are shaking their heads in wierd ways to make sure their hearing is still right), you just fool around you are not sure which is the right way of doin' it, you are very uncomfortable and you dont have that much fun, but as you start practicing it you start getting better at it (some folks are nodding their heads off at this point, some international students can't control loud giggles), then the fun part starts (the whole class is in fits now and he picks on one student we will call Sam) and he goes "Sam, where is your mind man, I was talking about accounting!!" It took almost five minutes for the class to get back in order, but I can tell you every one of us were wide awake for the rest of the class!

Then we have two profs handling Organizational behavior, both have scores of years of experience in the Vice President level of management in large corporations, and it really shows! OB is a fairly dry subject with so much of theory, models etc etc. So the style that one of them adopts is to trust the class to read the material on their own and engage the whole class in pretty involved conversations and whats more-in these you really get an opportunity to see what amazing kinds of people you are sitting next to!! In one class we were discussing a case on the culture in IRS and most of us were making some generous assumptions on what they would want and how they would be structued, and one guy raised his hand and said, well I have worked for IRS and here is what it actually is!! It is a paradigm shifting experience. Many times to make his point he would bring in some movie clip or some other video related to the case and we would end up having a lot of fun. Finally the personality of this prof is mind-blowing, he would just walk in and take the class by storm, I would be sitting there wiith 3 hours sleep previous night heads down, trying to keep my eyelids from sticking to one another...he walks in and boom..two hours are gone! Its simply exciting!

I have to talk about at least three other amazing profs, but I will save that for later...

Simulations-they are real!!

We participated in two simlations in the last month, one was with the orientation program, where we were split into teams and each team gets a company in a market and we are asked to make decisions-production, sales and marketing, finance, sourcing, then negotiate deals with other teams, cooperate compete, think strategically and implement a winning strategy-sounds like a lot, and it really was. We were simply overwhelmed, two days we were having animated discussions on how the production couldn't scale up, the market share seem to be going down, how to improve quality, how the hell do we get the striking workers back to work, what patents do we bet on, how much money do we borrow, do we get out of/get into a market and how to kill the competitors! And all this without having the faintest idea of what a balance sheet looks like what profit indicators we needed to look for, which part impacts which function-zilch-absolutely nothing. It was exhausting, and we didn't do too well on it, but we learnt so much within those two days!

Then just two days back we had an OPEQ simulation, each team was an oil company producing a particular quantity of oil (that was the only number we had to decide) and if all teams cooperated there would be huge profits, if one team cheats they make a lot of money, or as more commonly happens if everyone cheats everyone loses money. The communication between teams was limited and spaced appropriately so that there were many blind spots where you just had to trust somone's word. Things got really ugly, my teammate was going, "I want to know who are all in that Team-I am never going to deal with them for the rest of the two years! How could they cheat like this!!!" It really got very personal. And finally there was an analysis in class of the results-all messages and decisions were put out in the open and we had a riot of laughter (someone says-"Guys lets be true to each other, we will stick to 35" and their output that year is 75 and then some people putting out friendly rejoinders like "You sons of bitches, go burn in hell" and so on...it was a fun way of learning oligopolistic competition and the prisoner's dilemma

Some thoughts on first quarter

Its official! I have successfully completed the drill of the first quarter, supposedly the hardest quarter of an MBA program. It has been a fulfilling experience. It has been a real roller coaster, but never ever short of fun. Every single day I have been doing new things, learning new ways of doing old things, admiring some amazing individuals and thoroughly enjoying every minute.

The most interesting experience has definitely been working with my team. You are part a team of five and each of them is chosen to have a very different background from the rest. For example in my team, I am the only engineer and international student, we have a girl who has worked in the media industry, an accountant, a former Englih teacher and a pharmacist who is also pursuing law. Things get really interesting with such a motley mix of people, working closely on very tight schedules and under enormous work pressures. I have seen us take on different roles at different times from the creative genius, to the timekeeper, to the conflict resolver, to the project manager, the silent listener, you name it! I personally find it very rewarding to understand each of these different individuals, learn from their strengths and play to achieve the team's best output. I have learnt to put the team before myself and everything else, I have learnt to trust people and make and keep commmitments.

Then there are the courses themselves, each one so unique and differnt from anything I have learnt before. The class runs completely on participation. The instructors encourage discussion and get the concepts out of the students themselves instead of rote lectures. Two profs in particular deserve special mention-Prof Wruck who handled economics completely using case studies, with a flair and confidence that lit up the class, enabled lively discussions and created a beautiful learning environment. Second is Prof. Rucci, my personal favorite in Fisher so far, he has had experience at very senior levels of some huge organizations for a number of years. He has an interesting story for every concept, every situation and he just loves the students, always with a genuine smile ready to help. I should say I have never seen someone own the stage as much as he does, every single time!

First quarter involves some serious hard work to meet deadlines, midterms, student organization etc. If I were to make a suggestion for a newbie, it would be to join as few student organizations as possible and do some significant work in them because time ALWAYS comes with a premium in an MBA.

Finally, the out of class fun activities, it is very important to de-stress yourself in the first quarter as things can get really overwhelming many times. I have a great set of friends who are always ready for a movie, a late night walk to mirror lake, hanging out on High street and so on...its been great help in wading through the quarter.

[Many of my classmates have a different opinion from what I have expressed here...so this is no way the "normal" experience, but that's what is special about an MBA, there IS no definition of how you are supposed to take it-each person experiences something totally different in the same program.]

The Beginnings...

The journey begins...

This week, I start my MBA at Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. I will blog my experiences as I go along (as frequently as my schedule would allow it:) ) . I should be adding a post every Sunday...so check back (if you really have nothing better to do) on Monday mornings!

And oh...by the way, mirror lake is the name of a beautiful lake at OSU campus. I pass by this every day as I walk to Fisher and this one is staying right with me as I wade through the next two years:).

Day 1...

The campus is beautiful and HUGE! I need to walk 20 minutes to reach campus-its on the same road as my house is. On the way is this beautiful lake called the Mirror lake-more on that later.

Btw, at Chicago, I almost had a heart attack when I checked my folder and did not find the I-20 and SEVIS documents inside...after almost ten minutes of frantic searching I remembered that I put them in the my big green purse for "safe-keeping" :)...that was the only tense moment in the whole journey. When we landed in Chicago, they said there is a message waiting for some people, when I saw my name on that message list I was so happy-I haven't even arrived and they already have a message for me!! When I opened it, it said your bag has not arrived! Some local friends who came to my house were just so surprised when I told them that only one of my check-in baggage has arrived. They asked "How on earth did you manage to get even one correctly from British Airways" seems that they almost never get it right!!
Going good...

Got my baggage finally!! All stuff intact!

Today, for the first time in my life I was in a suit...almost half the day (Nostalgia: Microsoft days when people would look puzzled if you wore full-sleeves and formal shoes) I was talking and socializing with so many people from so many different countries (10 and still counting...). I felt so comfortable in it that I feel I wouldn't mind working at a place where I wear suits to office everyday ;)...

Yesterday an American senior took us to a pub+restaurant since pizzas are just $3 there every Thursday. It was my first time inside an American bar, (or any pub for that matter:))...enjoyed it very much though I couldn't participate in the drinking...we met up with a great lady (wife of a student) from Chile who started talking to us about Indian culture-she wanted to know about India and Indian culture-particularly about how women are treated there-she is a strong career woman and was astounded at some of things we had to tell her:)...we talked almost for an hour...we got out early since sessions started at 8 today morning.

Networking, back in India might be a "nice" thing to do, out here though, it is considered your bread and butter, how far you go is directly related to how many people you know and how well you know them. The faculty, seniors, industry professionals, almost everyone talks about networking and ways of doing it.

After the day's sessions were over they left us in a room to meet people and socialise and I got to meet so many exciting people...a Chinese girl (who has started teaching me Mandarin;)), an American who was a pilot for several years (he's agreed to fly me on a plane and teach me how to fly;))... a former US Navy officer, a German, an Indonesian, two Taiwanese, a Vietnamese, a Jamaican and ofcourse so many Indians. Yesterday I got to meet an Ugandan doing PhD in Animal Sciences and we ended up talking for half hour on the similarities between the two countries...so many people..so many cultures..so much to explore!

Tomorrow is a football game here...this is not our usual football..this is American football (the one where they crash into each other throw a ball and run like crazy...people are just too crazy about it...you just can't beleive how crazy!!! A $25 ticket for the final game (Ohio Vs Michigan) sells for $500 here!!! The rivalry between these two teams is just unbelievable!!

Need to go home now...catch you tomorrow...same time same id...with more exciting news from Columbus Ohio!! Till then its goodbye from ...Aaarveend Shaarma (this is the way some Chinese friends pronounce my name here;).

Muthal Mazhai (First Rain)...

Today is the game day here at Ohio State. Arkons play the OSU team, this is a football crazy state! Early in the morning as I was walking up to school, I saw so many small airplanes (not joking...real airplanes...about ten of them) circling all over the sky, each tied with a big poster on the back depicting some advertisement for a brand or company that can be clearly seen from the ground so nobody can miss it up in the sky! Thats how creative marketing can get in this country!!

Here a game day (usually Saturday) is like one big festival...families go together to the stadium, just outside they have so many stalls, many people start cooking food outside the stadium (barbeque etc)-this is called tailgating. And inside of the stadium is just an unbeleivable sight! inside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Stadium Check all the photos in that link!!

The capacity is 1,10,000 and there must have been atleast 90000 people there. And they all shout in one voice...O.H.I.O...there is a small gap from which inside of the stadium is visible. Red is the color of Ohio State and the whole place is just flashing red. Wherever you go people are in Red, and most of them are talking about the game. If this is the scene of an pretty low-interest Arkon Vs OSU game, it is impossible to imagine what OSU Vs Michigan would look like! People take a dip at the Mirror lake before that game every year it seems. Last year the temperature was around -5 degrees and the lake had almost frozen over, still a lot of people stripped and took a dip before going to the game! Incredible!!

After this,I decided to check out the RPAC (Recreational and Physical Activity Center)-this is a HUGE sports-cum-gymnasium center-state of the art-full of gyms, squash courts, basketball courts, tennis courts etc etc etc! The best part though was the acquatic center. There is a mega swimming pool (used for Olympics they say!) and three smaller ones... I'm gonna go swimming as soon as possible!! then there is a spa (a jacuzzi kinda thing) and a sauna!

When I came out of RPAC, there was a lovely rain-my first at Ohio:)...not the heavy troublesome one..but a light flowery rain making the whole place much more beautiful than it already was! Came straight to the internet center in the rain and here I am...

That’s the story till now...

Two achievements

Somehow our Professors seem to have a knack of recognizing Indian festivals much beforehand, we had a midterm on Diwali last quarter and again one quiz on the day of Pongal this quarter. However the lucky bugger that I am, I gotta eat some wonderful Gulabjamun on Diwali (courtesy: Nalabagam Sid aka my roommate:)).

For Pongal however I was determined to make Pongal and eat it too! Turned out that we didn't have stock of jaggery to make my favorite Sakkaraipongal. Ithukkellam asaruvomaa! I decided to make vennpongal for the first time in my life. As luck would have it, paasi paruppu (not sure of the name in English) is supposed to be one of the ingredients and ofcourse we didn't have any of that as well. When has lack of an ingredient stopped arvi the great! So I settled on an approximate substitute-toor daal and started off the process after a few phone calls and some browsing on how to actually make vennpongal. After the cooker was on for fifteen minutes I realized that I missed out one small ingredient-salt! So again off went the cooker to the sink for emergency-cooling and opening, (don’t ask me what the mixture looked like at that point). After adding the salt cropped up another hitch-I knew how many whistles meant the pongal was ready under normal circumstances, but under these extraordinary situation I had created, I really wasn’t sure. Resolving to myself that I will feed this Pongal to others before I ate it, I made an approximate calculation with the original cooking time and the new cooking time. Finally ofcourse the-savior-of-every-dish-Arvind-has-ever-made (to quote Rachael “that’s an expression”J), lots and lots of ghee and the Pongal was ready! I don’t like self-praise, but cant help it this time-whattay Pongal it turned out to be!!! My cooking has a new fan now (of course me).

And today I reached another milestone I made Dosa from scratch i.e. from mixing the flour upto the final (semi-) crispy Dosas. Ofcourse the Dosas turned out white as milk is another matter altogether (well that’s way I always intended it to be!!). Feeling on top of the world right now. I am the best!!!

And for some sumaar recipes of a disciple of mine check out http://meerablogs.blogspot.com/search/label/Reciepes

[Note: Comments on my past cooking triumphs are not welcome unless they are filled with fulsome praise]

Meri Ma-Taare Zameen Par

"Meri ma" is a beautiful song from Taare Zameen Par, one of my friends (Kanthi) translated the entire song into simple English...and it is still beautiful:)...IMO, the feelings of a child seperated from its mother for the first time could not have been expressed more beautifully

I never say it .... but I am afraid of the dark ma.....
I never show it off.... but I always care about you ma.....

You know everything right, ma
You know everything, my ma

Dont leave me in the crowd like this ma, that I wont be able to come back home ma
Dont send me so far ma, that i may not be able to remember you ma

Am I so bad, ma...
Am I so bad, my ma...

Whenever dad swings me fast on the swing ma, my eyes always searches for you,
and I think that you will come and hold me ma....
I never tell this to him, but I get frightened ma....
I never let it out on my face, but remain in fear from inside...

You know everything right, ma
You know everything, my ma

I never say it .... but I am afraid of the dark ma.....
I never show it off.... but I always care about you ma.....

You know everything right, ma
You know everything, my ma

“Every Child is Special”- And this movie is too…

The title claims "Taare Zameen Par-Every child is special" and the movie weaves a simple, but beautiful tale to convey that message. The plot is very simple-it's about a boy who suffers from dyslexia and his parents are unable to understand why their child is so slow compared to others in his class. The child's tribulations and that of the family are shown in a very down to earth simplistic style. However what makes TZP steal your heart instantly is the fact that in the first half of the movie, we just see the world from the child's eyes. The sequence where the kid walks on the streets seeing simple things from his different perspective (with a beautiful song running in the background) will probably go down as one of the all-time classic scenes of Hindi cinema! For me personally (as it must be for many of us who grew up in a typical middle-class schooling system), it was a walk down the memory lane in the first half. I have been guilty of putting my parents in the Principal's office a number of times; I have camped (alright…kneeled down) outside class on a number of occasions. I have even had to show my knuckles and get beaten…like a zillion times (yep, I was a big-time trouble makerJ). I have even been thoroughly petrified by the prospects of boarding school! I have been subjected to the typical comparisons to peers that teachers and others make. Maybe we need to re-think the way we have designed the Indian educational system-but that's a different blog post altogether.

The mother who tries desperately to balance her love for her child and her desire to do the right thing for him is depicted wonderfully; the impatient father who throws the weight of his aspirations on the child's head is another interesting character. Aamir Khan plays the role of a teacher who helps the child get through the problem-a mature performance as usual, though I felt his costume was very out of place for the theme of the movie and the school. Another aspect that I felt made the second half fall short was this teacher-student relationship-it could have been built into a profound relationship-but Aamir has decided (probably rightly so) to focus more on conveying a message to all parents (and maybe, in my mind I am comparing this with Amitabh-Rani relationship in BlackJ).

Aamir Khan has a class of his own when it comes to picking movies in which he plays the lead role and that elegance is still evident in his directorial debut. Great choice of characters-especially for the roles of Ishanth and his mother. Moreover Aamir never strays from the theme and still keeps it riveting for the viewer-another great director is born...we could expect some excellent movies from him in the future :).

The songs are very soothing; the background score blends very well with the scenes and takes the movie to a different level. Then the lyrics….expressing a child's thoughts without getting childish is not easy and if you want to know how it is done, listen to "Meri maa" from TZP-Wow! (For a simple English translation of this song click here).

If you love children you will just love the movie, and if you don't love them yet, you will start to, after watching this movie.

PS, there is a small documentary feature that plays alongside the end titles of the movie-do sit through it. One more reason why life is so beautifulJ.