Chiranth's Blog

But walking is the best exercise!

2011-09-25T22:56:00.000+05:30

This is my third attempt with weight training, and at 10 months, my longest attempt so far. And I'm glad of the progress I have made this time: I certainly don't feel like a beginner any more - I can talk the gobbledygook of GH and leptin levels, and the differences between a stiff-legged deadlift and a Romanian deadlift :) But I'm also not an expert - there have been plenty of occasions where I have overtrained, and experienced soreness for days.

The typical beginner (and I could count myself as one when I started) encounters many problems when starting out with bodybuilding - there isn't adequate time to devote to the activity, form is always an issue, minor injuries keep occurring, the list goes on and on. Beyond these, an issue that pops up is that one's support structure (friends, family, etc.) is not always supportive of an individual's weight training. Even my doctor said, "You don't need weight training, cardiovascular endurance should be more than adequate." Another common comment I keep hearing is "Walking should be enough. It's the best exercise!"

Walking is the best exercise - Really? Best for what? Can one set a goal saying "I'll walk till the strength in my shoulders improves"? How does walking help improve the flexibility of the neck?

I'm not trying to make fun of walkers or cardiovascular exercises. In fact, I enjoy both running and cycling - I don't run very regularly, but I love doing a 25 klick cycle ride as often as I can. But doing a cardiovascular activity in isolation can do the body a lot more harm than good. Let me elaborate:

Running long distances hurts the knees [google for the phrase "joggers' knee" - it will flood your browser with a zillion results] - Seasoned runners know they have to complement their running with specific exercises for the glutes, hamstrings, and the back, in addition to the pre-run stretches
Cycling is a great exercise, but can take a toll on the back. It's unnatural for the body to be crouched down for long periods, and this leads to muscle fatigue. Ultracycling.com lays out some resistance training tips for cyclists (and swimmers). Even Lance Armstrong's training program mentions a few points on weight training - I would assume this includes hyperextension exercises for the back.

Now, walking may not be as intensive as running or cycling, so the wear & tear takes longer to appear, but as I sarcastically mentioned earlier, it can not help the body parts that it doesn't work out: walking can not help improve upper body strength and flexibility.

So, here's my opinion: it helps the body more if a cardiovascular activity is done as part of a more comprehensive fitness program that ensures:

Coverage of as many muscle groups as possible
Increase in strength of muscles and joints
Increase in flexibility of the overall body
Endurance [the cardio will probably take care of that]

Now, body building isn't the only option to meet the above criteria. Other options include calisthenics, yoga, and pilates, to name a few. So, pick one, and give your body the full-fledged fitness regimen it deserves. And please don't let others brainwash you by saying, "Exercise X is the best exercise."

Workout lessons (learned the hard way)

2011-09-25T01:07:00.003+05:30

Some lessons I've learned while weight training, especially in the last few months:

The back and legs have the largest largest muscle groups in the body, and working them out (even for a short duration) not only strengthens these muscles, but also affects the body's overall physiology. More experienced weight trainers refer to this effect as the GH boost. Lesson: If one can work out for only two days a week, it should be for the back and legs, instead of the chest, biceps, shoulders, etc. [but one should work out more often to include them as well]
If the body is excessively sore after working out, it helps to feed on some carbs. Carbs do aid in recovery, and can help get back to the gym the next day. Of course, it helps if the carbs are not made of refined sugars :-)
Compound exercises work out more muscle groups than isolation exercises, and a lot of them end up hitting the core muscles. Again, if stuck for time, compound exercises are the way to go.

gmap pedometer

2011-09-13T14:14:00.002+05:30

If you're interested in trying cycling or running, check out gmap pedometer at http://gmap-pedometer.com/ It allows you to mark the routes you've taken on google maps interface. And yes, you can save routes for posterity. If only I could get symbian phone to work with this :(

In other news, I did a 41K ride last weekend, around the Bannerghatt National Park. I now know how hilly Bangalore really is :)

The Pain Killer Cycle

2011-06-23T15:52:00.002+05:30

Wake up with a terribly sore neck
Take pain killers
Feel drowsy from the pain killers
Cancel whatever appointments you have
Fall asleep
Wake up with more soreness in the neck :(

How many pain killer cycles can one handle?

FastTrack gone offtrack with its advertising?

2009-02-14T12:35:00.004+05:30

Radio One was recently airing some advertising for FastTrack’s new Army Collection. They were inviting women to send in jingles that go with a marching tune, and played a sample jingle on air. Here are the lyrics to that sample:

Get up and leave
if he tries to kiss your hand
He’s a one-girl man;
He ain’t a one-night stand

Corollary: if one comes across a girl wearing a Fast Track army watch, can one presume she is looking for a one-night-stand?

Jokes apart, why would FastTrack want to restrict their customer base to an ultra-liberal crowd instead of having mass appeal to the entire 18-25 age group, irrespective of how conservative/liberal they are, irrespective of what their preferences in relationships are? Does their advertising tactic make sense for a consumer products' company?

A thought on Friday, the 13th

2009-02-14T11:20:00.001+05:30

Doesn't the 14th of Feb impose an unnecessary, unwarranted, and artificial deadline on a Work-In-Progress situation?

Work update

2009-02-14T11:16:00.000+05:30

I've joined Adea Technologies (www.adea.com) more than a month back. Yeah, I used to work here earlier too. Familiar people, familiar work, let's see how this stint goes.

Ghajini: lost opportunity

2009-01-12T04:34:00.001+05:30

Take a look at the ingredients: a weird case of short term memory loss, a dedicated actor who’s chiseled himself for this role, and pretty good direction – one would have expected so much more from Ghajini.

Of course I am biased by Memento, and I’m glad that Ghajini wasn’t a copy. But the story could’ve been made so much more complex and thrilling. Instead, they chose a fairly simple story line in which no serious complications arise out of Sanjay’s anterograde amnesia. He seems to have a system that works fairly well: except when his enemies ruin it for him. And then it follows the traditional good-guy-gets-rid-of-bad-guy.

Well, here’s the thing about Sanjay’s condition. He could have felt the rage of losing his girlfriend every 15 minutes, or whenever he saw himself in the mirror. But there’s only one scene which shows that, but it’s for the benefit of advancing the story – it doesn’t add much to Sanjay’s character. Why didn’t the director repeat that scene a few times, so that the character’s condition could be more ingrained in the viewer’s head?

Why doesn't the movie explore Sanjay's psyche, and have him narrate the thoughts that are running in his head? The man would be under such tremendous confusion trying to figure out what’s happening around him – why not unleash that confusion on to the audience?

Why does the story, instead of making it bigger with the endless possibilities of anterograde amnesia, choose to talk about the courtship between a millionaire and an aspiring model? Couldn’t all that material have been saved for a different yuppy movie?

I’m glad I watched Ghajini, and I did like the movie. But I guess I had my hopes up way too high.

Faith

2008-09-04T01:18:00.001+05:30

Faithful : unfaithful : faithless :: love : hate : indifference

came up with this one when listening to Doolin Dalton

Quick retorts by single blokes

2008-08-15T02:33:00.006+05:30

Married people, please move on. This post is not for you.

Single folk, especially those under immense pressure from their families to jump into something that you don’t want to contemplate right now, please stand by… we may be able to help each other out.

Given that I have had a lot of time on my hands (see previous post), I decided to call my parents over to Hyderabad. And since I knew I was going to be home pretty much all the time, I asked them to come over on an extended stay. Exactly five hours before my parents arrived, it hit me that I could have a repeat of all the conversations I have had with them about marriage and how I’m not particularly thrilled by the idea of arranged marriages.

My scared self wishes to put together a collection of well-reasoned retorts that are sure to terminate any such conversation around arranged marriages, in favour of the single bloke. If you can add on to this list that I’m putting together, you would be helping out more than one poor soul:

Parents: We would like you to get married to someone all of us are comfortable with
Single bloke: Are you thinking of my car?
Parents: What’s wrong with an arranged marriage?
Single bloke: You cannot arrange a marriage; you can only arrange a wedding. Ergo …
Parents: We’ve found a lovely girl for you
Single bloke: I’ve found a red apple for you
Parents: Even your friend X was OK with an arranged marriage. Why was it OK with him?
Single bloke: Information Asymmetry? -- raise your eyebrows as you say this
Parents: Do you know how many good offers you have been getting?
Single bloke: A good offer in a bad system still counts as a bad offer
Parents: Don’t you want a wife who can cook?
Single bloke: You know, I bought this microwave oven last month and I still haven’t figured out how it works…

Some career news

2008-08-14T03:28:00.001+05:30

I’ve quit my job of over a year. Nothing went wrong, but nothing went seriously right either. As of now, I’m in the market looking for a job. Actually not just yet – I plan to take some time off to think about myself, life, and everything that comes with it. Perhaps in a few weeks I’ll freak out about unemployment, and get serious about the third draft of my resume. In the meantime, Chi has more time to dedicate to his blog :-)

2008-08-08T02:49:00.004+05:30

I'm only human
I seek what I love
I chase what I seek
I may affront what I chase
'Tis a chance I have to take

Noble

2008-08-06T00:55:00.003+05:30

There is the language that we read, and then there's language that we speak. The two are completely different animals: often, we come across words that we read but never use.

What if we could speak the way our favourite authors write? Would that show what our true character really is? If I used the word "noble" in a conversation, does that truly mean what I was describing was indeed noble?

Buy and sell your friends?

2008-02-23T23:04:00.004+05:30

I've become quite used to the big variety of stories and feeds that keep popping up on facebook. But one story that I saw today made my eyes open really wide:

The app seems quite harmless in itself: all it seems to suggest is that you treat your friends as pets.
From the application's web page:

Buy and sell your friends as pets! You can make your pets poke, send gifts, or just show off for you. Make money as a shrewd pets investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale is the bees knees!

But they might want to rethink their newsfeed stories

long time, no rant

2007-07-23T18:00:00.001+05:30

So here's one.

Why is it that some people have to put up HP#7 spoilers on their google talk status message? Do they want to show off that they are speed readers, or that they had been reading spoilers all along, or they just want to ruin the read for people on their contacts' list for the fun of it?

I'd been ignoring the HP fan sites for months, just in case I read a spoiler; and no, I did not read TOI on Sunday, the 22nd either. But (and here's the big mistake) I logged into google talk this morning, and boom - now I know how the story will unfold.

Thanks for ruining my reading, mate.

Ladakh Snaps

2007-05-04T16:20:00.000+05:30

Here are the Ladakh snaps!!

There are a few more snaps in this web-album.. and the story follows soon, after I move to biryani-land :-)

Snaps of the ISB Campus

2007-04-19T00:50:00.000+05:30

A few more snaps in this web-album

Graduation Snaps

2007-04-17T23:29:00.000+05:30

Here are some snaps from our convocation rehearsal, the class photo-session and the convocation ceremony.

More snaps here

the stage is set

shine on you...

crossing swords

with my parents

our class is too big for a single snap

walking in to the makeshift auditorium...

... and Mr Tee poses for the camera

Back to Term-2: A crash course in macroeconomics

Graduated!!

oops! I threw my hat too high!

hat throwing: take-2

waiting for the snaps to be burnt to CD... didn't anyone study Service Ops Management?

ISB's class of 2007: the final handshake

Placement Story

2007-04-11T23:56:00.000+05:30

When watching TV last night, I hit upon CNN-IBN playing this news snippet:

To quote from the text version from CNN-IBN's site

Five students from the prestigious Indian School of Business have bagged international jobs worth Rs one crore annually with the highest clocking Rs 1.2 crore.

Five crorepatis? Well, sure 416 is a big class, but I didn't know it was big enough for me to miss meeting (or even knowing) these five classmates of mine.

Update [17 April 2007]
After intense speculation, some friends of mine & I did come up with five possibilities who could have hit the one-plus mark. So I (probably) do know these five classmates of mine.

Comment on an earlier post

2007-04-11T23:45:00.000+05:30

I received a pretty strongly worded comment on one of my earlier posts titled Tale of two networks I thought it deserved the attention of another full post.

Here goes the comment by Mr Anonymous (or maybe Ms Anonymous):

Your stand about viral marketing in Tagged.com is a clear stupidity. It's still at your own discretion whether you want to send invitation to the list in your addressbook.

Haven't you wonder that it just makes easier for you to send invitation to your friends. If you think about blogging something , think twice before posting it.

Hmm... it looks like I touched someone's nerve there.

OK, Mr Anonymous, please look at another post of mine - First Gazzag, now Tagged & Facebox. Now you say it is at the user's discretion whether to send invitation to the list in his/her addressbook. Then please explain to me how to avoid the screen that I've listed in Step 3 which not only asked me for my hotmail password, but also refused to allow me to go ahead unless I typed the password in. It takes quite a bit of ingenuity to bypass this step - something that the average hotmail/yahoo user would not be able to do - therefore it is no longer at the user's discretion as to whom to invite.

Your last question was if it doesn't just makes easier for me to send invitation to my friends? No, it does not. It just adds to the spam in my friends' mailboxes. And I detest spam, especially if it goes out in my name without my explicit intention.

Graduated

2007-04-11T11:23:00.000+05:30

We graduated on a sunny Saturday morning under a lot of glare. Proud parents, smiling guests, excited faculty - it must be the most memorable day for most of my classmates.

Huge posters saying "Graduation - Class of 2007" hung on either sides of the door of a makeshift auditorium. And when we entered it, we were welcomed by a roar that still rings in my ears. I'd seen a lot of videos where a person walks down through an eagerly anticipating crowd and when I experienced that for myself, I did feel like a celebrity, even though it was for a tiny fleeting moment.

Well, I am an MBA now. I did enjoy the one year I spent at b-school and learned a few things along the way. Maybe I could have learned a lot more. Nevertheless, I'm happy, and my parents are proud.

Going offline

2007-04-03T17:57:00.000+05:30

My laptop loses network connectivity tomorrow. So, I guess this'll be my last post from ISB. We have our convocation this weekend.. finally I'll be an MBA. Reminds me, I ought to change my "about me" description.

What's next for me? A few weeks in Bangalore; then about five days in Leh (really looking forward to this one); another week in Bangalore; and then I return to full-time employement in Hyderabad.

Project Discotheque

2007-03-31T07:44:00.000+05:30

Here's a snap I had posted to section C about a classmate of ours.

The person on the right once acted in a movie called DiscoDancer. The one on the left used to work for Cisco. We let our logic take a hop-step-and-jump from these facts, and end up naming the person on the left as Disco (it doesn't matter what Disco's real name is - don't ask, and I won't tell).

While the name Disco is reasonably popular within our class at ISB, I am getting worried that his name isn't getting recognised among our alumni network. What would happen if subsequent batches at ISB don't recognise him as Disco? It'd be such a shame... we're talking about a missed legacy here.

So, here is my prescription for correcting this problem. Let's do a googlebomb :-)

To quote wikipedia,

Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner

Currently, if you google with the search phrase Disco + Cisco + ISB, Disco's blog shows up as the second search result.

If you just search for Disco + ISB, his blog is the 21st.

To me, these search results are unacceptable.

The objective of Project Discotheque is as follows - get the ranking of Disco's blog up and higher in Google's ranking for the search phrase "Disco" :-) Within a week of this announcement, Disco's blog should be the first search result for the phrase "Disco Cisco ISB" on google, yahoo and msn search. Within a month, the blog should be the first search result for the phrase "Disco ISB".

So, if you're interested in helping out, here's what you can do. If you are a blogger, or you maintain your own website, please make a link to http://isb2007.blogspot.com/ using the anchor text as "Disco".

Oh, and if you have any other suggestions, please do let me know.

done with it

2007-03-30T19:22:00.000+05:30

This time last year, I was dreading my last day at work. And today, I'm done with my last examination at ISB; nothing left but the convocation next weekend.

Yep, the roller-coaster is over.

And the emptiness will sink in pretty soon.

A Tip

2007-03-29T06:25:00.000+05:30

For the incoming batch at ISB, here's a tip:

Beware of the funnel.

But if you are really adventurous, then maybe...

Losers' Lessons from World Literature

2007-03-26T05:26:00.000+05:30

Here's a small sequence of events in the book Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield

The defeat of a proud Gaul

The place of defeat gets a bad name

..and the attitude sticks, even among the commoners
In the legend, it says "An attitude which has persisted down the centuries, with the result that scene of the Gauls' defeat by Caesar is still unknown. A regrettably chauvinist state of affairs."

It's a trifle sad the Caribbean Islands are already well-charted territory, else we could forget about the battles of Trinidad & Tobago just as easily as the Gauls forgot Alesia.

Why did India lose to Bangladesh?

2007-03-21T11:48:00.000+05:30

Question: why did India lose the opening match against Bangladesh?
Answer: because this is how they spent their practise session.

Scarcity & Spam

2007-03-21T10:20:00.000+05:30

Question: How does a real-estate broker attempt to speed up the pace at which he could close a deal?
Answer: He creates a perceived scarcity in the mind of the buyer. As soon as he has explained the nuts and bolts of the deal, you can be sure the first thing he's going to say is "I've got two other buyers who're looking to lease this place." That the demand is perceived to be greater than supply will automatically make the buyer willing to pay a higher price. Of course, knowing about this little gimmick of real-estate brokers doesn't help much - we are not 100% rational.. we somehow can't seem to account for this gimmick.

Real-estate is an essential, going by the roti-kapda-makan philosophy. Others may have lists longer than that - you could count education, telephone connections, maybe even Internet connections. But why would anyone consider orkut accounts as an essential? Well, let's take a look at this e-mail I received:

from: (name hidden)
reply-to (email hidden)
to my friends
date 20-Mar-2007 23:05
subject Message from Orkut
mailed-by orkut.bounces.google.com

HEY ITS DIANNA, FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ORKUT,EVERYBODY SORRY FOR THE
INTERRUPTION BUT ORKUT IS CLOSING THE SYSTEM DOWN BECAUSE TOO MANY
BOTTERS ARE TAKING UP ALL THE NAMES, WE ONLY HAVE 57 NAMES LEFT, IF YOU
WOULD LIKE TO CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNT, DONT SEND THIS MESSAGE, IF YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR ACCOUNT ,SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST. THIS IS NOT A JOKE, YOU'LL BE SORRY IF YOU DONT SEND IT. THANKS DIRECTOR OF ORKUT, TIM BUISKI. WHOEVER DOESNT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DEACTIVATED AND IT WILL COST YOU $ 10.00 A MONTH TO USE IT.

This message was sent to you by xxxx. To see xxxx's profile click:
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=xxxxx

For a moment, let's forget that this is a hoax. Let's also forget that Tim Buiski has been "the director" of bebo.com, yahoo.com and msn, before taking over as director of orkut ;-)

Now, the underlying principle of this hoax was scarcity. The email speaks of something that is running out, and the reader somehow is able to connect with that. But why wouldn't this sender consider whether or not the item being spoken of is an essential or not. It doesn't really matter if my orkut account expires - it doesn't really affect me. And I can hazard a guess that most of my friends don't treat their orkut account as an essential.

So, question for the day: why do hoaxes thrive? And why do they thrive as much on the Internet?

If you have any pointers, please leave a comment. I shall try to collate them and write down my own thoughts in a future post.

2007-03-19T11:06:00.000+05:30

We were discussing cricket with Prof Montealegre at a small get together that we had last Thursday. The conversation went something like this:

Prof Montealegre : So, I hear it takes a whole day to play a game of cricket.. that's quite fantastic!
ISBian Cricket Buff #1:Sir, there is another format that lasts five days.
Prof Montealegre : What! Oh.. that's amazing! So, which are the good teams?
ISBian Cricket Buff #1: Australia is the best. South Africa's good . India is good too. Pakistan are alright, but they play their best against India.
Prof Montealegre : Really?
ISBian Cricket Buff #2: Yeah, Indo-Pak games are very sought after. The roads are empty when there's an India-Pakistan match. Everyone takes off, nobody works.. and there are firecrackers if we win.
Prof Montealegre : Hmm.. very interesting. So, when is India's first game?
ISBian Cricket Buff #1: Day after tomorrow. We're playing Bangladesh.
Prof Montealegre : Okay, are they a good team?
ISBian Cricket Buff #2: Well, they're new, they have a lot to learn. They'll learn from us.
Prof Montealegre : Hmm.. nice, nice.

I hope the Professor has followed up on the latest.

Tale of two networks

2007-03-15T16:49:00.000+05:30

I think I'm getting slightly obsessed with this topic of web-based social networks, so I solemnly swear this'll be my last post on this subject. For a while, in any case :)

Some people believe that it takes a maximum of six people to link up any two people in the world. This is a familiar theory called the six degrees of separation. Mathematically, this makes sense. Let's say every person on earth knows 500 people. I don't think 500 is too high a number - I have 472 people on my orkut list, which include seven people I haven't ever met (they could be fake for all I know), but I think I know more people who don't have an orkut account. The 500 number means that through six other people, I could theoretically form links with 500^5 = 31250000000000, which is definitely greater than the population of the earth. Yes, there might be repeats, but there's a good chance I could cover everyone. At least that's what the theory says. But here's where I disagree -- there might be some clusters of people which are so remotely connected from the rest of the world, that they might not have a link. This is especially true with tribes that have been untouched by other civilised humans.. so it's difficult for me to believe in the Six Degrees theory outright. Nevertheless, if you keep increasing the degrees - from six to eight to maybe 15 - you are bound to connect most humans on the planet. For me, the more interesting fact about the "Six Degree of Separation" theory isn't in the number six but that most of us are connected to each other, most of us know each other. At least indirectly.

Let's draw a parallel to this in the Internet space - quite arbit, but please bear with me. Let's say that email addresses are the equivalent of humans. Well, they are born, they live and then they die. And while they're living, they contact other email addresses. How many degrees separate any two email addresses in the world? Maybe six, maybe more, maybe infinite (you do have closed loop intranets where all email addresses are internal to the network - pretty much like the tribes that have been left in isolation). If I assume the equivalent of knowing another person is an email sent from on email address to another, how many degrees would separate any two email addresses on the Internet?

Here's what I'm getting at. There are two networks - one of humans and one of email addresses. These two networks are separate, they are distinct, and they should not be confused for each other. If I am serious about Web 2.0 in any form, I have to draw a distinction between Internet users and the means they adopt to communicate on the Internet.

What orkut & yahoo! 360 and Linked in have done is to differentiate between the two networks. On Linked in, you don't invite an email address to hook up with you, you invite a person to join your circle. Even on orkut, if I ignore the malicious bots created by crackers (crackers, not hackers), it is people that I am connecting with. When the programmers behind this system forgets that he's trying to connect people and not email addresses, you end up getting a system like tagged.com. The website starts trying to find more and more email addresses to send spam invitations to in the vain hope that viral marketing will work. Well, sir, it doesn't. If gazzag.com were to get hold of my addressbook and sent invitation to everyone on it, they'd send invites to email addresses like that of the placement office at ISB. They won't be inviting the people working in the placement office, but the placement office itself - now what kind of a social network is that?

Lesson for running a web 2.0 site that bases its growth on viral marketing - let the users decide whom to invite and whom not to. That would be social; cracking through users' addressbook is not.

First Gazzag, now Tagged & Facebox

2007-03-12T11:09:00.000+05:30

The site www.tagged.com is a new social networking site. I haven't been tracking on its popularity, but the site claims to be the fastest growing teen social community on the Internet. From the corporate information available on the site,

Tagged.com is the premier social networking destination for the Millennial Generation and an ideal place for advertisers who are trying to reach the teen market.

OK, so that tells me (and my friends) to stay away from the site.. we've not been teen-agers for quite some time now. But there are bigger problems with this site than that.

A few months back, I had written the articles de-gazzaging my inbox and more on gazzag about a popular web nuisance that called itself Gazzag. I think tagged.com is just another example of such Internet annoyances. Let's walk through tagged.com's registration process to see why:

Step 1
OK, here's the website. It does look a whole lot uglier on Internet Explorer with some nasty banner advertisements. Anyway, let's create a new account on this.

Step 2
Yep, filled in my details. But take a look at something that I've done - I specified my date of birth as the 31st of February, 1978. Not only did the website allow the non-existent date, it didn't reject me because even though I am not a teenager. I'm wondering what happened to their tagline of being a teen social community.

Step 3

Whoa! Give me a minute.. why does Tagged.com want my hotmail password?!? Yep, one reason only - to get my addressbook, so that it can spam all of my friends with invitations to Tagged.com. Another example of viral marketing in which the existing users don't get a say in who gets contacted. What's more, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to get around this screen. I guess the naïve user would not look to bypass this screen and simply provide their hotmail password. While I didn't check if the tagged.com guys have devised mechanism to import contacts from yahoo and gmail, I won't be surprised if they have.

The same problem exists on the website facebox.com, another social networking site. When you register on this, there does not appear to be any way to create your account without importing contacts from your e-mail address books.

But if you click on the "by email address" option, you'd get the option to bypass this step:

Nasty, isn't it?

Let me re-iterate what I had written earlier about gazzag and other sites that ask for e-mail passwords:

... The tool that allows one to import contacts from yahoomail & orkut requires one to enter the username and password of those sites. And a lot of my friends, including a few tech savvy ones, have done exactly that. My question is why??

Would you trust me with your yahoomail password? I think not, I hope not. Then why would one trust gazzag or any other site asking for your yahoomail password? ...

Tagged & facebox are just a few more site that are trapping users into sharing their addressbooks. But the point is that it could get worse.. what if someone in Tagged.com's office is reading your e-mail? Their privacy policy will probably mention that they won't - but how do you know they're going to stand by that? Anyways, the next time a site asks you for your hotmail/gmail password, please think about if you'd like to share your password with me.

If you've sent me a tagged or a facebox or a gazzag invitation recently, I hope you'll understand why I've not responded.

Work-ex for an MBA at ISB

2007-03-09T02:47:00.000+05:30

As an ISBian, I keep getting queries from potential applicants whether their profile is good enough to be selected at ISB. One of the more worrying aspects for many aspirants is the amount of work experience they need before they can apply. ISB has a policy that reads

Preferably two years of full-time post qualification work experience.

We'll come back to my interpretation of the "preferably" in this statement in a short while, let me look at the aspirants first. Some of these people are really young; it's not rare to come across people in their final year of graduation and they go - "How should I spend my next two years before I apply to ISB?". Whew! talk about focus! Do you know why you want to do an MBA, I ask. And the reply usually starts with "ummm..."

Back to the subject - the number of years of work-ex is just one method of quantifying how much you have worked. The other method to measure the work-ex, perhaps not quantitatively, is to look at one's résumé. When one writes one's résumé, it takes a single line to mention how many years one has worked. What about the other lines? What is the story that they tell? Do they speak of a leadership that raised the value of your organisation? Does it speak of a benchmark you set for yourself, or for others? Does it speak of knowledge? Does it say that you chased your professional desire? Well, what does it speak of?

At the end of the day, when ISB's admission committee receives a huge bunch of profiles, it's the résumés that are going to get compared (yes, there are some other things that get compared too - a GMAT score, recommendations, essays, yadda yadda yadda - but let's stick to CVs for now). Naturally, a person who has worked for long would have a greater chance of having a richer résumé than one who's worked for say, just a year.

I also came this article earlier today: Opposing the Youth Movement. It justifies business schools seeking only those who have lots of work-ex. Essentially,

The whole concept of an MBA program is based around peer-to-peer learning—people coming with diverse experiences into a structured framework, where they're learning potentially how to run a business. So I don't feel that people who have experience are going to gain as much from [a program that admits undergrads]

This is probably a good description of the thought process running at ISB.

Right, so what can an ISB aspirant draw from all that's written above? Here would be my quick list:

Forget an MBA - focus on your career. When the time to think about an MBA comes, you will know.
Pick a career that gives you exposure to multiple aspects of business. B-schools value diversity all the way - in fact, a person who has spent two years in a programming job, followed by two years in sales might have a better looking résumé than one who's done four years purely in sales. Not trying to make a blanket statement here - but do think about it.
Try to stay with an organisation long enough to have seen different aspects & levels of the company's hierarchy. Unless you've spent enough time to experience hierarchy first-hand, it might get difficult to learn from it, or comment on it.

If you prefer to comment or ask questions by e-mail about this post, my address is pqtsocss@trashmail.net.

2007-03-07T11:01:00.000+05:30

0417 hrs - 2nd platoon Bravo team being overrun by the Viet Cong
the heroes - Charlie Sheen, William Dafoe, and a few others
the movie - Platoon
the sound - rapid fire, going rat-tat-tat...

1043 hrs - the Professor's voice overrun by the typing of students
the heroes - my classmates
the lecture - Web 2.0
the sound - frantic typing to complete an assignment, going rat-tat-tat...

Nike & holi

2007-03-06T21:41:00.001+05:30

Managed to come across some very good advertisements recently, thought I'll write about them:

Nike

Not only has the airing of this advertisment been timed very well with the world cup season, it also captures the Indian love for the game very accurately. As soon as the advertisement starts, the traffic stops, and the cricketers take over. It doesn't matter who's bowling or who's batting.. it's just the game that has to be played.. the game has to go on till the fat lady sings, or in this case, the traffic starts moving.

When the first batsman hits the ball too hard and the bowler goes "kya kar raha hai, yaar?", it's almost like the kids playing in a neighbourhood street with rules like "if you hit the ball beyond that wall, you're out". There's more that makes the ad very Indian - the chicken that pops its head out of the basket, the kerosene lanterns, the elephant that adds to the madness, the confused thulla.. it's hard to make out it's a Nike ad except for the less than half-a-second frame where the familiar swoosh pops by.

A donation
A friend shared this link with me on the day of Holi. Unless you've seen this before, make sure you watch this clip till the end.

I'm surprised on not having seen this on television. I would expect this to be a lot more effective than the Aishwarya Rai advertisements that used to be aired on the same subject.

Placements at IIMI, the Chronicle version

2007-03-06T01:16:00.000+05:30

A friend of mine forwarded me this article from Central Chronicle about placements at IIM Indore: http://www.centralchronicle.com/20070303/0303102.htm

Here is Chronicle's version of the companies that came visiting IIMI:

This year several renowned companies visited here to offer placements to the students; some of them are Macancy, Assenger business consultant, ... Deloty consultancy, ... Lehmen brothers, Goldman Saches, Duche bank, ... City group, ....

Some IT companies include .. Cognijent, ... Kotek Mahindra and Kevonsis etc.

:-)

3,2,1: My placement story

2007-02-24T06:56:00.000+05:30

shortlists - 3
offers - 2
accepted - 1

Hyderabad = home for quite some time in the near future :-)

BTW, does anyone know a place that I can rent?

Using awk to parse HTML

2007-02-24T04:31:00.000+05:30

Sorry for disappearing away like that… we had lots of stuff happening on campus (read our placements). And between tracking job posts and interview preps and and the interviews themselves, my blog was the last item on my priority list. Anyways, now that placements are done (and successfully for me), let me get back to the second post about working with data from the web.

The objective
One thing I did not make clear in the last post was the objective of our exercise. What we were trying to build was a model that could suggest the price for a user if (s)he decides to put up a car for sale. The model would be based on how people are currently pricing their used cars.

So, in order to build a model, we needed to work up some data from www.autoindia.com, as we did the last time. The next step is to convert all of that data in the 17,000 html files into a single spreadsheet. Each listed car on the website should have its details on a separate record in the spreadsheet.

In this post, let's explore how to do this using awk.

A simple sample HTML
Let’s take a look at the listing http://autoindia.com/UsedVehicle/buy-used-car130625.html. The webpage looks like this

In order to build our spreadsheet, we need all the data such as the year of manufacturing, the make of the car, the model and the style. Let’s take a look at the html source code.

For most of the variables that we’re interested in, there are specific identifiers that have been written in the html, like lblYear, lblMake and so on.

Given all such identifiers, it becomes a simple programming task to list out all the lines that match these identifiers, get rid of the tags, and bingo! we’ll have all the information that we need.

Let’s try out a simple awk script to see how we can do this.

The first awk script
I’m not going to delve into the details of how awk works. You can find out more detail on the GNU awk guide at http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html Yep, GNU’s implementation of awk is known as gawk. Though I have used gawk for all of the examples, I’ve interchangeably used the names awk and gawk. The name’s inconsequential, the result is the same.

Back to our job in hand, we’re interested in specifying a pattern and printing out the details of the lines that these patterns match.

/lblYear/ ||
/lblMake/ ||
/lblModel/ ||
/lblStyle/ {
print $0;
}

In the above snippet, we’re telling awk to print the entire line (represented by the $0) if it matches any of the regular expressions listed between the two forward slashes.

If we save the above snippet into a file named “split.awk” and run the following command

C:\> gawk –f split.awk buy-used-car130625.html

We get the following output:

2002
Hyundai
Santro
1.1 GS Zip Drive

Eliminating the span tags
Let’s look at the above information closely – if we can eliminate the stuff between and including the angle brackets, we’d be left with exactly the information that we need. Let’s modify the awk script we wrote earlier.

The two gsub commands are global search and replace commands. They will look for the regular expression (specified as the first argument) and replace it with the substitution string ( the second argument -- in this case, a blank) in the text that is specified as the third argument). Now that we’ve wrapped that up in a neat function, let’s look at the output that this gives us

C:\> gawk –f split.awk buy-used-car130625.html
2002
Hyundai
Santro
1.1 GS Zip Drive

In a spreadsheet, please!!
The last teeny-weeny bit of stuff that we need to do is to plug the above into a single line, preferably in a comma-separated or tab-delimited format, so that it can open up in a spreadsheet program like MS Excel.

We can use a simple trick. Each time the pattern is found, instead of printing the output after stripping off the tags, we can concatenate that output to a string, that can be printed off later using the END code block of awk.

Here we go…

And the corresponding output

C:\> gawk –f split.awk buy-used-car130625.html
2002 Hyundai Santro 1.1 GS Zip Drive

If I decide to redirect this into a file using the > operator of DOS,

C:\> gawk –f split.awk buy-used-car130625.html > file.txt

I can open file.txt using MS Excel (by using the tab-delimited option) to get something like this:

Expanding the above
The last bit that remains is to run the above technique across all the HTML files that we’ve generated. This can be done by writing a single batch script in DOS with the awk command that we’ve used for all the 17000 HTML files that we’ve downloaded

Of course, since we needed more information than the simple example that we’ve seen above, our split.awk script ran into many more lines. There were some fields that we handled using associative arrays

Our final code looked like this:

And our output in a spreadsheet:

Downloading awk
If you’re going to use awk for the first time, I’d recommend you try it on a linux or Unix machine. There are a whole lot of other tools that gel well with awk, using the pipe mechanism that Unix scripts provide. Plus, I’ve still not been able to write simple awk scripts that can be written on the windows command line. Even simple stuff like

C:\> awk ‘BEGIN{ print “hello world”; }’

fails miserably. Probably the quotes or something – haven’t been able to figure it out.

Nevertheless, if you do need to use awk on Windows, then awk comes as part of an entire Unix toolkit available at http://www.delorie.com/gnu/ Try the zip picker – it should give you the entire stuff – awk, sed, the whole nine yards.

Alternately, you could try using cygwin. Runs a bit slower as it uses something called a Unix emulation layer. But it's the closest replication of a Unix environment on Windows that I've seen, and is packed with all the unix tools that one can imagine.

Additional reading

The GNU Awk User’s Guide - http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html
Unix classic tools - Awk Programming - http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/awk.shtml
Awk man pages for Linux - http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/awk.1.html

Other Comments

In response to my previous post, Punit had asked me why I didn’t use RSS and an XML parser - here's why:

It didn't look like autoindia.com has been refreshing it's RSS feed (I wasn't able to subscribe to it) and the XML file that's on the server contains some very old data from 2005, and about 15 records from 2007 - it was insufficient for us.
RSS is typically used to only publish the latest n items that the site has listed. n could be 15, 100, or 1000, depending on the webmaster. If you want all the data that a site has, like we wanted, you'd be extremely lucky to get that off RSS. In our case, even if the RSS feed has been refreshed regularly, we would have needed to monitor it over a long period of time (probably a year) to build a sufficiently large data set.
Depending on how the webmaster has configured the XML, the description may not contain all the fields that one is looking for. In our case, we wanted everything - from the price of the car to the location to whether it has power steering. The site's webmaster didn't publish all of that. So, RSS was clearly out.

awk was useful for us in this exercise because of the way html is structured. Had the html been a little more complicated, I’d probably have had to use perl and an HTML parser module off CPAN. In the end, using awk has to be a conscious judgement decision – it can give you results quickly, but you need to be careful – it can be quite painful to debug. And if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t believe in documenting code, you’ll end up having loads of fun :-)

Our project
What I've described above was just the initial part of our project, where we gathered the data from the web. We went on to build a price-prediction model that turned out to be relatively successful. We had an error in the range of 10,000 rupees for the top 37% data, I guess that was fairly acceptable. Anyways, the report has now been submitted.. let’s wait for the grades.

Crawling web data using "wget"

2007-02-08T16:35:00.000+05:30

This is the first of a two-part post in which I discuss tools that we used for our project in our Business Intelligence using Data Mining course. During this project, we were to work on some real-world data to come up with some intelligent analysis using the tools we learned during the course.

Let's take a look at the website www.autoindia.com. If you try to search for all cars that are for sale, you'd reach http://autoindia.com/BuyUsedVehicle/BikeCarListings.aspx. If you click on any vehicle that is listed there, the site lists each individual vehicle in a separate webpage that looks like

Let’s take a look at the URL - http://autoindia.com/UsedVehicle/buy-used-car17262.html If you change the trailing number (17262) to some other number, the site would take you to a different vehicle that they’re listing. For our project, we wanted to download the html files for all the cars listed on the site – we’re talking about 17,000 files here. If you find yourself in a similar situation, chances are you would not want to save each page manually – even if you can save 15 pages a minute, it’d take you 18 hours to save 17000 web pages. Whew!

wget provides a smarter solution. From wget’s website,

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.

In a nutshell, it means you can open a command window, and type something like

C:\> wget http://autoindia.com/UsedVehicle/buy-used-car17262.html

and hit enter. And wget will download that html file for you.

Now our job has become a little simpler. We can take any spreadsheet software, have it generate the numbers 1 through 17262. Use a simple search and replace to add the leading string “wget http://autoindia.com/UsedVehicle/buy-used-car” and the trailing “.html” to the generated number. Save that into a text file. Copy the entire file into a command window, and then go and have a cup of black tea. Do make sure you add a dash of lemon. Depending on your network connection speed, you’d have downloaded all the 17000 files by the time you finish your tea.

Now that we have 17000 files with us, these are still in html. We now need to convert the data in html to something in a spreadsheet, so that the data for a given car lies on a single row. I’ll discuss how to do exactly that using awk in my next post.

Misguiding content

2007-02-07T03:50:00.000+05:30

The website of the National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG) loops through five images on the opening page -- two of these images are pictures from ISB. Even in the photogallery page, there are seven images shot at ISB.

I'm surprised why an organisation would put up photographs of facilities that are not their own. I mean, let them put up pics of the IIIT campus where they reside. Or at least, let them mention that these pics were shot at ISB.

BTW - does this count as image plagiarism?

Advertising for Morphy Richards

2007-01-23T19:46:00.000+05:30

I spent some time this weekend working on an advertising assignment that was due today. We were asked to prepare a single-page print advertisement for Morphy Richards, for any/all of their products.

So here's how I went thinking about this assignment:

Identify the attributes of the current advertising Morphy Richards uses:

Clean advertising & simplicity - no garish images
Their products don't have any major differentiator, so current advertising doesn't use the "buy this because we're better" tag line. Instead, their advertisements try to instil a positive association of the product.

Most of their products are for the homemaker (read the woman in the household) - the ad has to appeal to women, it would influence buying decisions on their entire product range.
Use creativity to generate emotional appeal - reinforce the feeling of homeliness with Morphy Richards products.
Identify which product(s) I want to create the advertisement for. I ended up deciding between sandwich makers and hair dryers.

Once these decisions were done, I went about using a combination of google's image search, my creativity, and my skills at gimp & MS paint to come up with these.

The first one

This one turned out to be really clean with a "can't hurt the eye" white background. But the image was bad - it was a sandwich that wasn't from a sandwich maker! Surely the prof (or anyone else) would see through that. And see through that, my quaddie did. Back to the drawing board...

Another sandwich maker ad

So this one featured an improved tag line. Had gotten rid of the "A sandwich" trailer. But there were three problems with this one:

the colours are not uniform throughout - half the ad is in a shade of brown and the other half in a bluish grey
the sandwich is ugly - it is a very greasy sandwich that no health-concious homemaker would ever giver her child.
In hindsight, the tag line doesn't make any sense. How can a sandwich be the next best thing to sliced bread - a sandwich should be better than sliced bread, shouldn't it? I'd worked on the tag line from the phrase "the greatest invention since sliced bread", but I'd lost the meaning somewhere during the transition.

Time to move over to another product - let's check out the hair dryers.

The first hair dryer ad
So, who would buy a hair dryer? A woman who has a bad hair day. Hmm, more googling and more work on gimp made me come up with this:

All right, now I'm violating the cleanliness principle. Yeah, the colours probably look good, and the format is fairly simple - visual description of the problem, textual description of the problem, visual description of the solution. But the woman is not right - she looks agitated. And people never look agitated in a Morphy Richards ad.

So the challenge is now - come up with a visual description of a bad hair day that would appeal to women, without indicating any agitation.

Well, more googling, and this is what we come up with:

The final one

And did the ad work? I don't know - I submitted this to the prof only today. But a few "oh cho cute" comments from the target segment did make me think it's come out well :-)

Thanks V, I couldn't have done this assignment without your feedback.

Words Worth

2007-01-10T23:39:00.000+05:30

ISB is conducting a competition to test your thinking.
The prize, for the 15 best entries, is a trip to ISB.

Check out the competition at http://www.isb.edu/wordsworth/

an afterthought

2007-01-08T05:16:00.000+05:30

A few weeks back, we had our annual alumni reunion, Solstice (just realised I'd been misspelling it all along as Solistice). When the alumni introduced themselves, they always tagged their year of graduation to their name. They'd go "I'm R, '04" and "I'm S, '06" and so on.

Next year, I'll able to introduce myself as, "I'm Chiranth, double o' seven".

----------------

Among other things, I managed to write three exams last week, and a 4918 word essay on Outsourcing. Was about to overshoot the limit of 5 grand, but managed to bring it down. Weekend was a good break - watched loads of movies. Did some productive work too, like changing my desktop's wallpaper, contemplating to clear my desk, etc.

Classes start again tomorrow... er, in a few hours. I'd better get some sleep.

HNY!!

2006-12-31T20:34:00.000+05:30

Wish you all a very happy new year!!

Very Funny Ads

2006-12-31T10:53:00.000+05:30

Check this site out: http://veryfunnyads.com/

gmail search tip

2006-12-31T03:47:00.000+05:30

Gobbledygook version
gmail indexes whole words separated by whitespaces, not partial subsets of text.

In plain english
When searching for different word forms, such as publish and publication in gmail, it's necessary to search for both words separately. Searching for publi is not going to fetch any results :-(

What MGTO missed out

2006-12-26T20:09:00.000+05:30

Watch Kramer vs Kramer or Jerry Maguire? The scenes where the two chaps get fired are pretty neat, eh? Here's a thought. Would an MBA grad be able to fire the two characters any differently?

Is there a fundamental disconnect from being an MBA grad and being a manager? Sure, an MBA (maybe) teaches us the quant skills and the hard facts to look out for when we are running a show. But then, doesn't it take a bit more to be a manager? Let's go back to the firing aspect - how would I, as an MBA grad, be able to tell a subordinate that he is going to lose his job, because of no fault of his? Should I take solace in the fact that it is a decision based on profitability?

A lot of companies go through crunch situations, and lay people off at one time or the other. Strangely, some people are willing to go back and work for the very same companies when times improve. I think that probably happens out of goodwill, more than anything else, of the managers. And I doubt one can learn how to create that goodwill at a b-school. Yeah, you could have courses which focus on how to improve one's personality, and how one should train oneself to react to situations; you could also have other influences during an MBA program, such as ideas of social responsibility. That, however, is one end of the spectrum. On the other end, an MBA might teach you how ensuring goodwill with fired employees reduces recruitment cost later. Somewhere between these two extremes is where MBA programs are creating the manager of today.

MGTO = Management of Organisations, a course we had in the fourth term, one of the few people-related courses we've had.

Another ad mismatch

2006-12-26T19:49:00.000+05:30

Paresh Rawal danced to a "ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ri, pizza aaye free" for Domino's. That tune doesn't seem to go very well in the Arshad Warsi ad, does it?

PM on the steel industry

2006-12-25T11:45:00.000+05:30

Excerpt from the PM's speech at the IISCO steel plant, Burnpur, West Bengal. Here's a link to the story on NDTV.

Why does Lakshmi Mittal or Ratan Tata have to buy foreign companies to establish a global presence and expand steel capacities when our per capita consumption of steel is so low and when there is so much opportunity here?

Let me see if I understand the PM's statement correctly. Is he suggesting that:
1. Mittal & Tata should not be establishing a global presence? OR
2. Mittal & Tata buy only Indian companies to establish a global presence? OR
3. Mittal & Tata should match their companies' production capacity only to match domestic demand, which currently happens to be low, but could rise in the future?

Maybe we should just stop attempting to make sense of ambigous statements made by politicians and assume they're playing to the crowd.

The network comes home

2006-12-23T20:11:00.000+05:30

They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And they come with different ideas of life. Each one of them is brimming with gyaan about the college, about resumes, about life, about careers, about everything. And boy, are they getting an audience. Here's what's happening. Our annual alumni reunion - Solistice - is on this weekend, and the alumni have descended from all over to our campus. I guess it's a good way to end a week that was jam-packed with assignments for almost everyone.

I ran into alienwan shortly after he landed up on campus. Almost expected him to be reviewing someone's resume, and he didn't disappoint. Also met ford prefect. There are loads of other alumni I met, some for the first time. Interesting to hear what they had to say about post-ISB-life.

They've started to test the speakers on the lawns outside our block.. looks like it'll be a very loud party tonight. I'd better finish that SOMG work in the next 120 minutes :-(

INPE + CFPD + MHTP = a big smile

2006-12-20T02:29:00.000+05:30

Advertisements, rebranding & bias

2006-12-16T12:45:00.000+05:30

KitKat's latest advertisement shows people wearing pants twice the size they usually wear. So, is KitKat now a health food?
Sony Ericson advertises a music player.. it takes a while for the viewer to realise it's a mobile phone. Got to admit, I love this ad; should try to locate it on youtube sometime.
ThumsUp rebrands itself as a men's drink, something that women won't understand.

Seriously, what's up with these brands?

--------------------------------------------

When on of our professors fired a "name three ads that you've seen today", we were stumped for a few minutes. He went on to say, "See, that's advertising for you. There's hardly any recall." I agreed with him then. But now I don't. If you ask people to name three political news headlines they've seen today, chances are good that they'll be stumped on that question too. That, dear readers, is selection bias.

--------------------------------------------

BTW, as the first three lines show, I seem to fare better on ad recall than the news recall :-( I hope advertising turns out to be a good elective next term.

Using tab-stops in MS Word

2006-12-12T03:50:00.000+05:30

This post ought to interest people who are busy updating their resumes.

Please open up your resume in MS Word, and hit the button that looks like this symbol - ¶. That button is available on the standard toolbar – you might have to add buttons to view it.

Now, let’s take a look at two snapshots of a resume.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Make note of the poor alignment on the right side in Figure 1. The two lines don’t end at exactly the same length. What’s more, there’s an arbitrary number of tabs and space bars one has had to use to get the alignment as close as possible to ideal. But hey, what happens when you change the margins of the document? You’d have to go tabbing and spacing all over again to fix the alignment. Figure 2, on the other hand, seems a lot crisper. There’s only one tab that has been used, and that has taken care of everything. If figure 1 is what your resume looks like, and figure 2 is how you would like it to look, please read on.

The following steps will help you use a feature called “tab-stops” which is present in most word-processing software (including MS Word), but can be quite a pain to understand and use.

So, here’s what you need to do:

Create a new style

Menus --> Format --> Styles & Formatting
Click on New Style. Specify the name, font, font-size, etc. Ensure that the Style Type is set to Paragraph.
Click on “Format”
Click on “Tabs”. A new options box should pop-up. The tab stop position should be set by default to 1’’
Click on “Clear All”
In the tab stop position, write in the length of your horizontal ruler. This would typically be the width of your page minus the margins that you’ve specified. For a page setup using “Letter”, and margin 1.25”, this would be 8.25” – 1.25” -1.25” = 6”
Set the alignment as "Right".
Click on “Set”, then “Ok”
Save the style with a meaningful name

Write out your line saying “Indian School of Business Hyderabad India”. Ensure that you provide only one tab between the words “Business” and “Hyderabad”
Apply your newly created style to the line.

Hopefully, your alignment problem would be solved. Now, if you need to change the margins of your page, you’d need to reset the tab stop position to something that suits the new margins.

She said he said she said...

2006-11-16T04:15:00.000+05:30

..that so-and-so are seeing each other.

Now, I know these two quite well.. and I'm really surprised they didn't tell me themselves. It's not like I'd go and tell people and start gossipping. I might blog about it though, but that's not the same as gossipping.

Bottomline - A party's due!!

Taxi Tale

2006-11-16T01:57:00.000+05:30

The gatekeeper had a pleasant smile, but it was definitely made up. No one likes being woken up at four in the morning, why should the gatekeeper be any different? Nevertheless, he had done his job satisfactorily after being woken up, he'd called for a taxi well before dawn for the two guests of the family in Apartment 14-A. Now the taxi was here, and the two guests were getting in now - luggage in the trunk, trunk snap shut, people in the car, doors shut, and the taxi was off.

M & Chi had reached Mumbai the previous night from Hyderabad, shortly after midnight. M's uncle had an apartment in Worli, where they caught up on a few hours' rest. And they were to catch a flight at this ungodly hour to Indore. In Chi's opinion, it was a crime to expect someone to wake up before 10:00 on any given day. And this was a weekend. To make matters worse, time adds up. If a flight is supposed to leave at five-forty, which by itself is bad enough, they expect you to check in at least half an hour earlier. Add travel time to the airport, and the time it takes to get ready, and then the additional buffer time in case something goes wrong. All of that meant waking up at four in the morning. But there wasn't anyone he could complain to; after all, it was he who'd booked the flight tickets. Now in the taxi, Chi thought he could catch a few winks, but one knows how sleep is. It doesn't come by when one needs it the most.

Neither Chi, nor M was familiar with Mumbai. M had close relatives there, but had never lived with them. Chi had lived there ages ago, but he was too young to remember it. Yeah, there was something that Chi noticed - Mumbai's roads were better than Hyderabad's. Maybe it was because of the early hour, but they seemed a lot wider than any road that Chi had seen. Another few hours, and these roads would be bustling with the life that Mumbai is known for. He imagined how the roads in Indore would be like - probably narrow and very pot-holed. He'd find out soon enough. They'd be in Indore by 6:30 or 6:45, around two hours from now. Hmmm.. almost 15 minutes had gone by sitting in the taxi. The airport was a good half an hour from the apartment, so they were almost half way through.

It was a too early in the day for any coherent thought. Maybe the upcoming competition at Indore had filled M's mind, Chi kept checking and re-checking their flight tickets. It was an Indian flight, he wondered if Indian's breakfast is any good. Strange name, Indian. You've known the airline as Indian Airlines all your life, and one fine day, someone just renames the airline as Indian. He wondered what they got out of the entire renaming the exercise. They keep doing this renaming business at Bangalore, Chi's hometown. Chi often thought when Brigade Road would be renamed.

It was 4:40 now, they should be reaching the airport. Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. And yes, the taxi was slowing down. But the familiar ramp of two terminals at the airport was not to be seen. Maybe it was right around the corner. There came a small fork in the road, and the driver pulled the taxi to a halt. Surely there was nothing wrong with the taxi, for the engine was still running.

The driver turned around and asked, "Aapko VT ke railway station jaana hai ki Bombay Central?"

Damned gatekeeper!

Epilogue
For the next half hour, the taxi flew faster than any aircraft that I'd been in. We managed to reach the airport at a quarter past five, and yes, we were in time for check-in.

At Indore, I exited on the first day of the Ashwamedha, but M made it to the second round. SS, from IIMI won the competition. More on that in a future post.

2006-11-08T03:07:00.000+05:30

In my last company, our company's President always used to talk about how he admired Sergei Bubka, for his ability to break his own records. It was his way of inspiring us to perform better. ISB is a bit like that; it breaks its own records. Just when you get the feeling that you're done with the craziest term ever, you get a term that's even crazier to deal with.

Some alumni had been telling me about how the PGP eases out once you move into the electives phase. Now, I am convinced that I had sampled the wrong set of alumni, for my fifth term is awful - it's packed with a thousand things and I don't have a clue about where I'm headed. I've had to rename my "to-do" list to a "not-yet-done" list, and even that is growing faster than Hanuman's tail. With placement preps, half-baked attempts at b-school competitions, co-ordinating between three different study groups for three different courses, one PaEV course, I'm surprised I still retain my level of sanity.

I hope for a more relaxed weekend - I'm finally off to Indore for two full days, and I'd be spending the better part of Sunday in Mumbai waiting for a connecting flight. So no studies, and no ISB-related work - just a competition, and a novel if I get the time. It's a pity I won't be able to travel around Indore, but never mind that - I'm glad to be heading out of Hyderabad for a change.

It's three in the morning. Time for an omelette au fromage :-)

Global Social Venture Competition

2006-11-04T19:08:00.000+05:30

The Global Social Venture Competition began in 1999 and is a student-led initiative pioneered by the Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School, and the London Business School. The Indian School of Business is a full partner -- with responsibility of promoting the competition in business schools in Asia, mentoring the teams, and holding the Asia semifinal round. GSVC is a business plan competition whose mission is to promote entrepreneurial businesses that satisfy two criteria:

They have clear and quantifiable social objectives and impact
They are financially sustainable, in the sense that they are profitable or self-supporting through revenue generation.

The team must have at least one person currently pursuing a full time MBA programme or has graduated during 2006.

Further information is available at www.socialvc.net or www.isb.edu/gsvc

Important dates are:

Registration with five page summary (optional, if teams require mentoring support) - Wednesday, November 15, 2006 (to ISB at GSVC@isb.edu )
Submission of final plans - Friday, January 12, 2007 (to ISB at GSVC@isb.edu )

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For any questions regarding this event, please see the FAQ on
h ttp://socialvc.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewPage&pageID=109&nodeID=1

The price of being disorganised

2006-11-03T00:17:00.000+05:30

My desk is a mess - there is a telephone, movie DVDs, my laptop's adaptor, coffee mugs, books, papers and God-knows-what strewn all over it. And my bookshelf looks worse. There could be a monitor lizard sitting behind all those books and papers and I wouldn't know of it before April 2007. And the silly thing is, the institute encourages this kind of clutter. Honest. Last term, our MGTO professor told us in class that clutter on the desk is a sure sign of a top-notch CEO in the making. Since then, I've lost all incentive to clean my desk.

In any case, I could never keep my room a 100% tidy; it can be very tidy for a short span of time, or slightly tidy for a moderately long period of time, but never very tidy most of the time. Thank God, Mum hardly visits, else she'd tear my hair out asking me to clean my room. I still recall my time in Bangalore - cleaning my room was one task that was always on my to-do list. It had occupied some kind of a permanent position on the list. Whenever Mum asked me to clean my desk, I was always ready with a quick "Next weekend." And weekends are wonderful days.. they're meant to stay in bed till late, not give a care about the world, and worldly chores such as cleaning rooms. Actually, I have a ready-made excuse in that regard here. ISB doesn't have weekends. Weekends exist on calendar but are not real - they're loaded with as much work as weekdays. So there, Mum, I'll clean my desk on the next "real" weekend :-) Unless the monitor lizard decides to come out from behind the books before that.

Coming back to the CEO-in-the-making-theory, it has occurred to me that it also takes a CEO lot more than a mere untidy desk to stay in the race. One also needs a very powerful memory to remember where one shoved those tiny bits of paper that other people gave you telling you they're important. You know, those little things that seem so insignificant when you accept them from others - things like lecture notes, class handouts, case discussion slides, etc. And I seem to be lacking severely in the memory department.

Our Operations course in the third term had a case study about a restaurant called Benihana of Tokyo. Actually, the name of the case is a bit misleading. Since the restaurant is located in the US, the case should've been named "Benihana of Tokyo of the USA". Adds to the clarity for folks who haven't seen the restaurant themselves, or pre-read the case. The misleading name apart, the case was an interesting read. The restaurateur's idea is a fantastic concept. But profs shouldn't make us discus food or restaurants right after a meal at ISB's dining hall. Makes you feel really bad about not getting your money's worth. As I always do with every case, I picked up the discussion notes which I later lost in the clutter of my desk.

And in the fifth term, we have the same case all over again in another course called Marketing Services. The professor for this course (he's fabulous, btw) expects us to pre-read every case and submit a written analysis before the class begins. The question he wanted us to answer for this case was "What is the role of the chef in the Benihana restaurant?" I distinctly remember the Operations prof discussing the exact same question back in the third term. And in my eagerness to prepare the perfect write-up, I spent a good half an hour trying to find my old case notes... but couldn't find 'em. And then I spent another half an hour trying to answer the question by myself. That's a full hour. One hour of non-productivity, one hour lost in the race to become a CEO, but more importantly, one hour less of precious sleep. Anyway, I shouldn't be complaining; I made up for my lost sleep in the Marketing Research class :-)

and a year later...

2006-11-02T03:36:00.000+05:30

E|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
B|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
G|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
D|--------------------5--4---------------------7--5----------------|
A|---5--5--7--5---------------5--5--7--5---------------------------|
E|-----------------------------------------------------------------|

E|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
B|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
G|------------7--4---------------------5--5--4---------------------|
D|----------------------5--5--4--2------------------5--7--5--------|
A|---5--5----------------------------------------------------------|
E|-----------------------------------------------------------------|

Happy Birthday, dear blog!

More on Gazzag

2006-10-25T17:41:00.000+05:30

I dug a bit deeper into the Gazzag thing after my last post. I created a dummy Gazzag account to see what's on the site, and here's what I observed:

The sign-up process does not need an invitation. Anyone can join in, without any restrictions. The sign-up process does not even have a CAPTCHA system to trap bots. So one can expect a larger number of bot-generated fake profiles on this site.
There are tools to automatically import contacts from orkut, yahoomail, Multiply, MSN Messenger, Outlook & Outlook Express. Imagine if you import your Outlook contacts at your workplace and your CEO receives a Gazzag invitation from you. That'd be fun, eh?
There are ads all over the place - a combination of graphics, Google-generated text-ads, and those irritating pop-ups (I deliberately used Internet Explorer to see what the majority Internet users' experience would be like). Of course, Firefox & adblock would be able to clean most of this in a jiffy.
Take a look at the profile information it asks - one of the fields is "Children in the future". Hmm..
One of the features that Gazzag is trying to market big-time is the live chat - one can chat with anyone who's logged on to the website. Either that's really useful, or really irritating.
Gazzag Dating - this is a site within Gazzag, name explains all.
I couldn't find a link where I could delete my account -- not true anymore. Please see update below.

On the whole, the site seems extremely nasty, and intrusive - definitely a lot more intrusive than orkut.

Now, a slightly tangential line of thought. The tool that allows one to import contacts from yahoomail & orkut requires one to enter the username and password of those sites. And a lot of my friends, including a few tech savvy ones, have done exactly that. My question is why??

Would you trust me with your yahoomail password? I think not, I hope not. Then why would one trust gazzag or any other site asking for your yahoomail password? There have been a whole range of sites that have been asking for yahoo & gmail passwords:

Meebo asks for your AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, GTalk, Jabber and MSN Messenger passwords
Multiply asks for Hotmail, orkut, gmail, livejournal passwords (maybe a few more)
Plaxo asks for your gmail password.

I'm sure there are tons more that can be added to this list.

All in all, I am a bit flummoxed as to why one would want to share passwords on a new service, just for a little convenience. Sites like orkut & gmail allow one to export their contacts' list into a CSV file. One could use that to add contacts manually on gazzag or multiply or whatever service they want to use. Though this needs a bit more effort, I think this is a much safer approach to importing contacts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update [26 Oct 2006]

After Venkat's comment, I dug some more if Gazzag accounts could be deleted. And yes, I did find these instructions:

Select the "Welcome" option in the main menu.
Select the "Account Settings" option in the submenu.
Select the "Terminate Account" option.

I found these instructions on http://www.gazzag.com/help/en_US/myaccount.jsp#10. Look for the question on how to delete one's profile.

de-gazzagging my inbox

2006-10-25T01:07:00.000+05:30

I've got tons of emails in my inbox asking me to join this site called Gazzag. There are tons more that I've deleted. And what's worse, the number of invites I've been getting per day is going up.

Gazzag seems to have taken cue from gmail's Viral Marketing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing] to popularise its social-networking service. What they've done differently from google is that they've automated the invitation process - that is a trifle irritating. In fact, some new users don't even realise that they've exposed their addressbook to this website which sends out invites to all their contacts.

Thankfully, gmail filters are here to my rescue. Gazzag, your invitation emails are being summarily trashed.

Indore, here I come

2006-10-19T02:59:00.000+05:30

That crazy schedule has paid off.. I'm now a finalist in the Ashwamedha [pdf] competition :-)

I'll be going to IIM-Indore in the second week of November, provided there are no major clashes with the schedule here at ISB. I've heard a few good things about the Iris fest, and am looking forward to seeing it myself.

BTW, here's a link to klueLESS, an online game that the Iris team had put up last year. Don't spend too much time on it - it's very addictive.

Top-hat & Tricolour

2006-10-14T08:23:00.000+05:30

Guess what movie this frame is from.

Answer (select this line with your cursor to view it) : Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This frame comes on when Harry, Hermione & the Weasleys reach the Quidditch World Cup scene.

Two 'P's fail

2006-10-13T04:28:00.000+05:30

There's a concept that details the four Ps of marketing - products, place, price and promotion. Recently, when someone mentioned "packaging" as one of the Ps, I was stumped. A friend was kind enough to drop a hint in my ear, "If you'd read Kotler, you'd know that some people consider Packaging as the fifth P." Anyway, I'm not trying to highlight my ignorance with this post, so read on...

A really successful company had this nifty idea of repackaging their product. They wrapped up it up in a flashy cover that also served as a carry bag. Pretty convenient for the consumer, one might think. Strangely, the retailers always give the customer a carry-bag with the product, even if no other product were purchased. The carry bags are always black in colour - so the logo of the product isn't visible to anyone. So no secondary advertising there. Bit of a flop marketing exercise, eh?

The company: United Breweries
The product: McDowell's Whiskey

Holidays != no work

2006-10-11T01:56:00.000+05:30

The last two days have been more hectic than any two days in the last term. Having procrastinated a lot for the first two days of the term break, I finally started work on the four competitions and the PaEV submission sometime on Monday morning. Here's the timeline.

1100 - Wake up, smell the coffee
1130 - Start working on Entrepid. Can't believe I'm doing DMOP again.
1330 - Hide & Seek serve as breakfast. Yes, I know the time, thank you.
1500 - Sid calls. Time to break off from Entrepid, and start work on PaEV.
1530 - Meeting at the cafe. Pizza & cold cofee a good lunch make.
1600 - Sid & I set up shop in the library.
1900 - Data, data everywhere, but not a clue to think.
2045 - burst of inspiration! Google rocks! Powerpoint sucks!
2230 - one document down, one more to go, but it's time for a dinner break.
0000 - both documents done. now to work on the b-plan competition.
0030 - numbers not good. Company is the second biggest money guzzler in history.
0045 - numbers changed. Now it's the biggest money guzzler in history.
0050 - Drastic changes! Layoffs! Salary cuts!
0115 - Give up. This is of no use. Hope that sanity shall return with the sun.
0130 - chat with Dee. Discuss next steps for the next day.
0145 - party going on in SV1 lawns
0150 - SG on the violin. AG on the tabla. SD on the whiskey.
0200 - a quick swig of signature :-)
0230 - back in my room, checking emails, playing catch-up on orkut.
0245 - Entrepid deadline's postponed. Leaves me Ashwamedha & Papyrus to work on.
0250 - Start dawdling on Ashwamedha.
0330 - Still dawdling on Ashwamedha.
0400 - The meaning of the first case hits me! I see light!
0415 - Wah Taj! Cuppa black tea. Wish I had lemon.
0430 - Yahoo! chat with my cousin. He advises me to sleep. Ha, I reply.
0500 - back to the case. Time to test my writing skills.
0745 - my hard disk starts creaking. Shut down laptop. Need a break anyway.
0800 - Skimpy-clothed models on Channel V
0820 - Skimpy-clothed models on MTV
0840 - Skimpy-clothed models on Channel V
0845 - Another cuppa black tea. Again, no lemon.
0900 - back to the case. hard disk still creaking.
0945 - the first case is done, whew!
1000 - AM reviews my write-up. "As arbit as the case", he says.
1100 - searching for inspiration to analyse the second case.
1200 - still searching for inspiration
1300 - start writing..
1400 - eyes heavy.. need to finish this doc before I can sleep.
1800 - hmm.. it's dark. great, I must've fallen asleep. now back to the doc
2200 - dinner at Kan's place
2330 - half an hour to the deadline. kase komplete! send out analysis to the IIMI blokes.
2345 - ooh, that was a quick reply. Oh, they've postponed the deadline #$%@!&*^!@

Time to get on with the other competitions...

New look :-)

2006-10-08T20:10:00.000+05:30

I finally gave this blog a long-due touch up. Stuff that I've changed:

White's out, black's in.
Fonts are a lot cleaner.
The blog now uses a larger screen width than earlier. So one has to scroll a lot lesser.
There's now a dynamic blogroll that's generated out of my bloglines account - yes, it has a few bugs (some of the links point to my blog, not the ones they're supposed to), but I'm hoping to fix that soon.
New links for accessing atom feeds through Google/Yahoo/Bloglines feed readers.

I hope I can put in as much effort into the PaEV submissions that are due on Wednesday.

Update: the blogroll issue has been fixed.

Saris & Suits

2006-10-08T07:11:00.000+05:30

The fourth term was the last one that we had as a section. We all go our separate ways now, each in their own chosen stream of subjects and courses.

To mourn/celebrate/rejoice the last term as a section, we had a lot of theme days - from a cas-ormal (casual + formals) day which fizzled completely to a very successful cap-day to a heavily photographed Formals Day. We also managed to get the Deans to pose with us on the Formals Day. Some memories...

Sharks in suits?

Formal Flintoff ;)

Walking the walk

With the Deans

Colours galore!

The entire section (minus Mama, the photographer)

A bird's eye view

A wave of blue

My study group

These snaps have been shot by Mama, SK, and docrahul. I again feel the effects of not owning a digital camera :-( My snaps will take their time to come, but they'll probably show up on my flickr account.

I'm moving back!!

2006-10-01T17:31:00.000+05:30

What's worse than suffering from an injury? Self-inflicting some more.

As if tearing a ligament wasn't bad enough, I deliberately asked for permission from the ASA to move to the first row. And they didn't have the heart to deny my request. I ended up sacrificing a perfectly-hidden last-row seat to swap places with SR in my last term. Then it got worse. Not knowing how long my injury would take to recover, I asked ASA to allow me to continue on my first row seat this term too.

But I'm getting better now. And I now have a chance to redeem myself. AB's now been casted and is on a wheelchair. And thanks to the limitation of the wheelchair, he has to swap his last-row seat with me. So, AA & KanKan, I'm going to be your new neighbour for the last few days of the term :-)

BTW, here's a pic of me handing over the baton, er.. crutch.

Dunked, er... drenched

2006-09-27T03:46:00.000+05:30

If you can't take the horse to the water, take the water to the horse...

While celebrating birthdays, section-C maintains a tradition of dunking the birthday boy's study group, close friends, not-so-close friends, innocent by-standers, and people who show up just to have the cake. We proudly kept up our tradition on the last birthday of the core terms.

Happy birthday, Watson!!

After a long-due haircut..

2006-09-26T20:39:00.000+05:30

..here's what a bloke gets to hear

R : (over sms) nice hair cut, much needed.

Major : hmm.. fauji hair-cut, eh? You look like a fauji, returned from the front, especially with your crutch.

Kan : You used to look like a pomeranian before you got your haircut.
Me : (with one eyebrow raised) What do I look like now?
Kan : A pomeranian with a haircut.

ATK : You must be feeling very light-headed.

Fender: Act 1, Scene 1

2006-09-26T20:33:00.000+05:30

Fingers hurt just as bad as my ankle used to.
A dissonance of strings frequently emanates from quad A-09 in Student Village #1
Flatmates eye me as menacingly as Fulliautomatix looks at Cacaphonix.

Yours truly is learning to play his first guitar, a Fender.

One pizza too less

2006-09-15T04:55:00.000+05:30

This blogpost contains many references to non-vegetarian food. If you are repulsed by talk of non-vegetarian food, or are related to Maneka Gandhi by blood or by ideals, please stop reading right now, move over to the next blog you were planning to read and pretend that you never opened this post.

What does one do when Domino's takes down the order for a Pepper Paneer Pizza, but delivers a Pepperoni Pizza? Does one:

a) Curse Domino's
b) Go hungry
c) Fall back to good-ol' Maggi Noodles
d) Turn non-vegetarian
e) Option (a) followed by inky-pinky-ponky between (b), (c) & (d)

At the outset, let me clarify -- I still am non-vegetarian. The above-mentioned decision dilemma didn't affect me, it affected two of my quaddies. Domino's managed to bring my pizza alright - a delicious Meatzaa¹, which is supposed to have every non-exotic meat that Domino's serves in India. Non-exotic - that's the operative word here. As most of us non-vegetarians know, you can't really get exotic meats easily. Can you call up Wan's Kitchen and ask for a dish of "Yak curry"? Probably not. Anyway, Meatzaa comes with this great assortment of chicken, keema, ham, and umm, that's it, I guess, that quite literally melts in your mouth. (Damn, my mouth waters even as I write of it) Oh, and I think this particular pizza has the greatest density of non-vegetarian toppings per square inch ever. Probably not good for those who care about their cholesterol; but then if you do care about your cholesterol, I'd suggest that you not order pizza.

All right, let me come back to the original problem. The four of us had ordered four pizzas (two non-vegetarian and two vegetarian) to celebrate A's birthday. And thanks to the static on the phone provided by the Huawei equipment that separates Hutch & BSNL, a Pepperoni pizza was delivered instead of the desired Pepper Paneer. To make matters worse for my vegetarian friends, we noticed this problem after yours truly had devoured most of the garlic bread (I should ask them to send more of the dip the next time). So now we had two veggies and one veg pizza. (I faintly recall someone named Gabbar saying something very apt for such a situation). Nice people that we non-veggies are, we asked V to switch to non-vegetarian ways. But his response was a quick "No", which he topped up with a "Maggi banaoon kya?" to the other veggie. Somehow, Maggi noodles didn't seem very appealing to them after a pizza, and they decided to pretend to relish their lone green pizza & 7-up and then went back to their studies.

I think I heard the cupboards in the kitchen creak later in the night, but I have to sympathise with a bloke who's been denied his Pepper Paneer.

¹ I'm not sure if the name Meatzaa ends with one or two or three 'a's - I've just taken the average (yes, I pay great attention to detail).

2006-09-09T02:45:00.000+05:30

The Ferrari lies parked in front of A-block in SV1, untouched for the day. Its temporary owner has started to use a crutch to limp around the campus. A chap who could run for twenty minutes non-stop a few weeks back can now be easily overtaken by snails.

After a long day, as I sit back in my quad, mulling over my new-found respect for snails, V walks in and asks if his French beard looks all right. "It's perfect", I reply. V goes on to describe how he needs constant reassurance about how his beard looks. I give the most sensible reply that I can think of. I say something monosyllabic that starts with hm and ends with mm.

Thankfully for me, the conversation shifts to V's new-born son. He shows me a picture of his son, sleeping peacefully. "He's always sleeping", V comments. "As are you", I observe. "Oh yes, he's just like me. I used to look exactly the same way when I was born", says V. Twenty-five years hence, if this kid dons a French beard and V is kind enough to send me a picture, I might be able to make more than a monosyllabic comment.

Back to the present, a case on Palace Hotels is staring at me in the face. And the clock reads 2:58 AM.

Cuteness explained

2006-09-02T20:34:00.002+05:30

Dee & I had our first meeting for our PaEV¹ project. Our meeting was far more productive than what my quaddie, A, has been having for his project. He leaves promptly at nine in the evening to work on PAEV and returns at two in the night after having watched a movie. So far, he's managed to watch Omkara, Les Miserables and The Unrecollectable.

I, on the other hand, have not had to rely on PaEV meetings to watch movies. Having created an average of one movie per day of the break right on the first day of the term break, I had very little carrot to distract myself from making the initial document that we set out to do. Plus, an email reminder from a professor saying "You're a week late, duffer!" is a pretty big disincentive all by itself².

Anyway, once our PaEV idea document was scribed and owls despatched to our pre-occupied team-members for comments, Dee & I had a lengthy discussion on cuteness. I had posted eons ago that I had one theory on what made something cute. I never got down to blogging my theory, though. But Dee & I were able to elaborately define the broad area of what would and would not be considered cute. Actually, it was Dee telling me her views, and I was trying to impress her with my listening skills. By the way, my listening skills are legendary; I have a diagram from yesterday’s conversation to prove it.

It transpires that the factors that lead to cuteness can be of two kinds (I had suspected this all along) - the lusty and the non-lusty. Yeah, some of these factors can fall into either category (the diagram below makes that evident). And you could also have situations where people negate an aspect of their cuteness with some other part of their character. And, there could be cases where a person is cute due to multiple reasons, one of them being lusty and the other, non-lusty.

Anyway, being an Engineer, I shall resort to this fabulous diagram (I can hear the applauses, thank you) to make things clear. Oh, and the "size of eyeballs" factor is what my original theory was. That's what helps Nickey to be perceived as cute and Mr Tinkles as ugly.

"All right, smart engineer," I hear you say, "so what's the point of all this?" Well, here's the meat of this post. If you're a guy and are trying to hit on a girl, you should position yourself in the lusty-cute type. People with casts on their legs fall into the non-lusty cute category. Seriously, breaking a bone or tearing a ligament while playing basketball won't get you anywhere on the lusty-cute-index⁴. Even if you are wearing a cast and getting a lot of attention, it's the wrong kind of attention. It's the kind of attention that kitten get because they're small and vulnerable. There's no difference between you and the li'l bird that a lady on her morning walk picks up from the street, says "oh, cho chad" and puts it back in its nest. Apparently, this is a reinforcement of Darwinian theories here… I won't bore you with that (even though Biology was one of my favourite subjects till XII⁵); instead, you can check out this article on NY Times.

Right, so that was what I've learned about cuteness in the last 24 hours. Shall update this space if my views alter significantly.

Notes:

PaEV = Planning an Entrepreneurial Venture - a course that we have.
No, I made that up. ISB's professors are more polished than I've described.
Dee - I've made some modifications to this diagram from yesterday. Hope you don't mind.
The author is in a state of vexation due to the newly-found realisation of his cast's dismal value.
Primarily due to the opportunity to dissect rats.

Why do I like iTunes?

2006-09-02T20:06:00.000+05:30

'Cos every now and then, I find a feature as cool as this!

Here's the iTunes main window:

Here's the lower left hand corner where you create new playlists:

Notice what happens when you hold the "shift" key...

You can create a smart playlist that allows complicated searches of this kind:

Of course, one better have one's mp3s tagged accurately :-)

Trashmail

2006-09-01T17:09:00.000+05:30

Trashmail is a remailer service that I've been using for some time. Pretty handy when one's filling up one of those anonymous surveys on the Internet. It's also available as a firefox extension.

This post has been inspired by the increasing number online surveys that ISBians are being requested to participate in.

CFIN topics

2006-08-29T08:02:00.000+05:30

M&M
APV
CAPV
WACC
DCF
WTF?

2006-08-22T04:53:00.000+05:30

This has got to be the dumbest thing I've read this week.

Shivangi has done a good job of analysing Karan Johar's movies. I agree with her sentiments wholeheartedly, except that I liked the first three movies - sensible or not. Heck, I've watched each of them at least thrice.

Anyways, there's one thing that KJ didn't quite explain in KHNH. If Preity Zinta was an evening-MBA student, what was her full-time job? Not that this piece of information will help me find the Holy Grail; yet I'm curious.

Cast Away

2006-08-18T02:38:00.000+05:30

The architect in the previous post lies bedridden with a cast on his left leg.

And here's how it happened.

Wednesday night - basketball court - section-C playing the TAs. The TAs start scoring left, right and center.. A scores two three-pointers to make the TAs race up the points ladder. At half-time, Sec-C decides it's time for more aggressive tactics. Chi-boy alternates with N to play point guard. Amidst the familiar chants of "Sec-C! Sec-C!!", we make a few successful shots and play some good defence to bring down score difference to six.

Then comes a defensive rebound which Chi-boy tries to grab. In mid-air, his ankle gets twisted between two other players and bang! he hits the hard concrete on his right shoulder. Chi gets replaced and the game continues... well, I don't remember much of the game as I was more worried about the ice-pack. But I did see J convert a few great shots. And yeah, not to forget R. He was all over the TAs.

We lost 47-37 eventually, but we're happy we gave the game a good shot.

Turns out that the twisting of the ankle resulted in a torn ligament. And a cast.

Casts apart, thanks to all who've helped me out yesterday & today.. K, A, N, Adi, R, Dee, Tutu, Disco, Sid, Laks, V, Mu, Major, my quaddies (of course), and lots of other names (I'm sure I haven't recollected all). And thanks to all my classmates who've tried their artistic talents on my cast. It doesn't look like a work of Picasso, but definitely beats the boring white :-)

House of cards

2006-08-17T18:09:00.000+05:30

When classes get boring, houses get built...

..and here's the architect.

The structure was too fragile for me to add another level. Perhaps, I'll manage it the next time. Wish me luck!

basketball woes

2006-08-16T03:10:00.000+05:30

Why is it infinitely more difficult to get a shot right during a game, when it seems so bloody easy during a practise session?

I hope tomorrow's game goes right for our section. For starters, I hope I'll not doze off while taking a shot.

In other news, I actually managed to run four full kilometres on the treadmill today - yay! Hope I can hit five soon.

last week

2006-07-25T04:30:00.000+05:30

end-term-exams - think-I-did-DMOP-well, but-can't-be-sure; faffed-my-way-through-the-other-three; ldp-presentations; night-out-on-comp-strat-project; more-presentations-at-ldp; late-night-bus-to-Bangalore; bus-driver-drives-like-a-maniac; reach-Bangalore-safe-and-sound; catch-up-on-few-hours-sleep; masala-dosas-for-breakfast; drive-my-car-around (really-missed-it); sort-out-form16-ye-ye-ye; lazy-Saturday-morning; meet-up-with-cousins; head-to-Forum; buy-the-fourth-Harry-Potter-DVD; T-loses-cellphone; celebrate-his-loss-in-Firang-Pani; PVR-tickets-sold-out; grilled-fish-at-Transit; drive-around-late-night; meet-loads-of-relatives-next-day; pack-up; can't-believe-term-break's-over; catch-overnight-bus-to-Hyd...

...and I'm back.

Chi-boy ko gussa kyun aata hai?

2006-07-19T18:30:00.000+05:30

Kyunki exam khatam hone par bhi term-2 khatam nahi hua hai..

Tasks to be completed before I feel the term break has really started:

Comp Strat project submission - hopefully, we'll do it tonight
LDP - course on Advanced Business Presentation Skills

Exams

2006-07-15T10:51:00.000+05:30

Again?!? Already?!?

Damn!

Tie-ISB Connect 2006

2006-07-11T19:39:00.000+05:30

The Indus Entrepreners & the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development, ISB are organising the TiE-ISB Connect 2006 from September 20th-22nd.

More details and registration information available at - www.tie-isbconnect.com

Tagged!!

2006-07-11T01:32:00.000+05:30

I’ve been tagged by Kapil, Nikhil & Swapnil. So here goes...

I am thinking,
Why made Zidane make that fateful header?

I said
something inconsequential, I hope.

I want
a telephoto lens for my camera.

I wish
for Term 2 to end fast

I miss
my car. Badly.

I hear
(right now) the wind.

I wonder
why I quit my job.

I regret
nothing, really. No point regretting anything.

I am
human

I sing
when I’m happy

I cry
when I watch The Man in the Iron Mask

I dance
awfully

I am not
perfect

I write
carefully, cautiously.

I hate
self-centred people

I confuse
myself when writing answers to questions like these.

I should
be sleeping. I should be asleep right now.

I finish
last. Almost always.

I tag
Dee, Tee, & Disco.

Corporate Quiz at ISB

2006-07-03T02:55:00.000+05:30

The Net Impact Club of the ISB, in partnership with Asha (Hyderabad), will be conducting a corporate quiz event. The quiz offers participants a chance to pit their brains against the best, win attractive prizes and most importantly lend their support to a deserving cause. The proceeds received from this would go towards the mid-day meals provided to the students at Ramakrishna Upper Primary School at Yellammabanda, Kukatpally, Hyderabad.

The details of the event are as follows –

Date: July 30, 2006
Time: 1:30 P.M. – 5:30 P.M.
Venue: Khemka Auditorium, ISB
Quiz Organizer: J.Krishnamurti (J.K)

More details & registration forms (for participants & sponsors) available at http://www.isb.edu/ACE2006/

Owl snaps

2006-07-01T23:43:00.000+05:30

I should've posted these snaps a long time back... I guess better late than never.

I'd posted about this owl ages ago at http://chiranth.blogspot.com/2006/01/avian-visitor.html

Midterms done

2006-06-30T18:31:00.000+05:30

Whew!!

The lemon tree and the monkey

2006-06-29T00:47:00.000+05:30

It's two days to our mid-term examination, and I ought to be studying. I am, but not to great success. I wandered around the Internet, and finally ended up reading Disco's blog. A couple of quotes from Prof Waterman took me back to another story that one of profs from Engineering had told us.

A trader and his wife moved to a new town. The trader eagerly established his business there, and dedicated himself to the cause of making money. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, but the trader's business didn't do well.

The wife, religious as she was, decided to seek divine intervention. She'd heard of this sage of infinite wisdom who lived in the forest nearby. People of the town revered him, and believed he could speak to the Gods themselves. The lady approached the sage, and poured out the couple's woes. The sage listened, and suggested they do a yajna. An auspicious date was set, and the sage visited the trader's house. The sage performed the yajna to please the Godess Lakshmi.

After the yajna was over, the sage collected the ash and asked the trader's wife to bury the ash near the roots of a lemon tree. "As the tree bears new fruit", the sage said, "your husband's business will prosper." Then the sage added a condition, "As you place the ash, do not let the thought of a monkey come into your mind."

After-effect of Argentina vs Netherlands

2006-06-22T09:12:00.000+05:30

Time : 0850 hrs
C's location: Academic Center 2, Lecture Theater
T's location: SV3, Quad CX, bed

T's phone rings for about 10 seconds. T picks up.

T (in his usual peppy voice): Bol, Chi!!
C (hushed whisper) : class! class!
T (looks at watch) : oh f***!! oh bloody f***!

Biking to Bidar

2006-06-20T19:20:00.000+05:30

This post comes a bit late, not due to the delay in getting snaps developed, but because I've been caught in a whirlwhind of Term-2 activity. Well, as the saying goes, better late than never...

We got a term break of five days after our exams last term. I dare say I've made the most of it. First up, I took a train to Vizag to attend Suresh's wedding. Met up with a few people from my previous job.

The day I returned, I packed my bags again as Disco (aka Sumit), Kanika, Tuhin & I headed out for Bidar - by motorcycles. We started off under the cool summer afternoon sun, hit the road to Panjagutta, Begumpet and then reached the highway. Realised after five minutes it was the wrong highway, turned back, hit the road to the correct highway. Finally, we reached the major landmark of Kotpally. Crossed the place, and took our first break for sometime.

A few kilometres later, we came up to an intersection that read "Gachibowli - 5kms left" (Gachibowli is where the ISB campus is located). We'd covered about 35kms of Hyderabad's roads to reach the highway that was right next door :-( Cursing our maps and our map-reader, mostly the map-reader, we trudged along. Stopped for lunch at Sangareddy and hit the road again. The breaks we took were fun, with papayas falling and some people resorting to Tarzan-line antics.

The empty road

in a field we invaded

the falling papayas

Kan-kan playing Tarzan, er.. Jane?

We reached Bidar at around six in the evening. Didn't do much for the rest of the day.. there was dinner at good old Kamat and the opening game of the World Cup.

The next day, we spent about an hour (maybe more) at the Rangeen Mahal of the Bidar Fort. The Rangeen Mahal has lots of intricate designs made by Persian artisans using Mother of Pearl We spent a good deal of time exploring photo-ops in the rest of the fort. There was the solah-khamba masjid with a lawn that's been surprisingly well-maintained.

The roof of a chamber in Rangeen Mahal

In front of the solah-khamba masjid

We headed for Ashtoor afterwards, eight tombs stand tall, but one of them is in a peculiar run-down state. I'm surprised how it still stands.

Our last place of visit was the sacred Nanak Jheera. Legend has it that Guru Nanak came to parched Bidar, moved a few rocks with his feet, and a stream flowed. We wrapped up our trip of Nanak Jheera with lunch at a Punjabi dhaba.

The return to Hyd was pretty uneventful, but with more photo-ops for us. Here are some more snaps from our trip. There are more I've put up on flickr.

The Sun peeps through the clouds..

Tuhin shooting Chiranth shooting Tuhin shooting Chiranth .. ad infinitum

ek, do, teen, chaar

L to R: I, Tuhin, Disco

p.s. The snaps that look brighter and have the date printed on the bottom right corner have been shot off Kanika's camera. The studio made a big fiasco with my snaps when they developed 'em. They scanned the print copies instead of getting the images directly off the negatives :-(

update: I've done what I could using Picasa.. let's hope my snaps look better now.

Time to unwind...

2006-06-05T23:28:00.000+05:30

... in a few hours.

Our first term at ISB comes to an end tomorrow. We've got our final two papers - Statistics & Marketing. We had two of them today - Accounting & Economics.

Both the exams we had today were open book. But they were two very different species of open book exams. Accounting was a good one - given a question, one could figure out which part of the prof's handouts one needed to look in to. Economics, on the other hand, was a disaster.. half way into the exam, I closed down all my notes (there weren't many) - their presence added a zero value to my performance.

I hope tomorrow's papers are a little easier on our poor mortal souls.

There's going to be some serious partying by my classmates tomorrow evening. Unluckily for me, I'd be missing all of that as I've a train to catch in the evening. I'd be travelling to Kakinada and from there to Vishakapatnam to attend a wedding. I'd be cut off from the Internet for the next few days. So, if any of you are expecting an e-mail from me, you'd have to wait for a while.

Logging off!

loooong day

2006-06-01T06:28:00.000+05:30

I can hear the peacocks screaming somewhere. Having taken over the traditional job of the rooster, they're announcing the arrival of a brand new day. For some people in section C, group 8, it's the end of a day, a long one at that. And for one person within that group, it's two days merging into one.

Yeah, my guess was right. I do sound a bit incoherent after an all-nighter on an assignment. Anyway, the good news is that the Economics assignment is done. After a lot of haggling, I finally set the price of SOMA at $0.77. God knows how I did it, but Ashraf tells me that my procedure was something known as the Monte Carlo method. Really? All I did was run some data through some formulae on a spreadsheet. Never mind, I'll take Ashraf's word for it.

Now the not-so-good news. Today's the last day of term 1 - excluding the exams, that is. We've already bid farewell to Prof Finn yesterday. And today we bid farewell to Prof Vohra & Prof Waterman. Seems like yesterday these profs came in for their first class. Don't know anyone who's come to grips with how soon this term's flown by. If I multiply this by eight, I'd complete my course here in eight flashes. Or eight winks.

I sometimes go through great trouble trying to stay awake in class. Having been awake through the night, I think my troubles just rose exponentially. Let's see how it turns out. Oh and to think of the impending deadline for the Accounting assignment...

50 more minutes, and it'll be time for breakfast :-)

Hsss....

2006-05-25T19:01:00.000+05:30

A few weeks back, a brown snake came visiting our Student Village. It'd probably lost its path on the way or something, and it found itself sitting near the stairs of Arjun's quad.

It soon met its death at the hands of the security chaps, turning soon into a mangle of flesh.

Snake in coiled posture

Snake's demise

ISB's pretty rich in wildlife. In fact, if one gets lucky, one might see the whole food pyramid in operation. First, you've got the insects. Then, you have the frogs - and mighty huge ones, too. Some of the frogs here measure up to five inches wide. Then follow the snakes. Finally, you have the peacocks. I'd love to capture a peacock devouring a snake here.. it'd be a darned good shot to take.

sleep - where art thou?

2006-05-23T02:04:00.000+05:30

Rohm & Haas for Marketing
The weekly quiz for Accounting
An assignment on Economics
Reading material on stats

I'm suffering from a serious lack of sleep...

Pink Papers

2006-05-17T02:58:00.000+05:30

At about 8:15 in the morning, I opened the door to head to the dining hall for a breakfast. I was speaking to one of my quaddies at the time, and wasn't looking outside the front door. I'd just held the door open and my hand touched something on the outside of the door. For a moment, I thought it was a lizard - there are quite a few of them here on campus, some of them quite colourful. I looked back, a bit startled.. and there it was. A pink paper stuck to the door handle.

A week into ISB, someone (I don't remember who) asked me at lunch (or maybe it was breakfast), "Have you started reading the pink papers yet?" My facial expression quickly transformed to one betraying all of my ignorance. "What's a pink paper?", I asked. "The Economic Times, The Financial Times!", came the reply. I could never make sense of ET & FT all these years, and I don't expect it to start making sense now, just because I'm in a b-school. But maybe some day it will. And I hope that "some day" is within the next 10-11 months.

Anyway, people around me are trying to read stuff. And I've not even figured out where to start my reading - academic or otherwise. I hope some inpiration to read rubs off on me soon.

Go, fetch!!

2006-04-28T23:28:00.000+05:30

A few days back, some of us decided to form a new club at ISB - the water polo club. Unfortunately, we never swam in that direction. Until today.

Finding ourselves in the pool at six in the evening, we decided to play water polo. As enlightened about the rules of water polo as we are about accountancy, it turned out to be a game of catch-the-ball-if-you-can. Thanks to some real long throws by Sushim & Tuhin, it felt more like a game of Water Dog, with the thrower screaming "Go, fetch!!" Yeah, Stuti's short throws altered the scream to a "Come, fetch" :-)

Anyway, it was fun.. hope to play again sometime over the weekend.

Five MFH Words

2006-04-23T15:45:00.000+05:30

Five MFH words at ISB (in no particular order)

McKinsey
Placements
Consultancy
Career
Perspective

p.s. MFH = Most Frequently Heard

First post from ISB

2006-04-23T15:12:00.000+05:30

Eight days, four parties (one of them starting at one in the night), innumerable gyaan sessions from our seniors, one lecture from a prof.. it's been a very sleepless start here at ISB. Can't wait to see how the year unfolds.

My pre-term course starts on Wendesday, so I have some time to breathe today, tomorrow and day after. Let's see how it turns out.

Saturday != Saturday

2006-04-08T22:37:00.000+05:30

This saturday was quite different from my usual saturdays. For one, it didn't feel like a weekend at all. Typically, Saturdays mornings involve the following conversation with my Mum.

Mum: Chiru! eddelu, hanneradu ghante aayitu! (Chiru! wake up, it's 12 o'clock!)
Me : zzzzz
Mum: Chiru! Chiru!
Me : umm? hmm.. zzzzz

Well, you get the general state of affairs.

Today was a much different story. Having been off-work for a week, I didn't even realise it was a Saturday. And I woke up at 10:20, really, really early for a Saturday. Considering that I slept at 4:00 last night, it felt quite strange to be up that early. Well, before you start applauding at my Saturday feat, I must warn you that it was a phone call that woke me up. Vinod wanted to ask me how much time was left for him to fill up ISB's ELP survey. I must've mumbled an incoherent reply, for he was soon saying "OK, go back to your sleep". But the reverse happened - I woke up.

An hour later, I was at our bank (this is the third day this week I've found myself at the bank), trying to get hold of a statement of something. A few hours later, I was catching up on some much needed sleep. Sleep done, I pulled my suitcases and bags out. Didn't start packing - it's too early, but I just got the stuff out. It's still not hit me that I'd be in a different city a week from now. And considering the number of things I need to do before I leave Blr, I'm surely taking things very lightly.

Well, evening was more of the lemonade game.. looks like I'm getting very addicted to it. Latest news on the lemonade scene is that Sharad has managed a profit of $125. Put up a screenshot, mate!

I'm about to end the day with more lemonade with a dash of Freakonomics. Good night.