Faith

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

came up with this one when listening to Doolin Dalton

Quick retorts by single blokes

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

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 :-)

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

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?

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

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

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

A few more snaps in this web-album

Graduation Snaps

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

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

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

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

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

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.