Early Bird Catches The Worm

1. Wake up alarm : (snooze the darn thing thrice and then off goes the backup alarm which again takes the snooze route)
2. You overslept  and therefore you skip the planned early morning walk with your wife
3. You read the newspaper leisurely and by the time you leave your home, you know you are behind the clock to get to office.
4. You get into the car and put your foot down - 100 ft of driving and lo behold! Traffic jam greets you sooner than you think. Colourful expletives is what you can think of!
5. On the way to office you get calls which you would like to take after you have opened your laptop, checked some MIS reports.
6. Each traffic light is programmed against you or so you feel. The red light durations  feel excruciatingly long
7. By the time you park your car in the office parking, cursing the fellow drivers,  the roads, most of the morning positive energy has already dissipated
8. You have planned to make a To do list but you get a call and a new task even before you could start planning on the list
9. In all this, the time you had planned on planning the day is gone and you are just playing catch-up for the best part of the day.
10. It is 6 PM and you still  havent started on the presentation for noon the next day. You feel you have done a lot of work but when you think over the day's proceedings over a cup of tea, you can barely remember a few simple tasks that you have done.
11. It is 7 PM and you get a call from your wife to get medicine on your way back.
12. It is eight thirty on the dials of your watch and still a long way to go. You say to yourself -Well i shall go home and finish the work left.
13. By the time you are home, it is 9:45 and you are exhausted. You watch TV while having dinner and the "home work" gets pushed to the next day.

Much like the tennis serve - if your ball toss goes haywire, your balance goes haywire to reach the ball, you don't watch the ball closely enough as you normally would and the contact point goes wrong and the serve gets buried in the net. The root cause - one of the links -the ball toss went wrong.

"Early bird catches the worm" - Need not be true - what if the bird is dumb and doesnt take advantage of the start.

Early Bird Likely to Catch the worm - that makes more sense. More on this in the next post.

Six months at IMT G: Haan Ji

Its been almost six months since we wannabe managers entered the portals of a certain insti called IMT G. Notice that I didnt use the adjective 'hallowed'. That said please bear in mind that the 'un-hallowed' is only in comparison with the IIMs :) The six months have been a roller-coaster ride right from day one when we lined up before SAC office, backpacks slung across the shoulder, form in one hand on a hot June afternoon.

That seems to be a long long time ago. What with staying up till the wee hours of morning and then making up for the sleep or the lack of it, in the classes the next day, to running around looking for Chanakya, Abhimanyu, Arjun, Chandragupta and the like in the first couple of weeks for various committee/club interviews( these are the rooms in the acad block which by the way i still cant figure out which one is where) to late night strolls inside the campus with friends agenda being bhasad - it is an experience of a different kind.

Ten things that one cannot miss here -

1. The Amphi-

This circular structure at the centre of the campus surrounded by trees is very much the heartland of IMT. Informal corporate interactions happen here.The official venue for class parties, this place has a nice cosy feel to it -not too big and not too small the diameter is just right.

2. The BBC -

Being midway between the mess and the hostel, BBC is most the frequented place and tells you the mood in the campus. If the exams are on then its a deserted whiteland, else this place is teeming with vella folks - some sitting on the sidewalk under the trees, some just strolling along aimlessly, some playing cricket on the cement under the floodlights

3. The maddening rush at the mess entrance adjacent to Block A when its ice cream time after dinner- There is a saying that talks about no-free-lunch. Trust me you have to 'earn' your choco-chip ice cream in the ensuing near-stampede

4. 'Haan Ji! Password type kijiye'

5. Gera Curve if you are taught by one Rajat Gera

6. PlaceCom Openhouse cant be missed.

7. The air-conditioned library - just for the summer season ;)

8. Tennis Court - This should have been #1

9. The lush green ground claimed by the footballers and cricketers alike; actually its neither going by the dimensions but its still fun playing.

10. (Edited) J Lobby - From project discussions to birthday bashes read GPL, from booze parties to exams, the square has a buzz about it, even at 3 in the morning, with its proximity to DLP and sutta stall outside the campus

PS: The best part of hostel life is the time spent with friends. This was a first for me in and I am throughly enjoying it :)

Disclaimer: The views are all in good jest and not to be taken seriously.

What Ails Our Society

It takes an Oscar winning movie, which delineates India's poverty, to make us sit up and take notice. The poignant scenes depicted are quite heart-rending. The point is not whether you liked or did not like the movie , the point is given an option we like to be in a self denial mode all the time. When I say self denial, I mean indifference, having a laid back attitude to life in general. It takes a jolt to stir us up. The motive behind the 1991 reforms was not so much a great vision ,as a last ditch effort to save our country from plunging into a financial crisis - we had a burgeoning fiscal deficit and were on the brink of defaulting on our international debt. Thankfully, that never came to pass, thanks to the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. Just goes to show that we are capable, but only when our backs are against the wall. On a lighter note, our cricket team over the years too seems to get its act together after a sluggish start. But why play catch up in the first place?

It must be an inherent trait we all share. I can certainly relate to it and can think of many others too. One reason lies in our upbringing. As kids we do we as we are told(to avoid being spanked), not often are we encouraged to take decisions. At best we come of age by 17-18, when I say of age, I mean in taking decisions. Compare this with an American kid. From about five or six onwards, the kid can take care of himself/herself(another kid too as a news report goes to show :D).

It can be argued that with India opening up to liberalisation, the younger generation of today is more independent with exposure to better standards of living. True, parents enrolling their kids in swimming or guitar lessons is not uncommon anymore. But this phenomenon applies only to the upper echelons of our society. We are still not a liberalised society. How else can we explain the several bandhs that hold the nation to ransom or the histrionics of the Ram Sena and Raj Thackeray! No, far from being a liberalised society,we have become a polarised society, with each side feeding off the other and thereby growing farther apart. Raj Thackeray , by swearing to weed out the competition emanating from north Indian states, has brought out anti-Maharastra sentiments in the youth from the North. The shooting case involving the youth from Bihar is testimony to this fact. Such incidents have political undertones and in no time the situation gets exacerbated, inflaming passions in our society and further fragmenting it.

With all this hoo-haa, does it mean we have finally woken up from our deep slumber? Yes and No. Yes because tolerance as a forte has been replaced with a sheer contempt for differing views. No because when it comes to real issues be it from fighting terrorism to development agendas, we are still dormant.

Here is a great chance with looming global financial crisis and deteriorating political system, to push for reforms - labour reforms, police reforms, judicial reforms, health, education - you name it, for the country needs it badly.

Its 1991 revisited again!