The Law

I was skimming thru some NBA news today, when I read this… (context: One of the teams – Portland Trailblazers got a new Asst. GM)

In the process, the Blazers get perhaps one of the most interesting and diverse executives in the league, one whose background includes a successful career as a criminal defense lawyer in Illinois. During that 61/2-year span as a defense lawyer, Penn secured victories in cases involving a man accused of murder, a man charged with armed robbery and a man charged with felony drug possession.

Work Hard, Fart Harder

This is that time of the year when the IIM Indore vs IIM Kozhikode debate clogs up discussion forums... people engage in heated arguments using long write-ups and twisted facts… from academics to discipline to scenic beauty to – maybe cleaner toilets.

I find this typically capitalistic… whether I swear by Clinic All-Clear or Pantene depends only on where I got recruited – HLL or P&G and not because I have some strong original opinion.

Moving on, some of these freshers are eager to know about life at the insti… and someone made the mistake of mentioning brand-building and PR at the insti… so these seniors who reply to these queries go all-out to hype everything up… so some dumbass would ask something inane like “What's the farting scene on campus?” and a senior would reply “@dumbass… yes, Planet I (some fuck-all name for IIM Indore which I’ve never seen outside discussion forums) takes its farting very seriously… regular farting games.. interest clubs.. watchout for special festive meals… be prepared, cuz this is no ordinary campus… here at Planet I, we take our farting very seriously… our motto is to work hard and fart harder!”

The system requires hype to survive… and people to fuel it… personally, I don’t think there is much difference between any of these institutes… 30 years down the line, you’re not gonna give a fuck about which institute you went to… maybe if you’re strong enough to give up this beaten MBA path and pursue art or travel or teaching kids or whatever it is that you really wanna do, you’d remember that very well.

Disclaimer: People who’re really, honestly in love with an MBA, please excuse the above lines… they’re not meant for you.

The Sunny Rain Dance

In my quest for timepass in Coimbatore, I went to this local bar accompanied by the sales rep that I’d met a couple of hours earlier. It was one of those places which has never seen a woman.

The tables were cramped, like a tea shop, so that no conversation in that room is private. Not that anyone in that room had anything private to talk about... even if they did, a few drinks later, how does it matter?

All eyes were glued to this single TV screen, which had one local bombshell doing an ‘erotic’ dance in the middle of a road, surrounded by roughly 50 sex-starved, dancing men.

The bomb was doing a rain-dance and getting a sun-tan simultaneously. Can’t they pick a cloudy day for the rain-dance, or a better time of a sunny day? I guess you need some alcohol to digest that.

Anyway, they took the ‘last order’ at 1030… I wonder why they call it that, because it never works. Slowly, as the clock ticked towards 11, they politely asked us to leave, by switching off the tv… then they switched off the ac… anyway, we left respectfully, before they got the brooms out.

I enjoyed that conversation immensely. It’s the best part about random conversations with strangers… no baggage from the past, nothing to guard against in the future… reminded me of all the people that I’ve met while travelling.

And some others.

For The Ennobling Cause Of Cleaner Humankind

I was discussing work with Rajeshwaran the other night… let’s just talk about marketing here, because I know still less about Fin and other crap… how can we give our lives to the pursuit of selling toothpaste, soaps, t-shirts… yet some of these are the most coveted jobs. Being good at something doesn’t mean you should do it. Often, we mercilessly smother the part of us which rebels against such mindlessness. I didn’t have the guts to take Physics over Engineering, or a gap year over MBA.

(Pardon the generalization)

We don’t value our time, or freedom… we treat our time as a (compulsorily) expendable asset… we give up our efforts and time to corporations engaged in senseless pursuits… when I’m 70, and look back at all the soaps that I’ve helped sell over the years, I’m confident of death-by-hyper-excitation.

Encouraged by society and having pledged our lives to mindless pursuits, we look down upon prostitution.

Hypocrisy.

Oh, and all those ‘focused’ people… that goes right over my head. This is probably my confused cynical mind spewing the crap out, but listen me out anyway… I don’t understand how people know that they want to sell soaps. Sorry for being judgemental, but are these people really passionate about human cleanliness?

Selling soaps.

How romantic.

The Cubicle

I wonder how man was moved to invent the air-conditioner… whoever felt that we should cut out the breeze and the smell of earth. I guess they just reacted to the madness outside, like all the traffic in Bombay. It’s like cutting your arm off because one finger is rotting (after you chewed on it too much).

I don’t like the idea of sitting in a cubicle. I don’t like physical confinement of any sort. When these corps go out on a 17-day Thomas Cook tour of 20 countries in Europe, spending most of their time in air-conditioned hotel rooms or buses, they are fashionably said to have caught the ‘travel bug’. It’s like a cool thing to do, right… to know exactly at which table you’ll be eating what for breakfast at 9 AM on the 5th day of the trip (thanks to Mr. Cook’s itinerary)… because any form of lack of control over your life is so unthinkably absurd.

Control. Certainty. Security.

They say I need a wife and kids to understand The Truth. I shall wait.

The Pursuit Of Happyness

“Somethings are fun the first time you do ‘em, and not so much the next”

“Like the bus?”

“Yeah, like the bus”
.

.

.

The next day, after work, we just went to the beach… far away from anything… everything… just Christopher and me… far away from buses and noise and… a constant disappointment in my ten-gallon head… in myself…
.

.

.

“Because when I was young and I'd get an A on a History test, or whatever… I’d get this good feeling about all the things that I could be… and then I never became any of them.”

You know...

"I'm a fun-loving person." announced the self-intro, pushing the limits of redundancy. Like the rest of the world is infested with masochists.

Then there are these filler-lines:

"That's... you know... the kinda thing we're talking about.. as such."

Why... why are these things said?

All The Emptiness

We never did change the world... the sleepless nights, adrenalin rushes... the world just went elsewhere, and took us along - along and apart at the same time.

Randomness will always hold sway over our efforts. All the little things which make you believe in destiny.

I'm reminded of Ladakh... how all the emptiness made me feel like an insignificant speck on the barren expanse... who ever let us choose what we're good at... just so happened that society likes say, MBA over Machine Design and English over Hindi.

It's all random. Sometimes I get lucky, sometimes I'm trashed... pride and disappointment are funny things. Stupid ego.

Blah

The wind blows the sand off my feet. I'm back in Elliot's beach, Madras. Things and people have changed. I don't quite know how. So much change that it's scary. I can't relate to it no more.

It's strange how familiarity is slowly eaten away. People come and go, and every day, a bit of the past is washed off. I miss the mountains. Those mighty Himalayas don't change as quickly as these beaches. I want to go back, to where I belong. I've had enough of the jargon crap. It's not funny anymore.

I'm a little drunk on JD. It's been a strange day. A day when the past has come back to haunt me. Sometimes, I wish my memory wasn't so good. It deserts me when I need it, like the Fin exam. Things evade you when you need them the most. It's The Law.

Cheers.

E-My Ass

Uninspiring lectures (unlike engineering, there are exceptions), mindless exams… they’re almost done for the year… Dilbert is so true… here’s a sample from a ppt for tomorrow’s Operations exam:

“Many companies are implementing ERP packages as a means or strategic objectives to reengineering its existing processes, performing supply chain management, requiring for e-Commerce, integrating ERP with other business information systems, reducing inventory costs, changing existing legacy system, requiring for multinational enterprise competitiveness, enhancing enterprise images, and enabling e-business”

Somewhere between e-commerce and e-business (recycling the same shit, like those demonic Hindi exams), inventory costs mysteriously get reduced. Oh, and somewhere amidst the shit, supply chain is thrown in for good measure… of course, this is operations management… so we can’t take a pee without a mention of inventory and supply chain.

Another one of my favorite is the impact of goddamn internet on managerial jargon… e-this, e-that… e-my ass!

That’s enough negative energy for one day. Goodnight.