Reflections

MBA is about to end (in another 3 months). The last few months have been quite eventful.

I was offered a PPI at Colgate. Last thing I would have expected. Colgate was fun and I was happy to get the PPI. Couldn't convert. Though, as they say, getting there and being interviewed by the ManCom (management committee) is a huge thing in itself.

Then started the mad rush for final placements. January began with anticipation and apprehension about where life (and more importantly placements) will take us. I got placed in Axis Bank. I had been interested in banking for a long time and was happy to get a bank.

If getting through in Colpal during autumns was a relief, getting into Axis bank was happiness. How many times in life do you get what you have wanted for a long time?

NightOut!!

We had an awesomazing experience last night. Last evening, suddenly, Meenu asks me if I wanted to go for a night out. Though I felt that it was not a good idea and wanted to sleep....but what the hell!! You don't do these things everyday.

So, off we went, 13 of us, at 9 O clock in the night. 3 of us were already waiting at Marine Drive.

It started out...well...not so well. We didn't get an auto to Andheri Station. So we walked. We had fun while walking and saved Rs 10 in auto fare. :P Train journey was fun. Since it was non-rush hour, the train was almost empty and we played Dumb Charades in a Mumbai local train. Quite an achievement. We got down at Marine Lines...and started walking.

The city scape looked beautiful. I fell in love with it yet again. Finally, at around 10:30, we were near Marine Plaza. We spent two hours there doing timepass. Some of us started playing games, some started chatting. We were joined by a friend from JB. Some of us also started singing. Bikash was so enchanted by my singing that he threw a one rupee coin at me. That, my friends, is the story of how I earned my first salary. :)

At 12:30AM, we entered Marine Plaza and started out buffet. We had strategised well in advance that we would ensure that the hotel suffers a net loss from our group and I am sure that with my and Arka's contribution and Amrut's experience, we did actually made sure of paisa vasool. We also played Chinese Whispers there. That is when Rashi said the most memorable thing in SP. She misunderstood something and said," Baby, I love your bu**, but it is bitter!". Raghavan went to a deep shock state for 15 mins.

We finished dinner at 3:00AM. It was the longest and most 'fun' dinner I've ever had. We came out of the place and thought we would spend some the rest of the night on Marine Drive. But the crowd there was not good and also Ankur got verbally assaulted from a flashyly dressed gay man who described in detail the things he would do to Ankur. :) We thought it was best we go to Juhu beach.

We reached Juhu at 4:00 AM and started walking aimlessly on the beach. It started drizzling and soon the drizzle became heavy rains. We all got drenched. We took shelter in a nearby closed food shop. It had a thin tarpaulin covering. We had lots of masti even there. Bikash was already drenched. He started pulling Harshita out of the shelter. Hershey started giggline and said ," Don't do this. I don't have so much self control like you!". Thankfully there were no policemen around and they didnt get arrested. ;)

We returned back at 5:30AM in the morning. I came back and just dropped asleep on my bed. Woke up at 12.

Planning to go to Alibag tomorrow!! :D

Autumns '09

Unlike other business schools, SP Jain has a concept of doing the corporate internship during Autumns (Sep-Nov) instead of summers. During summers, we do a socially relevant internship with some NGO.

The Autumns Placements for our batch concluded yesterday. The placements have been great and nobody needed to compromise on the kind of companies/projects they had to choose in spite of the slowdown. Some of the biggest names of the world visited campus for hiring interns. I will post the link to the official communication soon.

Yours truly will be interning at Colgate Palmolive. It will be a sales/marketing kind of project. I hope I will have a good experience there.

It ends...

Covered 3 out of the 5 topics. Not bad considering that i haven't posted for a while now.

Hope I will be more regular soon.

And thanx to people who have prodded me to write...

The Plunge

It was May 29th , 2009. 17 year old Aaisya Jan and and her pregnant 23 year old sister-in-law, Neelofar were returning home. On the way, they were abducted, raped and murdered.

You would feel sorry hearing the above, think about it, tut-tut for half a minute, lambaste the Government for two minutes and then, get back to reading the other stories for the day. In a country where one woman are raped in every 6 minutes, how does another rape matter? Well this time it did. This time, it was the now famous, Shopian rape and murder case.

The entire event was shrouded in mystery and the police showed reluctance in even filing an FIR. Later even the chief minister, the young Omar Abdullah, said, it wasn’t a rape case. The case went to CBI and it opened a Pandora’s box. Many top government officials were suspected to be guilty.

On 28th July 2009, almost two tumultuous months since the incident happened, the issue was being discussed in the state legislative assembly. Muzaffar Baig, a former deputy chief minister and senior MLA of the People’s Democratic Party, raised an issue. He accused the chief minister of being involved in the crime and that his name was included in the CBI chargesheet of the accused at serial number 102. The PDP just needed this to get violent and launch an all out assault on the chief minister.

Since the day Omar Abdullah had taken oath as the youngest chief minister of J&K, he had been under the scanner of everyone for non-performance. The opposition had assaulted him many a times in the assembly, pointing a finger at his character. Being accused of rape and murder was the last thing he could take. A visibly emotional Omar then made the following statement:

Justice demands that a person is innocent unless proven guilty. It can be true, perhaps, in cases involving theft and robbery. But so far as the (kind of) false allegations levelled against me are concerned, the fact is, I am guilty unless proven innocent.

Saying this, he announced that he would tender a conditional resignation and would ask the Governor to order a probe.

The CBI and the home ministry were quick to react saying that Abdullah’s name didn’t feature in the list.

Implications

Abdullah has made the biggest gamble of his career. If he is proven innocent, he will have the moral high ground. No one will be able to point a finger at him again. No one will be able to question him again.He would be setting new standards of accountability for politicians in this country.

On the other hand, if he is found even remotely connected to the case, his entire political life may end prematurely.

Omar Abdullah had taken risks earlier. Who can forget the emotional speech in the Parliament which catapulted him as the prospective CM. It needs to be seen if he can get lucky second time.

The woman who makes statues and burn houses

Caste has always been a deciding factor in almost all states in India. Specially in the hindi hinterland. And one woman who plays the caste card immaculately is Mayawati. The Bahujan Samaj Party was started by Kanshi Ram as a party which would work for Dalits (the backward class). Mayawati tactfully usurped the position of the party chief. And Kanshi Ram died a sad death.

Mayawati is now the UP chief minister. Apart from the various scandals she does every now and then, her only constructive work is…wait for it….construction.

Anyone who has been to Lucknow will see the massive Ambedkar Smarak. It has been built by Mayawati as a tribute to the great man, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. The reason why small sculptures of elephant dots the entire park still remains a mystery. Maybe, Dr. Ambedkar was fond of elephants. Apart from this, Mayawati has built lots of other statues of Dr. Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram…and believe it or not…Herself.

Other than this, she has nothing else to show. The law and order situation in UP is what nightmares are made up of. Maybe this is what prompted Rita Bahuguna Joshi, the UPPCC (state congress committee of UP) chief to make that fateful remark. Though her remark was in extremely bad taste, what she meant was that monetary compensation is not enough for a serious offence like rape.

But Behenji quickly saw this as an opportunity to play the dalit card. The general elections had been bad for her party and she was just waiting for a political opportunity. She quickly moulded the whole incident into an affront to dalits. Her logic was, something said against her is something said against the dalits. (By the way, the reverse logic does not work for her. According to her, if someone praises her, it is not praising dalits)

Mayawati made sure that the entire law and order machinery was set against Joshi. She was arrested with a promptness that one seldom sees in UP police. Later that night, some BSP vandals burnt down her house. (The chief of this gang was later promoted as a chief of an important state corporation as a reward towards his loyalty to Behenji).

To reiterate, the comments made by the PCC chief was not one would expect from a politician of her stature. But, the reaction to that comment by the woman in power was a thousand time more distasteful. If this is what the chief minister of UP stands for, even God can’t save the state.

Ma, Maati Manush....aar shilpo??

The Lok Sabha elections of 2008 must have been a nightmare for the old man from Salt Lake who manages the affairs at a house, situated across a red lake, where people write. That was a convoluted and confused way of describing Mr. Bhattacharya. But, taking into account the confused situation that he is in, it may just hit the right spot.

CPM, or the party that (supposedly) stands for grassroot level activism, fared poorly (its worst) in this Lok Sabha election. the reason being, it couldn't understand the pulse of the people at grassroots. Paradoxical. Right?

The fiery lady may have won the mandate handsdown by disrupting traffic, sitting on dharna, driving away industries. But, the bottomline is that she won. And since she has not raised any complaints of rigging this time (maybe because she won), we may as well accept it as a mandate from the people of Bengal.

What implications does it have?

Mamata sure has her eyes on the state assembly elections two years down the line. Going by the turnout she managed to generate at a recent rally at Esplanade, she may as well win. But, the people of bengal needs to think. What is her policy for development? None. All through the years that I have seen her in politics, the only rhetoric of hers is that there has been no development under CPM. She never goes on to say what is HER roadmap for development.

The people of Bengal are caught between two forces. One knows not what it does (CPM) and one knows not what it will do (TMC).

Fast Forward 10 years: People of Calcutta are still discussing politics at roadside tea stalls, the walls are still full of grafittis in green and red, the transport lobby is still trying to stay the crackdown on old vehicles and the Tollygunge metro is yet to become functional.

My Take

This has been by far the greatest time period that i have been away from by blog. Schedule has been hectic and though there was lots to write about, i didn't.

Today is my weekly off. The schedule tomorrow is light. "How about going for a personal Blogathon?", I ask myself.

So here is my take on various political issues that the nation is facing. I will cover the WB state elections, Mayawati, J&K, Indo-Pak dialouges and fighting brothers!!

Dhano Dhanne Pushpe Bhora...

From childhood, I used to like this song. Somewhere down the line, I lost touch and forgot all about it. The other say I saw this as a status message on Nags' gtalk. It brought back all the childhood memories; me trying to play this song on the keyboard, Dad playing it on mouth-organ. I feel i have a strange connection with this song. I knew the meaning the moment I heard this song considering the fact that I was not much into Bengali songs then.

I have tried to translate the song in English. Not a great job, but, nevertheless...

Listen to the song here

Dhono dhanne pushpe bhora amader ei boshundhora
Tahar majhe mahe desh ek shokol dhesher shera
She je shopno diye toiri she je sriti diye ghera
Emon deshti kothao khuje pabe nako tumi
She je shokol desher rani she je amar jonmobhumi
She je amar jonmobhumi she je amar jonmobhumi

This world of ours is rich with wealth, grains and flowers,
But in between all these, there is a country which is the best among all countries,
This country is made of dreams, surrounded by memories
You will not find such a country anywhere else
This country is the Queen of all countris, it is my birthland,
My brithland, My birthland!!

Chondro shurjo groho tara, kothay ujon emon dhara
Kothay emon khele torit, emon kalo meghe
O tar pakhir dake ghumiye pori pakhir dake jege
emon deshti .......

The Moon, the Sun, the Planets and the Stars, all reside here,
The black cloulds play here,
The sweet song of the birds put people to sleep and wake them up,
You will not.....


Eto snigdho nodi tahar, kothay emon dhumro pahar
kothay emon horit khetro akash tole meshe
emon dhaner opor dheu khele jay, batash tahar deshe
emon deshti....

The rivers are so cool here, the mountains are so huge,
The plains are so green, it mixes with the sky at the horizon,
When the wind blows, the paddy fields dance in waves,
You will not...

Pushpe pushpe bhora shakhi, kunje kunje gahe pakhi
Gunjoriya ashe oli, punje punje dheye
Tara fooler upor ghumiye pore fooler modhu kheye
Emon deshti...

The country is filled with flowers, every corner is filled with the birds' song,
The bumblebee drones over every flower in sight,
They fall asleep on the flowers drinking the intoxicating nectar,
You will not...

Bhayer mayer eto sneho, kothay gele pabe keho
O ma tomar choron duti bokkhe amar dhori
Amar ei deshete jonmo jeno ei deshete mori
emon deshti.......

Mothers here love their children so much, where else will you find such love?
Mother, I will always keep you in my heart,
I wish that as I was born in this country, this is where I die
You will not...


PS: There may be some serious errors in translation. Please correct me in the comments section

PGP2 begins...

It has been 2 weeks since second year began. The schedule has been a bit light so far. But that is with respect to classes only. We have lots of assignments and other submissions to make which is taking away the rare privilage of uninterrupted sleep that we thought we would get.

This year would be very important from a career perspective. In August, we would have our Autumns placements. In Feb 2010, we would have our final placements. With the current economic condition, things would not be as I had pictured them to be when I had joined. I just hope that I get through somewhere good.

A confession : I am tired of studying. For the last 21 years of my life I have been studying. I wish I had worked for some years in between. Anyway, I know the decision that I had taken was the best decision that I could have taken. But still...

Anyway, there are some interesting aspects of second year as well. We in marketing won't have any exams. All our assessment will be based on projects. So that is one good thing. Also, we would be having some innovative projects. The other day, our SBU head said we would have an Integrated Slum project...have to wait and see what that means.

PS: I had posted earlier that I would write about my DOCC experience and the PGP1 experience. Will write them soon.