Who is going to teach Management to IIMs?

IIMs the so called premier management institutes in India desperately need management lessons on how to conduct a CBT successfully. Since my opinion is subjected to change depending on my result therefore I decided to write this post before the results, and thankfully IIMs gave me ample time to get over with it.

First, they make blunders while conducting tests leaving thousands of students and many parents in dismay and then they take more than 50 days to conduct a retest for them. If that was not enough it seems like they are using my Grandpa’s computer to calculate the result. I could have calculated them a lot quickly with my laptop.

After the announcement of CAT going online most of the top CAT Coaching instis started conducting mock tests online and they all have a student base of about 20-30k. Now when they can compute results of 30k students in 7 days why can’t IIMs/Prometric can calculate the same in almost 80 days, and please don’t say that they were too busy in providing security to MNIK like Maharashtra police.

No matter what the result be but this its gonna go down as a blot on the legacy of IIMs in history books as “When managements guru’s couldn’t manage a simple test”.

48 weeks and counting…

Its been more than 48 weeks(week seems a longer period than month) since I last had Ethanol intake, although not technically as lot of medicines use alcohol as base, but we can discount that can’t we? Now that I stand almost at the anniversary of that historic decision(I know its an exaggeration, but then what's the purpose of a blog if its not exaggerated) I look back and see changes that it made to my usual life.

1. Easy on pocket. This is one of the major impact I have had. My salary last for couple of more days than it used to, of course the effect would be more severe on Royal Challengers Banglore as I helped Mallya in buying that team but with one of his regular customer gone I wonder if he can still keep that team.

2. Coffee tastes better. An year back or so I used to despise coffee, but since then I ve been more frequent to coffee shops than pubs which has in turn helped me in developing a taste for coffee. Plus you don’t have to worry about those breath analysers no matter how many cups of coffee you drink.

3. Girls aren’t the only thing to discuss. Well the fact remains that there are 2 topics that an average male discuss when he is drunk which are girls and football(or any other sport) well of course it may vary for bisexuals and likes of them. But coffee gives a whole new dimension to bakar. I never realized but there is a whole spectrum of things that can be discussed.

4. Weekends are not all about beer. Well no denying that fact that I always felt that my schedule was jam packed and I had no time for myself, but since I gave up drinking I realized that I have whole lot of time left with me to do things that I always wanted to. Guitar was number one on the list so kicked it off first hopefully rest will follow. My own Things to do before I die list(more on that later).

5. Backache. This is the one I didn’t anticipated. About an year back 2 days a week were not enough to complete my quota of alcohol intake for a week, so I used to spend almost every weekend night with friends, but since then I have been spendin most of those evenings at home nappin. So much so that at times I get backache due to this lethargy.

Well as they said there are no free lunches so I would take that point 5 for the 4 above it and this new found me, who is really enjoying it. Cheers

Pseudo vs self proclaimed Nationalists

Nobody could have ever imagined that a movie could get this much of airtime all over the country and that too for free. MNIK aka 'My name is Khan' has been in the news for all wrong reasons even before it has released. What really baffles me is while parties like Shiv Sena and Congress are playing politics over this trivial issue Shahrukh and the makers of the movie are minting money because of the hype created, none of them cares about an ordinary citizen or Marathi Manoos(The over hyped word).

Lets start with the so called caretakers of Maharshtra, I wonder how they call themselves nationalist while they thrive on the agenda of politics of hatred. Amitabh Bachhan, Sachin Tendulkar, Mukesh Ambani none of them is nationalist or a true Marathi, just because they said that Mumbai belongs to every Indian. First I don't really know of one good deed that Thackreys have done which has helped Mumbai in becoming a global city or anything that has helped any Mumbaikar/Indian in any way for that matter. But I am pretty confident that some of those personalities that they chose for bashing have done some real good deeds for the state as well as for the nation.

Now, as far as their political counterparts are concerned, they took it as an ego question and blew it out of proportion. I mean 30,000 men guarding Cinema halls, I wonder if they have even a quarter of this many cops patrolling regularly 26/11 could have been averted, and please don't fall prey for sentences like "they have prior information of Sena's Vandalism but had no idea about 26/11" as for one they had confirmed intelligence inputs and secondly if 30,000 cops can provide security cover to politicians and VIPs based on some vague intelligence reports a population of 1.3 crore certainly deserve atleast 7500 policeman for their safety. On the politics of division they are not any less divisive than Thackreys, the only difference is they are too shrewd to admit it. Their method of wooing voters is unique of its own kind for instance at one hand their state unit @ Andhra want to implement reservations for muslims on caste basis, the party leaders at center condemn it thereby wooing both the voters unlike Shiv Sena which are blunt when they admit that they are against a particular sect or cast. Similarly, one of their top leaders goes and visit families of slain terrorists of infamous Batla house encounter in Azamgarh and criticize the police while rest of the party distances itself from the act and give medals to those who died while fighting those terrorists. I remember that their government in Maharashtra came with a proposal to give taxi licenses to only those who are native of that state. If this isin't divisive then perhaps the definition of 'divisive politics' needs to be rewritten stating that 'Grand Old Party of India has to be excluded from this definition'.Period

As far as SRK(its as awfull as KRK but then it is easy to write) is concerned, to be frank its really difficult to believe that it is a coincidence that all the controversies had to be around this movie. Couple of months back he was made to wait @ a US Airport(that's what the news was) and incidentally the reason was his name "Khan" and I realized the bigger coincidence when I saw the trailer of the movie with him saying this line apparently on a US airport "My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist" you don't need to be a rocket scientist to read between the lines, all you need is a little commonsense and realization of the fact that politicians aren't the only persons who fool us. Even if I assume his tale to be true then what in the world changed the american mindset in a matter of 2 months that the same Khan was invited to ring the starting bell at NASDAQ. Then comes the IPL debate, what I couldn't figure out was a simple question that since he owned an IPL team, he had the money, Pakistani players were available for bidding, there was no pressure from anyone against selecting Pakistani players(that's what he claimed in an interview after bidding) and he had a slot as well in his team then why didn't he bought a Pakistani player, well lets assume that that he didn't wanted to as Knight Riders is his team and he made it very clear with his multiple captain theory last time, so then why the hell does he have to take a moral high ground and say that Pakistani players should have been selected. Well Mr. Khan you had an opportunity to change the world and you chose not to then just shut the f*** up, but you can't even do that as you are the self proclaimed righteous. This carefully planned ploy of yours worked like charm, you got a chance to get air on every news channel and promote your film, you got space on every newspaper around the world for free so what if an ordinary Mumbaikar suffered you were able to sell your tickets @ 1000 Euro each in Berlin while people here in India assume that you are the victim in this fiasco. I am glad we have only one SRK and he does not act in/produce more than 1 movie in a year.