Chronicles of Gautam

My boarding passes from September 2010 to March 2011 I was just going through my photos folder and found the above photo tucked away in the 'photos from mobile phone' folder. I remembered why I had taken the photo earlier - it was because I was surprised how many times I had to travel by air within that span of a few months, and for reasons mostly not related to my work. Air travel in India has increased in leaps and bounds barring a few hiccups, which were triggered mainly by the recession. Being a consumer for this product, I can now easily see the value that it provides to people like me. It is fast, reliable and largely efficient service(ease of booking tickets) which is affordable. The major change in the last decade has been on the reliability and the affordability front. Entry to private players and the resulting competition ensured that services were more varied, networks more widespread and prices driven down. At the same time the income level...

IIM Express: Rickshaw sporting a jazzy sign It has been a hectic two and half months to say the least. As I again glanced over some survival pointers  that my brother and his friend gave me before I came here,  I realized how much sense they make.  176 Lectures of 75 minutes each, 15 exams, 20 company presentations, 30 quizzes and innumerable cases and assignments.  I never thought I could attend so many lectures on a trot. This place made me get up and do it.   Its a mad mad world out here.

I am going here! Ok, so as you might have heard, my efforts of the past 3 years have born fruit; and I have been offered admission to the prestigious WIMWI, better known as IIM Ahmedabad. Now that I am on the other side of the fence, I can start writing cheeky posts with  subjects like this about how I made it :P The below lines are taken as is from an email that I wrote to a junior some days back. 1. Check out this site http://www.handakafunda.com/ . It’s a good starting point for CAT preparation. It has good (and free) videos on topics in quant and DI, and the download sections has old CAT questions arranged topic wise. 2. Join TIME/CL/IMS and give their mock tests religiously. It is very important to track your performance throughout the year and analyze each performance. Identify your weakness and strengths. I personally felt that CL’s papers were the best in terms of closeness to the actual CAT, and I would recommend it to you. But at the same time, I would also st...

India wins the Cricket world cup after an excruciating wait of 28 years. Non-Indians will perhaps not understand how much this means to an average Indian. Only the sport of cricket has the power to transcend the boundaries of religion, caste, language, politics and class in India. Winning the world cup has brought back this sense of nationalistic pride which is perhaps the greatest takeaway from the last 6 weeks for the country. One could find ample evidence of this on the streets of villages, towns and cities throughout the length and breadth of India at midnight yesterday; where jubilant crowds shouted slogans and waved Indian flags, hi-fiving and hugging strangers and soaking in the occasion. Of course speculations will be there about match fixing and theories of how it was all just a farce. Ya right. Like they can put up such a good show pre-decided. They would have had to be better than the best actors humankind has ever produced to put on such a show match after match. ...

The last fortnight went really quick and really slow at the same time. I had to give six interviews in the span of some ten days for admissions to b-schools across the country. Interestingly, I found out that the worst part about giving interviews is not the interview itself, but the wait outside the interview room! Hoping to get through some colleges :fingers crossed. Meanwhile, iPad 2 has been launched. Mototrola Xoom and RIM Playbook are to be here soon, I am crazily addicted to my berry, and to some extent my Thinkpad too. Current favorite song: Dil Ibadat from the movie Tum Mile. What a beautiful song!

One thing that hit me yesterday is that I am a Bangalorean now. At least in part. And the worst thing about it is the name itself - 'Bangalorean'. I am not impressed. Compare it with 'Mumbaikar', 'Hyderabadi', 'Madrasi' and 'Amritsari'. Don't they sound so much more desi and appealing? Here are some reasons why I consider myself a Bangalorean in part: 1. People ask me directions. And I am able to give them! 2. I can carry out a full conversation in Kannada. Ok, so what if its just an answer like 'gotilla' (don't know) :P 3. I know numbers from 1-10 in Kannada, so I don't need to ask the bus conductor to repeat in Hindi/English when he asks for change. 4. I am no longer appalled at the exorbitant rates charged by the auto wallahs. Yes, I call them autos, not rickshaws.

I was asked precisely this question during one of my mock interviews. Take a minute, there is no hurry, i was told. And the target was to sell 50 ipods of Rs 2500 each, with a marketing budget of 1 lakh. Hmm. So how do I do it? I thought on it and answered on the following lines: 1.  Ipods = rich young chaps, probably some rich farmers kids with some amount of disposable money at least.  They probably own a cell phone already maybe using it for their music needs. So this was the target market. 2. Price & place? Not much innovation here, since the selling price and Maharashtrian rural market is already mentioned. Maybe give them some discount and advertise this. 3. Promotion. This is where I was stuck. I had no clue how to go about spreading the message in far flung rural areas, with just a few people in each village willing to even think about this product. I said something on the lines of telephonic ads, local newspaper/magazine pamphlets etc. Maybe hiring salesmen afte...

The lazybum that I am, I am just re pasting my comment here on my brother's blogpost here. " You are absolutely correct about the average longevity of humans being the prime reason why humans evolved this way. If a person expected to die at the age of 30, it made sense to procreate at the age of 15 so that by the time he dies, his child would procreate and the cycle continues. Mental, societal and economical considerations of having children were non-existent. And not to forget, there was no contraception. It is only in the last 400 years or so that man has turned nature on its head and extended human life by leaps and bound - but that ratio of the age of death and age of procreation remains roughly the same - 60: 30 Of course people now easily cross 60, so we have lots of grandparents :-) Coming to think of it, humans have screwed around with nature, controlled and used it to such an extent that we might just end up destroying ourselves. (environment, nuc...

Film Poster - Dhobi Ghat Another quick post on another movie I saw recently. Dhobi Ghat is a movie about four people who have come to Mumbai for different reasons, from different socio-economic backgrounds and are somehow linked to each other through their actions. Aamir Khan plays a brooding painter, who mostly keeps to himself and is inspired by seemingly mundane things. Then there is an NRI female, who is in Mumbai to spend her vacations, and ends up in a one night stand with Aamir. Consequently they part ways the next morning, with no hard feelings on either side. Prateik Babbar is a dhobi and a wannabe actor who serves both these individuals, and is another link between the two. Aamir moves into an apartment which was previously occupied by a newly wedded muslim lady. It turns out that she has videotaped parts of her life in Mumbai so that her brother can see it as a diary. These tapes are found by Aamir. The backdrop of the film is a very vivid and in-your-face Mumbai, wh...

Film Poster - No One Killed Jessica Quick post about a film I saw recently: I saw the film "No One killed Jessica" around a week ago. I would give it 3 and a half stars out of 5. It s a well made movie. It does not bore you, tries to bring out the evil in our society but without being preachy about it. Both the lead actresses have done a good job - one who is a journalist and other is the sister of Jessica, the person who is killed in cold blood.The starting song 'Delhi' is currently stuck in my head.

The Blackberry Curve 8900 Recently I have been using the Blackberry smart phones. I used the Curve 8320 for around 3 months, and now I am in the possession of a sleek and sexy Curve 8900. I would say that Blackberry is not just a phone, but a way of life. I am surprised how quickly I am addicted to my berry. I have almost stopped checking my mails on the computer, because before they appear there, they pop up on my berry. SMS, MMS, Net browsing, GPS, Facebook, Twitter - I use all the services through Blackberry Internet services from airtel. Even with such a scenario, I wouldn't recommend blackberry to others, simple because they are not worth the money they come for. Compared to other phones in the price range, blackberries are mediocre at best. The OS crashes quite often compared to android, more like windows XP. The camera is mediocre, media features are mediocre, and the battery life is average. The only feature that is really, I mean REALLY great about the phone is the ...

Am writing this blog post from my mobile, a sexy Curve 8900 newly in my possession,.while on a ride back home in the company cab. I have Blackberry internet services enabled on it, and I think if I send an email to a particular address, it will be directly published as a post. If you are able to read this, then it has worked! More about my shiny new toy (and the Blackberry experience in general) later. Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

First of all, let me wish all of you a very happy year ahead! I am back to Bangalore after an eventful week in Mumbai. Back to office, back to work. Quite some things changed in my life in the past week: some for the worse, some for the better. I hope in the long term I will be happy for the past 10 days. I must admit that the year didn't start of well, the shocker of a XAT being the first of several lows. Comments of the paper ranged from a simple 'It was the toughest paper ever..' to creative ones like 'XATack!', 'XATom Bomb!' and 'Even Rajnikanth would have struggled :O'. Really, with the extremely high level of paper that was set (with differential marking and an ambiguous marking scheme), and the resulting luck factor that inevitably creeps in, one tends to question the rationale behind such a paper. I respected the XAT for their impeccable papers and flawless conduction of the exam till now, but this year was a disappointment to say the leas...