Memoirs of my 'sakshaatkaar' experiences

An interview or a साक्षात्कार is wiely accepted as a useful tool to evaluate a person to check the suitability to fit him/her into a role, it could be for recruiting, for assigning a role, for admission, promotion, etc.

I have been subjected to interviews right form childhood, from one of the first schools i joined and then the saga continues for getting into clubs, societies, college, first job interviews in campus, off campus, MBA, again student council, Placement process, all these experiences leave many scars behind but do make u battle hardened to take on the next one with ease.

But what sticks to u as a stain that even surf excel can't remove are the goof ups, every new experience comes with its own share and reflecting back u tend to think how silly of me, if only i had not done this...

I still remember my first interview for entering Class 1 in KV Sec 47 Chandigarh.

My dad had told me to finish it and come soon as he had to drop me home and go to the office.

All the other students sat down but I did not, despite being repeatedly asked to by the concerned teachers. I told them flat out I have to leave fast, so get it done with. Imagine a less than 5 yr old, dictating u terms of his own capture. They let me stand till god know when and then interviewed me as per the schedule and then I got a thrashing from my dad as well, but it was an interview to remember.

I bore the scars of my first encounter and leaped from pedestal to pedestal till giving interviews almost became 2nd nature to me.
You learn a lot by taking interviews than giving and that experience i had at SIBM while conducting mock interviews for our juniors, very enlightening experience I must say.
Anyways the most recent interview got me a naukri at Deloitte, hope it works out well

29 Nov 2009

A fateful day in the history of SIBM Pune especially for the batch of 2010 and going further for the (last?) finance batch of Kali

8 consultants... offerred on a platter was unadulterated pfaff, it was too tempting to let go. True there were apprehensions about going back into IT (or so we belived).. but not me, I was happy and happiness was me.

Lets get into details.. my third interview in as many days.. wanted to get in the first one, wasn't very sure of the second one, broke thru the barrier in the third... and thus almost completed the MBA saga. I say almost coz the third sem hasn't been very kind. My boat may be left high n dry in at least a couple of courses.. hence the wait.
In retrospect I sometimes ponder should I have waited for the rain and not got lured in the drizzle but again since when have we started trusting our MET dept predictions.
A couple more showers have been thr on the hilltop since then, the results have been disappointing to say the least. Hope the outlook brightens and we get bumper crops a-la vivek subbu (For the uninitiated drizzle was the early bunch of recruiters and rain was when the whole process was kickstarted officially)

T(critical)

Critical, all important, life changing moments, they come and go. How prepared can you get for them? Are you complacent? Didn't you know this was coming? Questions I often ask but a constant lackadaisical attitude is to blame mind you. It just doesn't help.
Very easy to blame it on something but ur conscience and get away with it. Life is so easy, its only my attitude to blame, that doesn't let me enjoy it.
First screw up of this season, and it ain't just any season, its THE season for which I climbed up this hill coming all the way from namma bengaluru, leaving my loved ones behind, full of expectations, after labouring so much its expected of me to put in some effort, but no, for me life has been easy and this too shall somehow come around for me right... what a rosy and hilarious assumption. Looking at Bugsy cursing himself for the day he was born (for the nice birthday treatment he was getting) made me think if I too will be brought down to face reality with a similar shock albeit, it will hit where it hurts and it won't be physical pain i'll be cringing with.
My my... it was scary enough, hope this dosage works and i get to some serious prep.
Blogged after a long time, but with overhanging ominous.
Lets all sit and pray!!
p.s Sachin hit his 43rd test century.. ppl keep doing what they're supposed to do, just posers like me are happy with false pretences and held up by others expectations.. wake up chokre!!

Brand

'Whats in a brand?' I used to ask when i was still a novice in this exquisitely sophisticated art of studying brands. Now after my 3rd sem enlightenment I'm a tad wiser and think twice before paying up for a brand, I wonder whats the premium they're charging for the brand? Do i actually relate with the vaue proposition the brand has to offer? Does its image and identity coincide? Has it been a case of brand extension gone awry? Numerous Qns about which i used to have vague ideas earlier are now so much easier to answer.
We keep complaining we don't get good faculty, but what if we get a faculty thats too good? Thats again a pain in You-know-where, we just can't stop complaining.. like good 'ol Kaali says..'Fees bhara hai na?' 'Time value of money pata hai?' btw he got a shock of his life yesterday when there were 17 absentees in his class.. it was a first and it was not expected, neither was his lukewarm reaction. But he taught well.
Coming back to brand, I have been telling this to anyone who would bother to listen - Mr Damodaran and Brand valuators don't see eye to eye. The value of a brand is required in times of mergers and acquisitions, 'how much premium to pay?' thats the big question, but Damu believes brand value is already factored in the stock price and hence no separate valuation is necessary, you pay for the company's stock (market value) and you factor in the premium for the brand, as simple as that.. or is it?
IFRS regulation require all companies to list the brand value under asset side of the balance sheet? why is that so?
Hence my conlusion that 'brand' like many other (useful?) terms has been coined by consultants to reap money and its like a tool in the hands of marketers to charge premium for a product where it may not deserve any... if it does it will be reflected in the market price without you harping about the value that product offers coz its under this brand. Foolish as this verdict may sound I choose to stand by it

unexplained phenomena

Uncertainities are hitting us everywhere, can we handle these risks?
Do we understand beta? And i'm not talking about the securities market. I dunno how many of us can relate the rising commodity prices to the pressure its putting on households. I did after staying home for a while, (no) thanks to swine flu, one of the many uncertainities plaguing our country and the world.
So many things are happening together and that too in this all important year particularly for me.
By the way today is our ex PM Late Shri Rajiv Gandhi's B'day. Some ministries conceptualized by him thanked him in the national dailies and justified their existence. Didn't sound very convinvcing to me, i.e only their explanations e.g Food Processing Ministry, gave a bunch of pfaff about how they're helping the nation without listing any major milestone they have achieved or are going to in the near future.
Coming back to the main topic. After summers my interest in crude has surprised even me and not without reason, its been behaving quite oddly too. Probably because i follow it only now that i find it so ridiculous. Commodities like currencies seems so similar in their fluctuating nature. Though trading helps in price discovery but the exposure to speculators is an age old malady faced by all markets. There's no solution to this and all of a sudden i feel so disillusioned now that i'll just shelve this post now. But before that let me ask the question that I had in mind.
WTI Nymex spot crude was trading at $66 whereas North Sea Brent was at $70 yesterday. How do you explain that? And today in the commodities report US crude inventories are down by some 8.4m barrels. Rumour is that with lesser spot price at Cushing its bound to attract lesser volume. Its confusing but i'll soon find out why such a disparity exists.

Crude oil pricing ain't no crude business

Analysts love to predict movement in crude and whats worse everyone wants to apply a different theory, each coming up with their own results.
The most confounding of them all is technical analysis based on historical price movements and volume fluctuations. They're supposed to factor in unexpected risks arising in the future but the question is to what extent?
Yesterday there was a prediction by Robert Prechter, who shot to fame after predicting the 1987 stock market crash. According to him Crude will fall to a range bound level of USD 4-10. Any sane person who has followed crude or the big Oils would laugh hysterically till his/her lungs can support no more, I know I did. His prediction was based on 'Elliot Wave Principle' which some analysts term as pseudoscientific and follows the crowd psychology, it says "all investors turn pessimistic after showing a bout of optimism."
Crude can't by any means go back to $10. I am an ardent believer in supply side economics when it comes to crude pricing and it makes perfect sense for a wasting asset which needs substantial capital investment to keep cost of production down.
Due to extreme cost cutting measures adopted by the Big Oils they have managed to post returns past expectations but the substantial cuts in capex are an area of concern. The average crude extraction price has been consistently rising as new areas are being explored. The old warhorses like Thunder Horse and Atlantis are no longer pumping oil as they used to half a decade back. The new focus areas are frigid Russian wells, Brazilian pre-salt and Canadian oil sands. Russia and Canada will require huge capex for achieving subsistence levels, as of now in comparison to the prevailing crude price, these fields are prohibitive.
Then there're also cases like Venezuela where the govt. is hell bent on nationalizing all natural assets, with such cases happening at regular intervals (Russia and possibly Brazil in the near future) oil companies have to tread with care.
If you ask me crude will hover within $70-$80 as in this range even the costliest oil wells are profitable, and profit is what these companies need if they want to secure a future for themselves.

The day we got paid

I have had plenty of these during my Infy stint but this one was painful at least the run up to it definitely was.
Here we were interning at Chennai, staying in T Nagar, shelling out a hefty sum of 20k per month for an acco thats totally worth it, but I'm so used to spending extravagantly that I'm increasingly tending to live beyond my means. There's no cash coming in, its just a bout of outflows one after the other.
After being financially independent it's tough thinking of the prospect of again asking for money from parents, that day doesn't seem far though.
Now in our summers, most of the guys are being paid on a pro rata basis but then they're also being paid extra for acco, travelling n food now thats fair, but our admin fellas neither wanna give us travelling, nor do they know how much we're coughing up for our room.
After probably a lotta bickering by our mentor they've released the full amount. We're gonna encash it asap lest they change thr mind.
We did all in our power to ensure that we made up for the lost 8 working days that we missed, came on all the weekends, never complained abt anything at all even then they had the cheek to question our motives of coming on weekends. It was suspected that we were working weekends to increase our stipend, ha u wish!!!

Chennai revisitied

I am back to my old bastion albeit a little misplaced, its a little more crowded, noisier and costlier than Tambaram but thats the premium you pay for staying in T Nagar. Chennai is as hot as before but this time I got A/C power and I actually look forward to coming back to my pad unlike last time when we preferred to eat FC food n come back by the latest cab. My room is nice, its got net, an A/c, fridge, attached bath, TV, what else cud i want? I've attached a pic.

Lets see how the work turns out to be, today was the first day, still 2 months to go, our mentor is a bright guy. We're all pretty geared up and determined to meet up to the expectations, lets see how long this enthu lasts.... hopefully long enuff for the project to get over.

I've forgotten watever little Tamil I had learnt then, have to regain that rustic flair to impress random ppl with my broken Tamil especially autowallahs who then decide not to fleece u.

Yesterday saw RDB for the umpteenth time, quite a coincidence that the movie that I associate Chennai with and which I saw at least 5 times in movie halls in Chennai (specifically in Mayajaal n Melody), I get to see again on the fist day of my visit.

There is lots that I wanna see and do now that I am here first on the list is visit Learner's Court, our melting pot - 13 wandering souls that made Tambaram their home after the luxuries of Mysore, who colored T'ram on holi to the horror of the awestruck locals, stormed the local populace with our glam gals, those sure were fun days. Now the last court inhabitant has also abandoned it, but we left behind a legacy of Infoscions that'll continue for a long time to come.

Had it not been so hot a trip to Pondy was definitely called for, the project timelines will also make us rethink that plan but its definitely on the cards.

I gotta get my hands onto some tasty sea food soon plus i havn't had chicken in since yesterday, gotta do something about it, tomorrow i shall put an end to this travesty.

Lot of the T nagar area has changed, I did a ful survey of Pondy Bazaar, Usman Street, Mambalam, V N Road, some parts are the same, some have seen a make over e.g the flyover at Pothys is a breather but the crowds remain. My roomies thought this place is crowded coz their's some festival is coming up, it took some time convinicing them its like this on all weekends.

Ah! good ol' Chennai... what do u have in store for me next?

Helping the economy

When i had visited the pyramid mall in Pune I was surprised to see all empty stalls, it was either a case of bad inventory planning or they were winding up business. I enquired around and found out they were closing for refurbishing, on further prodding it came out that they were into huge losses and it was just a pretext to wait for better times to re-open.

I wondered if the techies of b'lore too wud stop visiting the ever mushrooming malls and kill 'em. I had to wait for sometime coz i wasn't gonna get an opportunity to visit b'lore till after my exams what with the admissions process and all council crap interfering with pre-exam activities.

But once i did visit B'lore i was pleasantly surprised, neither was there any effect on the malls nor was their any shortage of shoppers. Malls were still brimming, multiplexes were still running to capacity at least on weekends, restaurants had ppl queueing outside waiting their turns, b'lore as usual. Generally u wud see stores running discounts, that i had seen when i had last come here in Jan but now there was none, probably i missed the ugadi discounts. Well, we did our bit of helping the economy by contributing to the national income, my friend bought her new shades, she had lost the older ones that i had gifted her, so for this one I ain't contributing, I am berozgaar now woman!!

I went to catch up on a new movie with a friend, Fast n Furious 4. All the talk about sequels being crap were punched in the face by the Director Justin Lin. Its the best of all the 4 that have come out yet. There's not much hoopla about cars n babes its just hard core car action, surprisingly the movie doesn't glorify NOS much, its just skills and raw car muscle. Vin Diesel in his usual no nonsense, no bullshit avataar, crunching bad guys with glee-- total paisa vasool.

My friend, who had pestered me for going to the Akshay Kumar starrer 'tasveer' or sth but even she was blown away by this one.

Enjoying the vacation ain.. wat about summers?? I'm reading hard n reading fast man!! lets see if i can meet the target... Here i come Damu..

Half an MBA - 10 months effort

Aii Karamba!! Already one year since i left my job casting aside all apprehensions, the economic downturn, following the hunch that 2 in 3 young fellas between the age of 23-25 follow, better life awaits post-MBA. Frankly there couldn't have been a worse time to take the plunge and looking at the job market just reaffirms all my doubts. Just the day before I was checking out the day zero video of our super seniors, the offers, the jubilation and best of all the sense of satisfaction and achievement and yesterday I bid adieu to our senior batch, their frustrations, the disappointments but their was still optimism in the air and thats what gladened me. They were all confident that the brand SIBM will fetch them plum offers even outside campus and they were still more hopeful for us signaling that much better things await us. Starting in bad times with a lower than avg package will have its implications way into the future. The quantum jumps won't be so easy to come by and people starting later will take the leap faster and zoom ahead. I met an old school buddy in Apache after 7 long years, he was in SCMHRD and though we had been talking on phone we hadn't got the chance to meet even after staying one yr in Pune, finally just before me leaving for home and he leaving Pune for good, it was a must meet situation and what better setting than our good ol' Apache. I was very proud of him for securing a PPO in Heinz and that too at a very lucrative package, we sat together for some time reminisced about old times n old friends, it was every bit as exciting as it could be. I wish him all the luck in the world ahead.

In the pic are two of my seniors who i was the closest to, our Admissions Team S-team, Pranav n Joey.

Pranav I wud see in a few year coming to meet us in an Audi Q7, probably running his own startup successfully while Joey a.k.a Joyita wud be the VP-HR in a big firm, with the kinda skills n capabilities these guys had there would be no stopping them once they're out of here. All the best folks, do us proud!!!

Well half an MBA done and I feel a bit wiser, a little foolish too, things seem different now, more reality is acceptable and God willing our batch will pass out with flyign colors and outrageous salaries, me included insha-allah!!!

My pic in the inset shows my 'Farooq Abdullah' topi, quite a rage in J&K and good stuff to battle Delhi's cold, I last used in my final days of Engg as the bugger Satish had lost my other cap, Found it recently when packing my stuff, my bengali roomie hadn't seen anything like it and i offered him my cam to snap it up with a weirdo expression, I was wondering how n where i shud put it up and then eureka!!!

I have to join for summers on 12th in Chennai, its gonna be a different Chennai than when i was there last, its gonna be work and only work. Have to finish the li'l red book in 9 days starting today, let get going then...

India Unbound

Mr Gurcharan Das was here, and so were all his fans in the Symbi community, on 18th of March 2009. Our II Sem Final exams were starting from 20th, I am writing this post-haste, didn't have time to pen it down then. Me being classic me had put everything till the end and hence my course was all pending, every waking hour i spent in planning when to finish what but never actually got to it. Our entire batch was asked to attend Mr Gurcharan Das's lecture. I being a big fan was happy to but others were not so kind.
He has a magnanimous presence and after the usual Symbi ablutions when he took stage he reprimanded Diro and we all loved to see him panic in his usual flair :)
Anyways he started off, there was nothign new, he had prepared the presentation from his book only but with the facts depicted in a graphical form. Once his session was over I was just happy to see him but there was no takeaway from his ppt as such. Everyone realized that.
We only then got to know the real motive of inviting him then, he is on some advisory panel of UGC and we drew our inferences. Some faculty members were real glad to see him and opened their hearts out to him, he too was impressed no doubt.
All in all it was 2 hours well spent for me, i don't regret it, hope at least on this pretext i wud get to meet all such people whose works i have read and admired over the times.

'Holi' day

'Aya mahant Basant' - Holi augurs the arrival of the Spring Season in this part of the world. The season change hardly brings any cheer, its already hot as hell here and the winter was only pleasantly cool. I've had better Holis than this one, in happier times. Sounds ominous, as if we're at war or something, I just love melodrama!! Our seniours had a tough year God only knows what awaits us this December. We just got out of two admission processes, giving loads of promises to bright younglings, some o' them older than me. They all had dreams in their eyes exactly the way we had been last year, full of expectations raring to have a go at it, become the much acclaimed and famed managers (reminds me of "Yuri the manager who manages!!" Kali wud love that no doubt!!). I didn't know how address their queries, SIBM has done well no doubt but there are still a few who are not placed, what will happen when you leave the college without a job in hand. Jobs are downright hard to come by on campus, once outside the situation is far worse than under the institute's roof. It was so draining to just complete one admission process that when we were told we'll have to do another it was just too unnerving. The SNAP authorities chickened out under the pressure of FIRs and RTIs, revised the scores and lo!! we were left with another 900 students clearing the cutoffs. It hits you that these people are a deserving lot but the pain of another 4 days of carnage is overwhelming. The admissions process had been quite admired by candidates and the college alike. We all had a nice feeling of contentment in our hearts and were glad to be the center of attention all these days but when the monthly quizzes and vivas came along it was a nightmare. I aced by managing to get a zero in Ops. Its been my achilles heel thus far, I tend to mess up with fairly silly mistakes. They have been a fact if life here at Hogwarts (he he he how I wish).
The Summer internships are gonna start shortly I've been trying to arrange acco in Chennai but hasn't worked great till now. Hope we all have fun wherever we go

Narendra Modi's visit

I havn't had a chance to travel to Gujarat and explore the state as yet. The closest I have been is just flying over Ahmedabad. The sigh of the city and most of the state from air was spectaculat. I have seen lots of Indian cities and hinterland from air but Gujarat was a distinct experience. It seemed well planned for starters. Any city seems just a cluster of real estate and nowadays farmhouses on the periphery, in Ahmedabad I saw a series of canals dotting the city's boundaries and what struck me as strange was these canals were somehow passing below seasonal rivers, more like bridges and underpasses. I had seen something similar in mail forwards from friends in Denmark where they have water bridges, ships cross land on canal bridges.
When we heard Mr Modi was coming over to our college to address the batch for a favor he had bestowed upon symbi by offering cheap land near Ahmedabad we were all curious as to what this guy was gonna tell us. Our new Audi was ready and this was a fit event to inaugurate it. The Z+ security was a problem for the students and SIMC had to take down a few of their posters but overall there was an eager anticipation among the crowd over his high profile visit.
He arrived on time on a chopper, we had been sitting in the audi for close to an hour now and getting restless but his aura was enough to spur everyone's attention. He entered and raised in hand to acknowledge the crowd, quite like political rhetoric, but that his presence held us in awe.
The symbi administration indulged in their brand of tomfoolery that lasted for nearly an hour, in between Modi got up at least thrice thinking it was his turn to address us but there was always sth or the other that was next to come. Finally when he got the podium he unceremoniously refused to accept the title of 'Professor' generously granted by our chancellor.
The guy spoke in Hindi but he quoted facts, about Gujarat, about his exploits in Gujarat, about his modus operandi that spurred the leviathan state machinary in to action and within 1000 days turned Gujarat from a trading community to a land of self sufficiency - the state that excels in farming, power generation, irrigation, industrial development, you name it and you got it.
When the indistrialists especially the ADAG chairman expressed their desire to be the next PM at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit and from what we witnessed there and I believe me to be a good judge of personalities, I believed in him not because he had all the traits of a great politician but he was just wouting from facts published by Govt of India, undeniable facts. What works for one state might not work for the entire country, he acknowledged that but with consistent persevarance it was not impossible either.
Our Principal Director was also invited to the summit and in her words 'she was all over Modi and has still not been able to get over him', and she was expecting us to be all over him too which we graciously said we'll consider.
He just faltered at one point, a point raised that talked about the banning of 'Parzania' and alluding to the Godhra incident, he turned defensive and fumbled, all the magic was gone 'poof' at that very monent. Its such a paradox that the image u have cultivated so hard for urself can evaporate in a jiffy due to the chinks that u had bore in ur armor sometime in the past.
All the respect that he had garnered till then was fizzling out and our admin jumped to damage control and no further questions were allowed keeping a bit if the Modi aura still in the air.
We all came back hoping the state of Gujarat will hopefully come for recruitment (ha ha) and banish all our woes in the near future, make us a part of vibrant Gujarat.