The year of turnarounds?

another eventful (for the most part) year drawing to a close and as it has been the case for a lot of nights this year, i am still sleepless..i could be all corny and write about being sleepless in singapore but then it wouldnt make any sense, just another set of babble from this moron..

as the year draws to a close, i am scared of facing the next one.. not scared as in shit scared but i believe its going to be a watershed year.. its going to make or break a lot of things right from my career to my personal life. From a career perspective, the startup i am working in is in the verge of a turn around and growth and we can eiher make or break this company this year. one wrong move and we are in a shithole. Got to steer it through the narrow fjords and shallow waters without breaching the hull or ending in a sand bank with no cash.. man its gonna be one hell of a ride and to start it, i am supposed to be strategising on this and also be a part executing it. On the personal front, the pressure to get married will rise higher as the months go by and this is the most scary part for me.. the ability to find someone with whom i can spend the rest of my life with.. ok i might be romanticising this part here but then it is a gamble especially when it is this arranged marriage. Right now it is stuck in that part where the girls my parents think are suitable dont fall under my suitability radar. expectations mismatch.. it is as simple as that and i just cant seem to get my parents to look at my point of view and for the first time in my life i am being as stubborn as they come with my folks.. no way, i am not screwing up my life on this.... one wrong decision and my ship is sunk...

actually the personal life is in much dire straits than the career. i am sure we can always get the company, there is always a second chance, but with the marriage, one screw up and you are done..
so there you go.. the next year is definitely going to be one hell of a ride and i can expect more sleepless nites... i wish life were much simpler but then i wouldnt be enjoying it :) maybe the year will be good for turn arounds.. i could possibley end up turning around both the company and my parents view point..it helps to be optimisitc..

Content overload

I was just wondering.. there is so much content out there in the web these days. Especially in the blogdom, where people air their views on a multitude of subjects in a variety of ways and have arguments, discussions etc etc.. isnt there a better way of capturing this content in a way that could be grasped and portrayed in a much better way than RSS or search. When you do an RSS, all we get is a list of all the latest additions to a particular space that is syndicated or when you do a search its a list again based on some criteria such as page rank, isnt there any other way of identifying and segregating this content, maybe by how others feel about it but that could be very democratic and can be skewed, by the veracity of the content or any other criteriat/meta tags. is there a better way to store content that can facilitate an easier retrieval than search engine/rss? have i gone mad or am i in the starting steps of the next best thing since the internet? who knows.. its 1:15 am and i am still not sleepy.. so it could be just another random thought..

Well i was just going through my old photos and i saw this.. nostalgia....

The three cool dudes at the INSEAD graduation.. well ok ok..not the three cool dudes.. two cool dudes and the one you can call him whatever u want..

 

MBA - Mostly Bungled Autopsy

One of my friends asked me today how did INSEAD MBA help me. So i decided to do an analysis or an autopsy now that its more than 2 years since i graduated. Why the hell did i do my mba in the first place.. when i look back at this , lets ignore the story we fabricated in the essays shall we.. the real reasons for me were - get out of the morbidly boring life style that i had gotten into, get up go to work eat, work, get home, sleep, routine with a few visits to new jersey and maybe a few visits to the bars strewn in here and there. It was becoming a horrendously insipid life and the company i used to work for - infosys, it didnt care as long as they were making 50% over margin on my work.. and didnt even have proper performance based incentives and recognition then.. i was just another nerdish software project manager and when I saw some arrogant harvard grads in the project managers office at my clients who stopped short of laughing at some cool ideas the nerdish software project managers came up with, the reasons were complete..

So what did i gain from doing my mba and graduating at a really awful time when the economy was so sluggish that mbas were asked to be door mats or hankies for miserly pays, lets see.. a net worth that is negative and will take about another 4 years at the current rate of growth of my pay (guess u can ignore this part cos i decided to work my ass off in a startup), a newly attained nirvana that was bought about by the acquisition of some new analytical skills which tell me that doing the mba to move from nerdish software project manager to arrogant white collars was a sheer waste of time and money as other than bringing you into a new congregation doesnt really add much value especially if u graduate at the wrong curve of economic cycles. and lastly, it kinda makes u a cynic.. and what about the morbidly insipid life.. well that has not changed except for the great one year at the campus...

so if u are entering an mba school cos of the reasons i listed above thing twice.. so there u go... u jsut read a mostly bungled autopsy on my mba.. and one more reason why i call it a mostly bungled autopsy is cos the case studies that one goes through during an mba, they are always a post mortem, ex-post and never ex-ante. One can always go back and say one could have and should have done something else or analyse the reasons behind a particular decision and the entire mba stream is built around ex-post analysis using which one speculates on the future. forget the economics and finance which work on logic, the strategy is purely ex poste. you will find several "i know it alls" giving great thoughts on what should have been but i wonder if they would have been if they were asked to make a decision at the time the case actually happenned. It is so easy to talk ex poste. So there you go, i have used my case study to tell you what i should have done before taking up an mba, but i know that cos i did an mba.. so its kinda catch 22 dont u think..

Of Crushes and Closures

I had long lost contacts with this friend of mine from my undergrad days. Her emails were bouncing and i didnt know any one who was in touch with her. No, before you start to imagine things, let me get it straight, she was a good friend and i didnt do anything stupid for her to cut me off. the last time i talked to her was in 2001 when she was in univ of maryland. Anyways, i finally got her email contacts through a friend of mine who is in touch with her close friend X. Well i also knew X, but i have since lost touch with X for numerous other reasons.

Where am i going with this blog.. well you will know.. I met X in my third year at Pilani. X was a very pretty and smart girl, and was probably the first girl i asked out. I just went up to her and asked her if she would have coffee with me.. and she did! I think to this date, i have never had a bigger crush on anyone else. U always had this feeling of butterflies and moths and every other thing that you can imagine flying in your stomach, but then i was so stupid and immature those days that i didnt know how to handle this and ended up bungling it so bad that i think i came across as a psychopathic stalker. Yeah thats right.. thats exactly how it looks when i think back at those days.. man i was a dumb nincompoop when it came to this and no nothing has changed now.. i still act like that when i am smitten..

Anyways, at the end of it, i lost touch with X bcos one day i realised my interactions werent welcome and somehow very strangely and for once when my brain acted like it existed, i realised i was acting like a stalker. So i just pulled back.. but never really came to apologising for the silly things i did.. when you think of them now, man those situations were so damn awkward but then u hardly ever think when you have butterflies in your stomach..

sometimes when i am looking at my old photographs from those days, i remember the times i had in college and relive them with my pals whenever i meet them, but these one set of events took a bad turn always stay in the back of my head during such times cos i believe i did do somethings stupid and never really apologised... it still needs closure. I have no idea how to close this.. guess some things never have a closure...