The state of the mind

The state of the mind has to be expressed.

I had taken a bet that the market would improve post March. But I forgot a simple attribute about myself. I take big and difficult things very easily but frequently overlook simple and common-sense things. The mistake here was that my profile is a bit fractured, which makes this job seeking endevour a tad difficult one.

Notwithstanding the premiere B school tag. Usually one has to display focus and perseverance in a profile, not necessarily in work. A lot of people in this world are in the business of giving others a gold medal for their past achievements, while what matters is what is the future potential, what can be changed in the future.

Then there is this attribute of pretending to project a positive attitude in an interaction.

Someone once told me, watch your thoughts closely, because they soon turn into actions. I guess, I need to put control mechanisms to manage my cynicism.

To take a break I went to crossword and read a whole book, three cups of tea with an overpriced sandwich in between. In Bangalore, I had a landmark at 10 mins walk and another landmark at a 20 min walk from my home. Here, Landmark is at the other end of town, the closest crossword is a local and a auto ride far. Taking totally about 45-50 mins. Landmark is generally a more exhaustive bookshop when compared to crossword. Though neither of them have, Growing a business.

But I guess, crosswords is under revenue strain. The one I went today had subleased their space to a gift and an online photo publishing shop(zoomin.com), along with a cursory CCD . Or some other branded coffee shop.

Also visited few NGO's, but most of the educational ones are vacationing at this point. Even the NGO's have a class distinction, the best endowed one where the elite and foreigners work, the middle class one where middle class people work and the bottom of the pyramid one which are exactly where they are needed but without any glamour and razzmatazz..I have always held the view that NGO's should run as private limited companies, but that would create a problem from the grant perspective. But SKS did convert from NGO to pvt limited pretty early Also visited a slum, where I might teach some children, presumably Maths and science, ironically in a shiv sena office.

Randomly at crosswords,

Went through a few pages of this Indian book, where the storyteller describes himself as M. Self deprecatory humour begins somewhere in Rajasthan

Read last few pages of Gone with the wind

Realised that some random book by some Pune kid is number 1 fiction. ( Oh Shit, not again by Mandar Gokate). The publisher is a local one and inserts a lot of pages of self advertisements like contact us if you want to write a book etc. There are so many aspirational writers/publishers in India, and I guess the penguin and big name publisher hegemony ends here. Chetan Bhagat has created a entirely new market here. Small Publisher, small time writer, simple English, good entertainment. Of course the snobs of south Mumbai and central Delhi look down on this form of English, but who cares about them

Dork is out of print at this crossword, Trainspotting and Eats, shoots and Leaves are as always unavailable, so are any books by Vijay Tendulkar or Harold C Pinter.

Gamechangers is available

Rashmi Bansal has written another book, but taken things upside down. Has something on jugaad, junoon and another word starting with j. Celebrating other's success seems a good opportunity, need to try my hand at it, sometime.My personal(borrowed from NNT) bias states that success and failures both need to be celebrated equally.

Browsed through the last pages of a Fitzgerald book, I guess it was Tender is night. Had an eerie feeling.

And how much time( if,) before the online store of crossword, landmark odyssey etc start matching flipkart's pricing, at least for online retailing. Looks impossible though, but you never know. They just need a reason to justify the differential pricing to walk in customers. Better still, they can create a new branded portal owned by them but not carrying crossword's brand name and start the differential pricing game. If they want to take flipkart out ,this is the time, else see amazon buy flipkart a few years hence and hammer them till eternity.

Addendum:

NICOLE KEPT IN TOUCH with Dick after her marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, "I loved Dick and I'll never forget him,"
Tommy answered, "Of course not why should you?"
Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success.
Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, New York, practicing general medicine, and later that he in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was admired by
the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who
worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.
After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking if he needed
money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he practising in Geneva, York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with someone to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so
she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.