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.

How IIT preparation is evolving

I read IITian full page ad in Mumbai Mirror and froze for a moment. They were talking something like hybrid colleges, where the colleges teach the IIT syllabus and also normal HSC stuff.

I guess this is a very normal practice in Kota, where the whole of India seems to be turning up for JEE preparation.But before Kota happened to JEE, Hyderabad had happened. There was this phase i think in 1990's where a majority of students in IITs were from Hyderabad through two coaching institutes, Ramaihah and Krishnamoorthy. And there was this college Vignan which gave you an easy admission and virtual attendance free environment if you came from either of these two coaching institutions.

The coaching market has evolved and I feel cold in my feet thinking, how the market moved from Hyderabad to Kota and now is taking over Mumbai. IITianpace uses youtube to further talk about it's message.
http://www.youtube.com/iitianspace7#p/a/u/1/vGrcjQovLKM

The founder is cautious while selling IIT coaching to 8th standard students and calls this a healthy trend.

I don't know how this market will evolve but I won't be surprised if in the near future IIT's stop JEE and implement an American model of technical education which banks a lot on recommendations and is mostly subjective.

A lot of PE players have invested in IIT coaching classes. Links and video below.

Matrix investing in FIIT JEE
Nadathur in career point 
Milestone Religare in IMS 
Milestone Religare in Resonance Eduventures

One of those nights

When I don't want to sleep. I am listening continuously to bandi song from LSD.

But I am in-the-money on a naked option. And I have to track it real time, so that I do not ending up blowing it up completely. I am already in notional loss. So I need to wake up before 9 AM tomorrow.

I saw LSD today. Well, I did not find anything obscene in it. A combination of hard hitting irony, simple Indian flimsy gore, and a masterpiece of a juxtaposition.

Had I been on campus, would have started a movie now and taken a stroll in the morning before going to sleep.

31st March 2010. An end.

Another beginning beckons. Where?

Can I have Murli Manohar Joshi back ? Please.

Analysis of any problem is good. It gives an entity, an individual or a group the data points from where a decision can be easily taken. At a simple level it is a great tool.

But in the b2b market, a simple analysis needs to be peppered with a lot of bullshit, so that the buyer believes that the product that he is buying is actually worth it, never mind the fact that they can understand the analysis or not.

A few things which have left me disappointed in the last few days.

• The surge in suicide rates, more so amongst the kids.
• The rising costs of management education, led by the IIMs
• The stupid selection criterion set forth by most of the IIMs.

 It matters to them, what you did in standard ten, twelfth and then your graduation. Never mind that in India you have various state boards, central boards, CBSE, ICSE etc.  A common measurement of academic excellence across these mediums is fruitless.

Why in god's name does it not occur to them. There was a time when I took CAT and loved it madly, because it did not value knowledge, but application of skills. You did not have to set up a profile starting from your tenth standard , depending on their criterion by the time you reach their gates.

So what will IIMs do next, a la Big 4 consultancy? It matters not what have you done or can do, what I am interested is whether your father is a well heeled bureaucrat in Delhi, who can use influence to win me a government advisory contract?

Look, there is very little I can do to change what the IIMs are doing. I can merely change my outlook so that I can find my way through this system. Or, quit and move to another country.

Say, I hold on. and 10 others also. We stay put because for some crazy reason, we subscribe to the idea of a nation state, Mother India etc. We reach a stage when we have kids who are beginning to prepare for standard ten. What do I do? I pressurize them. 10 others also pressurize their kids. You know where this roads lead, right? Suicide.

Mostly I haven't expressed my displeasure with the IIMs before, thinking that they are a private entity, they have a freehand in their criterion for gd/pi calls, their fees etc. But do they understand that they are the beacon people look up to expecting answers to everything, because they are suppose to be better.

But then, one day you take notice that a kid called Sachin Tendulkar says that he has a lot of responsibilities because people look up to his. If he is not careful, and be seen with a cigarette on his lips, a thousands others will pick it up. It effects him, this responsibility and he is aware of it.

But why do the revered IIMs do not get this basic reasoning.

They have already inculcated the culture of rigour during an MBA program, possibly with an exception on Cal. Professors in other B schools tell their pupils, look the IIMs believe in rigour as a form of education, since they are IIM's they should be right. And hence, even I will introduce rigour.

Mr. Bakul Dholakia stands up in a convocation ceremony and proudly announces, If you have survived in IIM A, you can survive anywhere in this world.  Did not a single entity sitting in that ceremony have a question for him. Err...Sir....but...what if I want to live a life ...and just not survive it?

I am ok with rigour been passed down in other, mostly private , B schools.

I am not Ok, with the ever increasing rise in fees, I don't care what are their costs and the rate of inflation. A govt. institution is a govt. institution. I don't care what are the salary packages when a kid gets out of an IIM. I don't want a kid's life to be a debt trap, just like it is in US today.

Ideally I would prefer a kid to be free of any encumbrances after a formal education, so that he is not obligated to join a company which pays him disproportionately, so that he can square off an education loan, "survive" in life, and one fine day discover that , all he has done in life is survive, and forgotten, how exactly a life is lived. He should be free to choose a vocation independent of a promise of future cashflows/ career.

I am not OK with a kids life turning out to be constant struggle for grades, so that after six years he can take a  shot at a seat in IIM.

I have looked up to IIMs as temples. I still do. But for how long I will continue, I am not sure.

Well done abba

turned out to be good. very similar to welcome to sajjanpur. and very real. the hero gets every thing right, here boman irani, but the villains also get awards. And the poor police just watches it on.

A lot of people walked out from the theater very happy, satisfied that they had spent an evening entertaining themselves, and discussing benegal no end. Mr. Benegal, did you want this? 

The actors, other than the professional ones looked like the local populace. Especially the dances in the lorry. 

Hyderabadi Hindi was remembered, after a very long time.