Kit-kat time

I know it sounds cliched when I say the first term has gone real fast. I also know it sounds even more cliched when I say I am 16.67% a manager now (It IS a sick excuse-for-a-joke, but I am sure all MBAs/managers would have laughed at that). Back home at Chennai for a week long stint of inactivity. I am going to surpass all my existing records of inertia.

My first term had courses on:
Managerial Communication,
Business Government and Society,
Managerial Economics,
Quantitative Methods,
Financial Accounting, and
Managing Organizations.
I guess my best learnings came from FinAc and ManEco. I truly feel like I have learnt something useful from those courses. At least I wont cringe in ignorance the next time I look at an annual report.

Now that term 1 is done, it seems acads will be easier now on, if one is to believe seniors. But I have an eerie feeling that it is all about getting used to being screwed day after day, and that it will never get easier.

Having said that, mid-Nov is when things will TRULY get easier.. By then our summer placement process would be done.. And the run-up to that is going to be quite an experience. We have already been warned that once the term starts next week, we will have a Pre-Placement Talk everyday. And there are loads of stories of how people prepared in the past. All that sounds like stuff that legends are made of. So I happily discount them as ox-excreta. At least most of them.

And placements are going to be even more interesting this time. With all major investment banks pulling shutters down one by one, jokes are getting really skewed on campus. Almost everyone has to quip on how State Bank of Mysore is where we guys are going to get placed. (If someone from SBM is reading this: No offence meant to SBM, I assure you.. I was only reporting what others have been discussing.. Personally I hold SBM in high regard because it has been a.. Well I'll complete it in my SoP and recruitment forms, thank you)

Lets see.

BTW as you might have noticed by now: www.vishfulthinking.com is up :) A whole lot of thanks to all those who responded to my call for votes.

A stroll back to childhood

A couple of days back a friend visited the library here and came back thrilled. He seemed visibly exhilarated. That kinda tempted me too.

In my childhood, I used to visit libraries quite often. Especially in my 5th - 8th standards. Hardy boys / Archies / Asterix / etc used to keep me awake every night. We used to live in Choolaimedu then. And my books were sourced from my school's library and from a public lending library (A C Samy lending library on Choolaimedu High Road. Anyone seen that?). I used to swell in happiness every time I walked into one of these two buildings. They definitely would fit the cliched description of "well-equipped". Kept me well fed/read week after week for nearly 4 years!

The very smell of oldddd books used to give me a high! And the sight of them things lying in a beautiful array that looked very symmetrical despite the dog-ears only added to the effect. My heartbeat would get faster as my fingers would run around looking for that particular book in the series, and I would let out a silent whoop every time I succeeded in finding the book I wanted. The sheer joy one gets when checking a book out and walking out impatiently sneaking peeks inside is priceless.

As I walked into the big library here at IIMB, all these thoughts rushed back to me. The rows and rows of yellowing books pulled me back by a decade to my childhood.

And the smell! Ah..

Sadly, the library was largely empty. In this wi-fi enabled campus, with life on the fast lane, who will want to do things the library way. Google has spelt doom for these timeless structures. But as I flipped through books and found that they had been around in the same place even before I was born, it gave me an inexplicable thrill.

I was there for just 5 mins. But the experience is still on.

I love libraries... I love my childhood...

A photo-walk around IIMB campus

IIMB Campus pictures

How to name it?

I have always been fascinated by dot-com blogs. They seem much more professional and profound and un-cheap than the dot-blogspot-dot-com and dot-wordpress-dot-com ones.

So after much thought and cost-benefit analysis, I decided to get a domain name for myself months back. Got to know from KP (www.kprabu.com) today that blogger offers domain names for a year at 10$!!

So I've decided to take the plunge. But I am unable to decide what to call my blog. Have put up a poll on the right side of this page. Do vote for your choice.

If you have some good option to suggest, do use the comments section of this post!