Peters ( and Marys)

This post is dedicated to all peters and marys ( which i guess will include almost all ppl xcept me;)

Its hard to understand, sometimes, how two extreme cults coexist in the same time frame and space frame in this universe. not just that . there r split personalities within the same kind of ppl. for further damnation of voluntary split personalities pls refer keshav's blog http://avuthu-pottu.blogspot.com/2006/04/online-hunk-offline-junk.html. thats a totally different track though.

so what r the two extreme cults?

1. ppl who belong to local kannama pettai and talk like cool dudes. they use words like kinda, thingi, anyways and and more junk.
2. then there r those same set of ppl who use " scene, sirupillaithanam, daaragiduva, bulb, dabba and GOD save, more of such lingos.

first let us consider the first point. what is thingi? why add i to thing to make it thingi? anyway is a simple word. why add s to it? athu enna dude? do i head from australia? whats kinda? does it mean u r kind?

oh man!!!! pls give me a brk. please man.

next comes our local shtyle - madras baashai and all.

i bet there r more brahmin female fans for the kind of gaana songs which vijay plays in every film of his. ( my own cousin sisters r a testimony to this). i cannot stand this daaanguthu songs anytime in my life.

i hv to almost plead with my sisters to talk in normal language.

the funny thing is both these cults r so different and yet attract the same masses.

we all have an identity of our own. and most of us forget it. we painstakingly adapt and assimilate such stuff. and r also proud of being a part of such communities.

well well well. this is a difficult issue. no point raising. nobody is going to listen.

who cares? I do!!!!

Anyways this peter kinda thingi's gonna rock!!!!

Its all over

Ended the first year with yet another despicable performance. next three months i hope to do better things.

and yeah the joy of going home is the only thing that keeps me in spirits.

Busy but Vetti

" What u love to do, u always find time to do"

A lil bit of digression now.

exam time now. its difficult understanding things. i have a 'corporate finance' paper tomm. well we call it coffin for short. yeah one of the tougher courses for me. din do too well in the quizzes. and i need to pass the exam somehow tomm.

coming back to the starting point.

i like exams a lot. during exams u have very less time to do things other than exams related stuff. and i end up doing other things instead!!!!

u cant hide ur true love in any kind of situation. it just shows up. take the opening sentence of this post. that is what it says. so what is my true love? read below....

for example, i swore that i will not waste time on Y!. i usually chatted very rarely with athai and arun. but then we have a tough exam tomm. so decided to do some unabated chatting with them. interestingly, during exam times, i feel like taking a 20 min break for every 15 mins i study!!

i had waited all along to get my haircut today. when i have enough to study already. and getting a haircut here means travelling up and down wasting precious time. what was i doing a week back???? cud have done yesterday or day before, but i am very superstitious. hair cuts on friday and saturday is strictly not acceptable to me. so it was to be done today.

had to get a medical certi from a doc to apply for the mountaineering camp. as luck wd have it, IIT hospi ditched us. we went searching for clinics in powaii. thats more time wasted. and we have not been done with it. in an hr's time, we will start all over an try to put things in place. meet the doc and set things right.

finally i cud never think of anything worthwhile to write abt last two three days when i had a lot of time. and today , this moment, with all the pending portions, decided to write abt this particular feeling.



sure, the affinity to do things dramatically increases when u know u dont have enough time for it.

why did GOD create murphy????

Wait please

Yet another hot day in mumbai. the bus is crowded. yeah u have enough place to stand and hold a bar close to u. the situation gets interesting now.

u try different strategies.

strategy 1

u scan around continuously to see who is going to get down and get ready to grab his seat. u r in a state of tension. one guy gets up. and before u can move, another guy closer to that seat jumps in. u again wait for ur turn. same thing ensues. during the process, u keep moving around and everytime u move closer to another seat, u lose the present place of standing to another guy. 1 hr passes. u get down without getting a seat. all exasperated. maybe at times u get a seat. going by my history of bus travel, it never happens. thanks to murphy. and u have added frustration having shifted all over the bus with no success. ofcourse u might still get a seat.that chance is there.

strategy 2

this time u stick to ur place come what may. u patiently wait and pray for the person sitting close to ur position to get down. u r not fickle minded this time. 1 hr passes. still u dont get a seat as usual. too bad. but u r not too frustrated. u were not exactly desperate for a seat. if u got it , u had it. but wait sometimes luck is in ur favour. u do get a seat. and i tell u sweet r the fruits of patience. the remaining part of ur journey will be more sweeter than if u had gotten a seat right at the start. again there is tendency to think that we shd have tried strategy 1 had strategy 2 failed.

Is it all really worth the wait....?


{ on a technical note, for mba grads, this illustration is a classic case of dilemma between spot buys vs forward contracts for ,say, crude oil purchase negotiations}

Sometimes....Stop thinking

Everybody does analysis. Everybody likes analysis. Analysis is gud. Analysis is important.

There are major decisions to take in life. we do in depth analysis sometimes. sometimes it pays off. sometimes it does not.

There are times in life where analysis can get too far. really too far. it prevents spontaneity in life. We all live the life we have peacefully because of this spontaniety. The human mind is not a monte carlo program. it cannot generate all possible scenarios and generate payoffs for all such possibilities. end of day nobody knows what was right and what was wrong. who is right and who is wrong. whether to take the left turn or the right. to take the straight road or just divert. again we win some. we lose some. all in the game. nobody can expect clear payoffs from life. and disappointments stem only from such expectations.

Life is not all too colourful. there is a patch of grey in the background. always. there are no clear pictures. no clear answers. u never know when it starts. never know where it will stop.

There is a problem to game theory. we anticipate. we adjust. thats all right. but not everytime when ur actions keep depending on the other person. then u lose ur originality. u lose what u r. u r non existent. philosophically there is no "u". but still, i am talking abt physical realities.

we can achieve happiness by being what we are. and accepting ppl as they are. by getting on with life. GOD gives everybody a fair deal.

there is no need to understand always. just love. it does not require understanding. and it is a powerful medicine.

Quoting Mother Teresa,

" The more time u have for analysis, the lesser the time u have for love"

that was a profound statement. draw the line. when to analyse and when not to.

stop analysing.

break the bars
free ur thoughts
draw the line
and all will be fine

My Tryst with Computers

Its a puzzle.

I get easy with ppl who are gud at sth which i am terrible at ! More specifically I rarely match frequency with ppl from a similar academic interest ( which might partly be due to my own absymal acadmic abilities :-( . i got more computer science friends in my batch here and else where. and then i know for a fact of life i cannot discuss one comp funda with them. why shd i expose my foolishness and ignorance.

It happens with language. It happens with computers. Though i want to talk abt computers, i am doing it against a backdrop of language as well. just to show forcefully that sth is not alright in a usual sense.

I have literally been a west indian last three years ( yeah.... i still retain my hair and am not that black either and never tried a kingfisher till date....) and yet my hindi is hardly digestible. the beauty is still i manage to mix with northies without too many inhibitions. and atleast at my engg college and at my workplace, i have really strong friends with whom i still keep in touch. opposite poles attract. they say. i am not sure. nor can i claim that it applies to me. and finally i dont care what makes me tick with northies....probably that wd make a separate post by itself, that is if at all i manage to figure out!

well this is for the start. now for the main-course. my bete-noire. computers.

I cant find words to express my feelings for this humble machine. its pretty mixed. at the same time i love to write abt sth which i am sure i will fail miserably . and hence this attempt.

First a basic dose of psychology. we avoid sth mostly becoz we r afraid of it. and we are afraid of sth becoz we dont understand it. this is the case for most things in life.

and so it happened. the first computer of my life came in class VI. that is way back in 1992. a single machine in our school lab. that too i used for playing prince. under the able guidance of my computer teacher. i knew i cud not handle it. i can handle these video game joy sticks much better than these arrow+shift+ctrl+tab+ num lock keys.

then on i have miserably failed attempting fifa, road rash, nfs2, dave and so on.....dont even dare to think abt AoE or Counter strike....on the contrary i guess i completed mario atleast once. BLC was okay. but with these cheat codes i never stood a chance. mine sweeper ws my only accomplishment. beginner level completed in 5 sec. that too purely by chance.

I cant recount the number of times i was left languishing in these languages like fortran, c, c++. the closest i came to understandin a computer language was BASIC. too sidey a language though. i mugged this oops concept just for the sake of placements in engg. and i din have a job even when i passed out from college. actually i just din attend CTS interveiw at college just becoz i was happily enjoying at home and never knew abt it. wat a correlation with computers to start a career....

i dont understand these computer networks, proxies, gateways etc although i have breathing internet and Y!M through these very things. It took a long time to figure out what configuration and pricing wd suit my requirements for a pc. but i guess so far if i had done anything remotely successful, that was getting a decent deal for a pc with a comparable configuration. i still have not attempted all the tools and functions in a MS office package. hope to learn sth before the course finishes. becoz as an MBA, all i am supposed to be is a master of these packages. when ppl talk abt comp stuff, i silently slip away. i cant handle this for sure!

in the first term, we had to learn SAS which is a statistical analysis package. till date, i cannot understand it one bit. watever lil i used of sas was by searching for codes in the internet using google. and that is not the tharikhaa for learning. with the imminent possibility of using SPSS for mktg project, i am completely bowled. the last lecture on spss left me baffling for words. i have decided to ditch tomm's spss class without much fuss.

i have encountered strange problems with blogger.com and orkut. the exp with these codes in blogger for adding features to my page has been a disaster. i am not able to put a hit counter again. and i dont understand these template codes. i wd rather do without these extra features.

learning MIS was a catastrophe in the first term. excessive mugging did not yield dividends ( nor the capital appreciation). i still cant understand the seven layers of communication or diff configs of networks. MIT was better. without any idea of IT, AA in MIT was my lone achievement here as far as acads are concerned. that too GOD'S GRACE.

Having said all that, a life without computers is unimaginable. this morning we din have power. even s i woke up, i tried to start the comp unmindful of all the sweat due to heat in a power cut room. only while putting all the cash flow spreadsheets did i understand the beauty of microsoft excel. mail, yahoo messenger and blogging ( okay orkut also to some extent) has become my staple food. nowadays i get bored at home when i visit madras with no comp to give company ( but anyday i wd prefer curd rice for comp;)

the computing ability of this microprocessor and connecting ability of this internet have been the most impacting phenomenons in the last 100 years. forget thinking abt doing a project without google! not possible. i dont use calculators for calculations, only excel. and winamp? when my comp is on......music is on indefinitely. without computers such seamless connectivity to music wd have been impossible or tedious.

although i amk not tech savvy, the benefits i have reaped from them is beyond debate. I hate computer subjects. I hate IT ( yeah even IT for Income Tax)

so my exp with computers has been mixed. but i guess i have to get even with my cousins. atleast try to become a stud in one computer game. thts a far fetched dream. but that is definitely the project for this summer shd i be in madras for my summers.