I have been doing a lot of reading in trains recently; the credit goes to our Jabalpur trip in this past week. I have been reading sitting on doors of moving trains, in the pale neon light of compartment, or sometimes in the weak torchlight of my cellphone in the dark when every passenger has slept. The topic of my readings has remained constant throughout this entire year- business. The reading on this trip was no different. I finished reading Philip Delves Broughton’s “What they teach you at Harvard Business School”. HBS is my dream school, the only school that I want to study in if ever I decide to do an MBA. Philip Delves is an HBS alumnus, batch of 2006, and he has filled the book with lots of anecdotes, description of professors and workings of HBS, and a crucial question about finding a balance in life between business and family. The book is a somber reading, and a very thought-provoking one for someone like me. This book, combined with an incident that happened in Jabalpur, made me ask some crucial question about my business.
Growing Pains of an Entrepreneur
In search of a meaning
Something I wrote a long time back 
The world is full of two kinds,
Who look for meaning and who don’t
Me, I’ve got two minds,
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t
Robert Frost and the Meaning of my Life
‘…and miles to go before I sleep”
said who that bloody creep?
who’s gonna walk to take a nap,
when it takes a second to hit the sack
Starting your CAT 2010 Preparation?
Wondering how hard you should work to prepare for CAT 2010? I have a straight answer-
Work THIS Hard!
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Things I can do When Dagny is NOT at Home
So Dagny has gone to her Maika (meri sasuraal) for three days and I am the temporary boss of the house. So before I go and buy some beer, I thought I should pen some of the things I can do while my boss darling is gone:
Things I can do when Dagny’s has gone to her Maika
- I can watch TV late night without interruption of seeing “Utaran” or “Big Boss”
- I can stock beer in the fridge. Friends smell it from miles away and slowly arrive at home.
- I can wear the same underwear for three days.
- I can survive on tea and maggi for days.
- I can leave the water for boiling and forget.
- My clothes can stay on the floor. As I keep telling her, floor is also a space for keeping things.
- The bed can have books scattered on it.
Some other unspeakable things which I am not going to mention.
Simon And Garfunkel — Scarborough Fair
Heard it after so many years, that too in a movie. The finger-picking on the guitar made me wanna pick up my guitar again. Here it is for those who have not heard it before:
During the late Middle Ages the seaside town of Scarborough (now a resort) was an important venue for tradesmen from all over England. It was host to a huge 45-day trading event, starting August 15, which was exceptionally long for a fair in those times. Merchants came to it from all areas of England, Norway, Denmark, the Baltic states and the Byzantine Empire. Scarborough Fair originated from a charter granted by King Henry III of England on 22 January 1253. The charter, which gave Scarborough many privileges, stated “The Burgesses and their heirs forever may have a yearly fayre in the Borough, to continue from the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary until the Feast of St Michael next following”. (On the modern Roman Catholic calendar, the equivalent dates are August 15 to September 29.) Naturally, such a large occasion attracted a lot more than just tradesmen; they needed to be entertained and fed, therefore large crowds of buyers, sellers and pleasure-seekers attended the fair. Prices were determined by ‘Supply and demand’, with goods often being exchanged through the barter system. Records show that from 1383 Scarborough’s prosperity slumped.
Stupid that is Google, is there a replacement?
A few months ago we had a malware attack on the site. Although we cleaned up our site, a leftover 301 redirect in our .htacess made our site disappear from google search. I cleaned it up and contacted google again to restore our site. For two weeks nothing happened. During those two weeks I kept seeing the malicious site showing as a top result for ‘totalgadha’ keyword. Our page rank had also been stolen. It was then that I started asking- Is this search really doing a good job? It is showing a malicious site in place of a reputed site. The more questions that I asked, more furious I became-
The first thing that I started questioning- and this question was popped up by my highly internet-savvy friend- is how could Google lose its search result? For years its crawlers have been surfing thousands of pages on my site. How can this data be replaced to show something irrelevant? Is this search engine so stupid? How can it wreck its own data without verifying and validating?
More Updates on my Married Life
Recently, our neghbours lost a case for their house and they were being evicted from the house with their belongings taken out of the house and kept on the road. A big crowd gathered. We also watched from our balcony. Everyone got depressed at the way they were being pushed out of their house. So did my wife. The gloom hung in the house like the stench of burnt milk. There were women also fighting in the process. No wonder Dagny had had enough by the afternoon and she started her song-
Dagny- “Let’s go out. Watch a movie at select citywalk?”
Me- “umhmm..can we go someplace nearer so that we can come back soon and work?”
Been there, done that
Donkey Fossil
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Are You a Twitter Twit?
When I started playing Bridge in the National arena, I used to practice the game online with my partner, my batchmate from IIT Delhi, on websites such as bridgebse or Okbridge. The latter is a serious website where you can pit yourself against top players around the globe. Although my partner was a serious bridge enthusiast, he had an annoying habit of chatting online while playing. The moment it was not his turn to play a card, he would press ‘alt + tab’ and switch to chatting on his messenger or a chatroom. Consequently, he would continuously commit small errors that would cost us our game. And as a result of his chatting, he could never pay attention on the game for a long time in order to reach the depths of the game. He was hooked to chatting. And when I realized that, I gave up on the partnership.
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