Why NOT to work from home

Top of the mind recall on a pretty friday morning-Top 5reasons I should not work from home!

Reason No1: The papers being referred to and being worked on are found crumpled the morning after(because I slept on them!).

Reason No2: The laptop will not connect to the internet and then I find innovative ways to mail things using Bluetooth and GPRS! (crazy techie people)

Reason No3: The idea factory is slow and drowsy

Reason No4: The above mentioned papers get left behind at home because everything else that is BIG and BLACK (read laptop and diary) get picked up and stuffed in the bag hurrily while the poor souls of scribbled notes get left behind.

Reason No5: The mind gets accustomed to working in such a lazy, comfy fashion with pillows all around and a sprawled out me! Office chairs seem too upright post that!

The last point is aptly described below thanks to Homer :)

A pretty place called office

For most people an office is a nightmare. I somehow have enjoyed my first brush with it.
The graffiti on my white board. The scribbles in my omnipresent black diary. The deep thought before my first two line email. The whole first name business.
The latter is such a pain! For someone who was taught from day one to go all protocol respecting and age respecting, this whole thing is like a system shock! Ah ma, why'd you ingrain it so deep?

Frameworks

I think I've cracked the nut on why I am so frustratingly slow and stupid sometimes, especially when it comes to anything to do with my MBA. I think instinctively while the MBA gives you frameworks to think by. I work on gut feelings while MBA demands data and trends. I understand the concept and twist it to suit my abilities while MBA wants the stiff white collar to be a stiff white collar. Ah damn!

The trigger to most of my self discoveries has been my internship. The one person who loves to deal with the intangible and the almost creatives, sits with a computer and finds mathematical trends in the obscure realm of image parameters! And then when I have a math-numbed brain, I have some amazing sessions with my boss who makes me think. And you know the best part? I forget my 4Ps(again) when asked for a launch strategy and instead stare like an idiot when he finally tells me in which direction I was supposed to tread.

How will I make a success of this mba thing of I can't get myself to always be in that framework!?

Oh right, it is another framework!

Delhi Daredevils and I

Date: May 3, 2011

Time: 1pm

Venue: The Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi

Occasion: Coca Cola Meet and Greet with Delhi Daredevils

Who all: I recognise Irfan Pathan(to my left) and Colin Ingram(3rd on my right); rest I am a little clueless about. I'd appreciate if you could tell me

What was I doing there: I went to meet them and have lunch. Ended up working somewhat.

Stories, tales and an exam

I had a realisation of my own right now...I so want to write a story/novel/book but besides creating a character set and amazingly sweet or conflict ridden situations and a awesome couple for it, I can never decide what to do with them! I dnt fregging have a story for them...i want an ending to the love stories I start in my head. Maybe why they dnt end or even come close to any form of closure is because I dnt know how love stories are completed! Inexperience you see...darn I wanna know what happens to my characters after they've met and broken the ice and are not fighting/drinking/eating/

studying!! Yes, my characters study :P
So in short when I'm studying(yes) and studying stuff that doesnt engross me for whatever reason, I go hunting to find out what happened to my characters and where have they reached in their lives. I dnt see them often..just every exam time and everytime I think I found a face for my characters. So my faceless characters continue with their lives with and without me. Like I do mine.

Ooh la la!

This is an absolutely random blog post. When I was logging, i didn't know what I wanted to write on, just that i did. Then my dashboard showed me that I had managed a whooping 100 posts! Wow! I can jab! ;)

So technically this is my 101st random musing on my life and I truthfully doubt if anyone cares! Ah well...
So I just gave another exam of another term where a good number people, as always, were practically implementing team work and yours truly kept wondering how come no one noticed all this? Or maybe they did and they were just avoiding conflict. Or maybe once you become an invigilator you can't tell the difference between what's genuine and what's not. As you can tell, probably, I am thoroughly pissed at all this.
I am pissed at people's insensitivity, lack of ethics, morality, humility and general humanity!!
Oh and yes, I found myself a new symbol for myself(I think this sentence is structured wrong)...it's a driftwood. I somehow feel like one :-|

A goodbye

I just have to write this down. A single hug has triggered this post that too half an hour before an end term examination! Of all the seniors that I got to know in the past one year here, I recently said goodbye to a good lot of them. All these farewells were happy. Of all the seniors that I got to know in the past one year here, only one came to look for me to say goodbye and give me a hug. I suddenly realised she'll be the only one I'll always remember no matter what. She lived on the same floor as I and we often watched TV together...bonded over random idiot box content but now that I look back, we genuinely bonded. She was so easy to talk to and just an integral part of the 1st floor...I will miss her!
I am so sappy sometimes. Darn.

Of Mirrors

Sometimes a change of mirror is all one needs to alter one's life. Like I have always believed, life has its own sweet way to teach us subtle lessons. Its upto us to take it as a learning or as just another event.
For me this post is triggered by an event. I was in the mess and I looked up into the mirror over the basin. I saw me. But I also saw a few scars from old pimples, a stray hair out of place and a few new pimples readying to take their place on my face. How come I didn't see these when I was brushing just this morning? Because the mirror changed! Or maybe just the lighting was different, but what I saw had altered.
So I learnt two things...one I needed a good facewash (:P) and two, I had to look at life from different frames. Think about it. Even physics accepts that reality changes with changing of frame of reference! How obvious it always was.
Let's look at life from differing points of view...one side is a personal me, who's just plain confused about life and the other is the professional me, who is supposed to be doing just fine. Hmm.
So what are your frames in life? How would you judge it?

just another monologue...

It's been sometime now that I have had some, or ok a lot of things to talk on. Much has happened since the day my iPod and I sat together on a bench and wondered why life was so weird.
I spent two days being a pseudo intellectual thinking what would've happened to Gautam Buddha's wife after he left her in pursuit of higher goals of life. It triggered much debate within me and with my friends but I obviously have no answer.
One other interesting happening was a rather short discussion I had. It has been my observation for quite a while now that men my age tend to be more loud, immature and quite boyish while the ones who are older are more mature, stylish and smooth. It could, I now agree, be just a personal bias but it was mine. When i did express it to this particular person I got a rather interesting answer. All it said was, " You've seen a wrong sample. Maturity, style and attitude are extensions of the personality and upbringing, not just age." I was floored!
So while I enjoy this super sexy weather of purple skies, cool winds and a calming drizzle from the solitary perch of the lone balcony of this hostel, I am content. I have made peace with life today and I hope I can sustain it for a while. I do sometime miss the opportunity of sharing such simple moments of pleasure with someone but maybe another time. I hope.

Govt's gift on women's day

One female independent director in firms must: MCA | mydigitalfc.com

So here's what the government does...give us another reservation. Am i estatic? I am not so sure. But a pat on their back for trying. The glass ceiling just got that much more brittle!
Happy Women's Day lovely people!

Douglas Adam's little quirky tale

So as I went about stumbling over the internet I found a small tale written by Douglas Adams that I reproduce here without anyone's permission. If I am violating any laws, please let me know and I'd be happy to comply!
So here goes:

Cookies by Douglas Adams (author: "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy")

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the time of the train wrong.

I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It's very important that you get this very clear in your mind.

Here's the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

It didn't look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought, nothing for it, I'll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn't because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.

Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. "Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice . . ." I mean, it doesn't really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.

Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line.

(Excerpted from "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" by Douglas Adams)

Alone

I'm sittin alone on a bench outside my hostel and it is on moments like these that I feel life, with all it's sorrows and happiness, can't get lonelier or more peaceful. There is no one to talk and no one for company. All I have right now are a bunch of pesky mosquitoes and an iPod.
I wanna just talk. Talk somemore. I haven't has a decent conversation in so long that I can't remember the last time I did. It's almost like except for my mother no one wants to really know what's up in my life! Ironically almost everyone on this campus asks me that when they see me. Life.

Shivani Saksena
sent from my iPod

excellent work-just sharing it

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Battle of the emotions

Emotions are powerful, that we all have heard. But to experience it the sheer strength of the emotion and realise its power is quite another. At least for me it has been.
The past few weeks I experienced jealousy and hatred and like each time that I experience the mix of these two, I stand in awe of it. One side of my brain shows me the rationality of all the literature that sugested that negativity has in it the power to overcome the strongest of person-Osho, Sri Aurobindo and the like. The other side pulls me to further explore the realms of this dark side and feel a new wave of power and its accompanying attitude.
The triggers of the situation will never see light on this portal(they stay locked in safer media) but the experience obviously has me using my head to word it out.
Women, history suggests, are women's worsr enemies. As I grow out of my utopian ideals and experience for myself situations where earlier I would scorn others for having reacted in a way, I am reacting thus. Pitiful. But life.

Any one worth her salt in marketing...see this!

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

Rusty ol' me

So yours truly has decided that life needs a facelift. I need loads of other things but one has to start somewhere. So I have restarted two previously integral parts of my life: physical fitness and public speaking.
The former is currently being pursued by using the well stocked gym that XL offers. I haven't had much time to devote to it or my self lately. Then a few events triggered a major need for revamp. Step in my resolve to go to the gym. On day1, I use the treadmill, I use the stepper, I do some floor exercises and rusty, flabby me gets all sweaty and exhausted! Sheer mortification overtakes me as I realise that I have indeed lost my agility and flexibility.
There is another side to this tale. The public speaking bit. I participated in a debate after 5long years. Oh boy am i rusty! But like they say, it never goes out of your system. Standing there with a small chit of my points, I felt like I was back home. I could feel I was rusty, I could feel I needed a brushing session but I was happy. I rediscovered my first love. One I had let slip in engineering.
Now I wish I can continue with both-both were sorely missed and desperately required.
Ah life!

My celestial constant

Living in the hostel is an experience everyone should have. It's like a kiln one needed to finally go through before one's true strengths come forth. I can gas around on hostels for quite a bit-I hate most of it!

The inspiration behind this particular post is my realisation that I have little in common with my earlier life(read: pre-jamshedpur). It almost seems like a previous birth sometimes. Nothing is the same, not even me. or wait. I think it should be-most of all, me.
So the other night I was walking back from the mess and I looked up at the sky. I don't remember why I looked up, was it the moon, was it exasperation, was it a kink in my neck, was it a desire to knock at heaven's door, I don't remember. but I looked and I saw. In that moment of isolation, I saw my oldest companion-the only constellation I can always track and one I always look for-the Orion.
It must've been class 3 or 4when I first learnt of the Orion. since then, whenever I could I've always looked up to find it and it's a relief that it's still there! But that day it spoke back to me.
for most people there isn't much that objects communicate. I somehow perceive it differently. there are bonds one can share with every thing-it doesn't have to be a breathing, talking flesh and blood. and once you believe, you'd know what I am talking about.
I miss myself terribly on some days. on some days I am complacent about this change. my glimpse at the Orion that day just made dealing with complacency easier. It was almost as if it said to me that it'll always be there-a constant in this changing life. A constant companion that would travel with me where ever i went and one who'd never ever change. most of all when i did.
can't say that about anything else now, can I?

MAXI

I'm feeling all soppy about MAXI tonight. I don't know why but all day today I was getting all sentimental about the nice bunch of people who i met thanks to Maxi.

Just in case you are wondering what MAXI is, it stands for MARKETING ASSOCIATION AT XLRI. I happen to be a junior executive member and mighty proud of it!

I was relating to my mother over lunch just how supportive each of my seniors had been and how I probably had never thanked them for it. Thanks guys! I know most of you won't ever see this, but thanks for standing by me during the nightmare called SIP and more.

It is also a matter of great personal pride for your's truly to be on Xl's website. Here it is. And another(my personal work!)

This is to MAXI. Of today. Of yesterday. Of tomorrow.

dedicated to term II

this slightly tilted drawing is dedicated to the endless economic classes of term II that taught me as much economics as it made me sleep n draw :D

what if...

so last night i was tired and not so tired. while i lay contemplating ways of putting myself to sleep, a thought crossed my mind. what if king kong could talk back?
for the last 17years king kong has borne every antic of mine. he knows every secret, every good thing, every evil thing i've thought n done, every crush i had, every time i nursed a broken heart and much much more. lately he's also a good pillow and a substitute for a nice warm hug.
as it happens, last night i wondered what king kong would say to me if he could talk back. would he admonish me for being like me? would he express his anger at being treated like pillow? would he be all nice and tell me what exactly was the cause of all those salty tears that he so diligently absorbed?
i don't know. somehow the more i think the worse options i come up with. and all bad things he could do-shout, scream, gossip and more. isn't it surprising that i can not think of one good thing a mute secret keeper would do?
the world's cynicism is hitting me after all. my best buddy is also a potential "wikileak". lame joke. sorry :P
oh btw the snap below is the first documented proof of king kong...year 1993...month unknown. somewhere between mar-aug