Much ado about...

Regular readers of this blog (I am still hopeful!) are aware of the entire brouhaha about "The play that never was" which happened last Wednesday. Irregular readers or those who don't know what I am talking about should read the previous post just below this before they come back to read the rest of this one.

Now that Wednesday March 25th was approaching, I was looking forward to watch the play more than ever before. Further news items in newspapers and on the radio, talking about the play and how its special edition was going to be a special show, kept on adding to the anticipation throughout the week.

And then it was that I received this mail from my boss asking me to arrange a mock session for some presentation on some product that we are launching. And before you say you guessed it, let me still have the satisfaction of telling you that the mail mentioned Wednesday March 25th as one of the dates on which the sessions would take place and before you jump the gun and take away from me my thunder, let me also tell you that the timings for the session were just right, starting about an hour before the show started and ending at least an hour after the show could have ended.

So it was that with a heavy heart, I drew the schedule and sent it to all concerned. I was still ruminating on the lost opportunity and trying to console the inconsolable Jassi when I was given a real bad look by one of the other concerned. He also happened to have planned for the show...with his wife...having bought tickets worth Rs 1000 each...twice of what we paid, btw.

In spite of all the bad looks and all the inability of being consoled, nothing could have been changed, more so when there was a mail from the boss again the next day, asking people to stay back for the entire session irrespective of whether they were directly involved in it or not. You couldn't have played around with something as direct as that, could you (we did try doing some re-scheduling earlier when certain things would have freed us up on time for the show)?

It was not to be and it was not. We sat through the entire mock session, I trying to forget everything by concentrating on watching the presentation getting murdered in some mock sessions and added on to in others, others shifting from being interested to being hung over, all this within less than a few minutes.

And then the torture ended and we were out on the streets to get back to home and that is exactly when the show broke as well. As Jassi put it very nicely, "not only did we not get to see the show, but we also got to get stuck in the traffic because of it".

PS: We managed to sell the tickets in time, and the person we sold to had a really nice time...really nice...really nice (yes, she did it, repeated it thrice).

The night when I was almost a hostage

This is going to be one long post!

Even as I write this, two floors of the Oberoi Hotel Towers are on fire and explosions follow gunshots in what can perhaps be a final assault by the security forces aimed at flushing out terrorists holed up inside the Trident-Oberoi hotels and probably holding hundreds of people hostage.

As is a usual pattern now, I was in office last night with three other colleagues of mine, working on an important client presentation to have happened today and watching the fifth one-day cricket match between India and England. As we were celebrating yet another Indian victory and watching the post match presentation ceremony, Nitin got a call from his father asking him to take care while returning home as news channels started carrying the first reports of indiscriminate firing at the Mumbai CST railway station.

We were just debating if we should switch channels and watch some news when Ashish heard some shouting outside. As we ran towards the windows of our 9th floor office, we could clearly hear sounds of gunfire and see sparks flying in the building right across the road. This building opposite our office building is, of course, the now immensely-in-news Oberoi Hotel. It was immensely confusing as people started calling us talking about firing and bomb explosions in other parts of South Bombay while we, a bit ahead of the news, were experiencing something ourselves.

It was just a matter of time when we could see smoke rising through the hotel building, and filling the rooms overlooking our building. We watched in alarm as people broke open the window glass and were hanging out the window ledge in an attempt to escape the black smoke that could be seen enveloping the entire building. There were some people who broke these windows in panic and there were others (like the one I saw) very calmly going about his business of talking on the phone as he picked up a chair and struck the window pane with it. I might just have seen a terrorist!!!

As events started unfolding at a furious pace one after the other, the exclamations only grew louder. As we watched with open mouths, we heard an immensely loud sound and our building shook. Scared for our lives, concern fuelled a little more by the now-panicky voice of Ashish, the four of us (I, Ashish, Nitin, and Sameer) rushed to the first floor of our building just in case we had to move out of the building in a hurry. On our way down, we saw some people sitting in the lobby of Kotak Investment Bank watching the news with as much interest and concern as was almost flowing through our veins.

As we reached the first floor and were peering through the window on the side overlooking Oberoi's, we started receiving calls from everyone from family members to colleagues to the senior most of management (what with Ashish being very senior in the company, of course) as the news finally broke on news channels.

Mumbai was under siege as terrorists attacked some 12 centres, mostly in and around South Bombay. There was indiscriminate firing, and along with it numerous bomb and grenade explosions that rocked the city, killing and maiming people and the entire Government machinery.

I know that I should be probably ashamed of myself but I was actually enjoying the entire event, revelling in the undercurrents of uncertainty, fear, and unpredictability. The scene was no different for the others as all of us switched between watching the TV and looking across the road peering out of tinted glass windows and finally, having a laugh at how outdated the news channels were. As people hung out at window ledges, using white clothes as distress signals, some channel carried a report branding them as terrorists. Pray, why will terrorists hang out of window ledges carrying white distress signals?

As night progressed, police forces enveloped the hotel, spreading across the entire area and cordoning off all nearby buildings including ours. The army moved in at about 3 in the night but nothing was really happening except the incessant firing and occasional explosions that we could prominently hear. Our hunger satisfied by raiding the office canteen, we sat around, resigned to our fate but just as one of us dozed off looking at the same video footage repeated multiple times, we were disturbed by yet another round of firing or yet another explosion.

Things were fast getting out of control and all the fun and excitement had given way to this nagging fear at the back of our minds. Some of the guys went into a panic mode and that was not helping either. I could almost feel my feet shaking every time I went into the room facing the Oberoi's. On one of these visits to check the situation outside, I could see someone strolling on the ledge on the topmost floor, carrying something that appeared like a torch (and perhaps a gun as well). On another, I could see (or imagine?) snipers hiding in the NCPA building alongside. As day broke, we thought it was probably just the tail lights of cars reflecting in the darkness but as per latest reports, snipers actually opened fire on the Oberoi's and guess what, they were firing from the NCPA.

The whole night had passed and the terrorists were still there holding up and the army all across, trying to get in the building in the best possible manner. In the early morning light, things were only prophesising the doom to follow. As we came down to talk to the security guards of our buildings, we could see the army guys in the compound and the entire area seemed to have been converted into a military cantonment. As we asked permission to leave, we were not prepared in the least for the way we would be led out of the back door and allowed to leave.

Sunil, my driver, after having spent the entire night on the streets on the Marine Drive in the middle of action had managed to get the car out by that time. As we rushed out to join him and started getting as far as possible from the site, he recounted his story of how a grenade exploded right in front of him, shaking the cars around, including the one he was sitting in. Dropping Nitin and Sameer en route, I was just wondering if things could very well have been closer and how God was kind to spare me the agony that so many others faced.

Three images will always remain in my memory reminding me of the night when I was almost a hostage, one of that guy breaking the Oberoi's window pane so coldly, the other of the guy strolling on the top floor window ledge and the third of people waving white flags in exasperation, piteously asking for help. God has been kind, may He bless all those affected by this tragedy and those who caused it.

Professional Entrepreneurism

One of the activities that I have been involved in recently as a part of my work involves a major shift in strategy for the business that my company deals in. Although it is interesting to see how new things are unfolding and how life is going to change for all stakeholders of this new business sooner or later, what is more interesting is to observe the sheer inertia that governs the lives of people in any business. The resistance to change, in whatever format the change may be is so strong that it is difficult to envisage, forget execute something drastically different from what is already present.

This becomes all the more difficult for an organization that is process driven like the one that I was working for prior to my MBA. In such an organization, the resistance part probably comes in much later and it is actually the fact that everyone is so used to blindly following existing processes that creates the hurdle. This is where you need the element of entrepreneurship to get out of this situation and give a good shake-up to the existing setup.

Having said that, if you look at organizations that are truly entrepreneurial in nature, it still does not solve the problem at hand. This is where resistance to change comes in not because the process of doing things in a certain way is very well defined but because defining any process, even if it is another process to substitute the current one or even the process of change, is the difficult thing in its own right. The lack of processes and professionalism makes the task of change or setting up a new process appear insurmountable.

So what, you ask, is the solution? Professional entrepreneurism is the answer that the Vice Chairman of my company provides. He is bang on target as far as spelling the need for this attribute is concerned, whether that attribute is already there in his (and my) organization may be something completely different altogether. Not getting into anything politically complicated, let me just concentrate on this phrase that caught on with me during last evening's webcast organized post the quarterly results of the company.

The phrase Professional entrepreneurism is amazingly self-explanatory and simple but achieving this is equally difficult. In fact, I believe that an individual at his/her own level can never be a professional entrepreneur, he/she can either be professional or an entrepreneur. It is not that individuals do not understand the need for being both but it is right there in our internal psyche to take that much amount of risk, to attribute that much importance to going ahead at any cost, to be that much driven by routine and to be that much guided by gut or by science.

The point that I am trying to make here is that though individually very few of us (oh yes, there are exceptions that prove the rule!) are able to act professionally and yet be entrepreneurial in our beliefs and thoughts, it is with a higher degree of probability that this can be achieved collectively. The thought processes and actions that an organization is capable of getting into are very much different from what an individual can ever hope of achieving. Application of cold objectivity and rationalization comes much more easily to an organization than to an individual. An organization may decide to be nimble on its feet through the very nature of its non-maneuverability...as a firm, you can be rigid about being flexible and no one can question you on that.

This means that the answer does not lie in trying to change the employee into a professional entrepreneur but in making the organizational fabric very professional and very entrepreneurial. This can be done by making sure that there is a basic set of beliefs or guidelines that need to be followed whenever anything is to be done but these are just that, beliefs and guidelines, nothing very specific that can kill the thought process. There should be guidelines for everything, even to change guidelines but never any process that is deep frozen and does not provide any room to go out of the box. Personally, I don't know how much of it is easier said than done but what I am sure of is that the way to do it is only by attacking the collective core and that there is no way that you can change the basic human psyche and the way human mind is conditioned to think.

A new update from a new city

There has been a lot happening around me that I should have written about but I guess I have been just plain lazy. It is difficult to put pen to paper, or finger to key when you are engrossed with so much else that is going on in your life.

For starters, it has been nearly two weeks since I have permanently moved to Mumbai. As if that was not an event enough, I decided to follow it up with changing my role from that of a Relationship Manager for High Net Worth Clients, who I used to advise on their investments. Going forward, I shall not be doing anything of the sort. Instead, I am supposedly going to be working with the business head of he wealth management unit of my company.

The work that I need to do, however, is not really very well-defined. Even though I am supposedly going to be involved in the overall strategy of the firm, as per the job description doled out to me, I always believed that I will be required to work as a floater. Having come here and spent more than just a couple of late nights in office, I think I can say with fair bit of certainty that my job details are pretty uncertain.

Right from trying to improve productivity in a tough year, to working towards some new businesses that the firm is launching, to some very mundane stuff like preparing excel formats for various purposes, there is quite a bit of variety in life. The good thing about this variety is that it keeps me on my toes almost all the time and that I do not get those pangs of boredom that I was so susceptible to, in my previous role which offered me the luxury to relax and not do anything, every now and then.

The bad thing about this job, however, is that it takes me far away from much of human contact. Since this is more of a brains rather than mouth kind of a job, I do not get to interact too much with people, either internal or external, which is something I had not anticipated or factored in and therefore, terribly miss. The change of location has not helped, either, since it is now a new set of people at work with whom I can't even have cordial, meaningless, unrelated-to-work banter without some amount of effort.

Since it has always been difficult for me to put in that effort, I , more often than not, remain at my desk, at times doing something I am engrossed in and at others, just plainly gazing across the window towards the sea, whose view my seat so graciously provides.

It has been just a few days here, and there are so many things that one still needs to understand about the job and people here that it is quite unnerving at times. But herein lies the opportunity, and I am sure of it, to shape a career. It will be left, however, completely to my own resourcefulness and ingenuity to identify and capitalize on the opportunities before they get out of my grasp.

Amongst other stuff, I visited Singapore with my family (parents and sister) on my first offshore trip paid by my own money. The experience was very nice, and doubly so because I had the good fortune of being able to enjoy the company of my family on this vacation. Following it up was this felicitation in Goa organized by the company for some top performers in a certain category. I took Papa along but had not really anticipated how much he will like it and neither did I anticipate the positive feedback that I received from peers and colleagues who liked the novelty behind the idea of taking your parent along to a place like Goa. Novelty? Coming from a culture as rooted to the family concept as India's, that did come in as a surprise factor.

Well, I have finally moved in to a well built and well provided for place that I can call home for the time being. This place is in Santa Cruz, a 2 BHK, furnished house where I have moved in with Priya, my sister. It is still early days and even my stuff has not reached me from Delhi but first impressions seem quite favorable as the house is fast on its way to being called home.

Outclassed, outperformed, and outplayed

Gaurav XI 168/9 (Anas 47*) beat Kotak Wealth 90 (Manmohan 13)

Inspired by a relatively superlative performance by a couple of players, Gaurav XI rode all the way to the lunch table in style, and in the process, comprehensively beat Kotak Wealth by 78 runs.

In what promised to be a warm and sunny debut match for most of their players, Kotak Wealth suffered the ignominy of one of the most disappointing defeats that a 20 over match could have seen. Muffing up a run-chase on a pitch posing no real worries and much before that, giving away one-too-many extras for a chaseable target, things could certainly have been better.

The toss was, in fact, a good omen for Kotak Wealth as the not-one-of-the-fittest-teams got to choose what they wanted to do and not surprisingly, they chose not to field in the wee hours of the afternoon and instead use the tiring opposition in the hot and humid conditions of the noon to meet whatever target was posed to them. At Modern School Vasant Vihar grounds, a relatively wet, green top in the morning which dried up into a relatively batter-friendly track with the day's passing meant that the decision to field first had all the promise of turning out to be the right one, for more reasons than one.

In retrospect, too, it wasn't as one-sided a contest as the scorecard suggests, at least not in the first half when some good ground fielding by Suveer and company and one particular blinder of a catch by Mukund had the batting team struggling to convert their ones into twos and twos into threes. Even the initial damage done by the 23 run spectra wide over by Nishith and some more off-the-track efforts by Mohit and Shankar seemed to have been redeemed by some fantastic run with the ball from Gaurav Bhalla and to some extent, Saket's first spell.

Wickets were falling at regular intervals and the run rate had come down from a disturbing 12 an over till the 3rd over to a more manageable 7 per over in the 11th. That was when Amas came on to bat and things started changing for Kotak Wealth. With a string of boundaries getting unwound from the 12th over (2 in Saket's and 3 in Mohit's next), matters started looking ominous. Even Gaurav Bhalla, easily the pick of Kotak Wealth's bowlers, could not do much in his return spell, except maintain a tight leash on the run rate with his good line bowling.

Coming into the bowling attack by starting with almost a wicket maiden, Saket came in for quite a hitting when he replaced Bhalla after his 4th and last over. Before Saket could take his revenge in getting the batsman bowled, he had been hit for two sixes and a boundary, and sounds of the lid thudding onto the Kotak Wealth team's coffin could already be heard.

The pair on crease did much to raise Gaurav XI's score from what was looking like a 125 kind-of-a-score by the middle of the innings to well over 150. Amas with his fantastic stroke selection and some really clean hits was, beyond doubt, the best of the batsmen and it was actually a pity that he remained unbeaten on 47 and could not complete his half century. Last 5 overs going for 60 runs was an indicator not just of the supreme ease with which Amas and company could see, hit, time, and place the ball but also spoke a lot about the ease with which the wicket was playing now.

Kotak Wealth team was upbeat even after the beating in the final few overs and though there was that uneasiness over some 30 odd runs that could have been removed from the opposition's score, things did not look that gloomy and as Sunit said, it was all a question of the ball finding the bat and the rest will follow.

What turned out to be not so prophetic was the fact that the ball did only that, find the bat and there was fairly little that the bat could do from there on. With a good line and length maintained by the opening bowlers and the number of extras not really overshadowing everything else, it was left to Kotak Wealth's batsmen to make a match of it. They had to work hard for their runs and except a few good hits by Manmohan Tiwari (who, incidentally, was given the signal to bat after much discussion and dispute) and later by Nishith, Shankar, and Bhalla fighting for a lost cause, there was hardly any application seen by the rest of the batsmen.

Adding to the misery was the absolute lack of match fitness and practice of many players that resulted in a number of unfortunate mix ups on the pitch, getting as many as 3 run out decisions for the fielding side. With a salvageable midway score of 53/5 as against the opposition's 73/3, Kotak Wealth slumped to 90 all out in the 17th over. A bunch of tired and despondent cricketers were back to the pavilion with the promise of more regular practice and game sessions before asking for a re-match. Analysis of the scores and the game may continue for another day or two but whether it actually results in the team getting fitter, leaner, and more competitive, remains a thing to be seen.

Bowling Analysis for Kotak Wealth:

Gaurav Bhalla: 4-0-11-1 (02.75 runs per over)
Saket Khosla  : 4-0-34-2 (08.50 runs per over)
Mohit Sharma : 4-0-35-3 (08.75 runs per over)
Suveer Modi   : 1-0-10-0 (10.00 runs per over)
Nishith Kumar : 4-0-44-3 (11.00 runs per over)
Shankar Saini : 3-0-34-0 (11.33 runs per over)

Batting Analysis for Kotak Wealth:

Kapil Manchanda : 09 (caught in the deep)
Rahul Sharma     : 05 (LBW to yorker length ball)
Suveer Modi       : 04 (clean bowled)
Mohit Sharma     : 02 (clean bowled)
Manmohan Tiwari: 13 (run out after no reply from Sunit)
Sunit Jain           : 07 (runner Saket run out, taking a cheeky one)
Mukund Raichur  : 02 (caught in the covers)
Saket Khosla      : 03 (went to a brilliant catch in the slips)
Nishith Kumar     : 08 (run out after no reply from Bhalla)
Gaurav Bhalla     : 02 (caught behind)
Shankar Saini     : 10 (not out)

On a fine Delhi morning

It has been ages since I worte my last real post on Mode C and the blog, I though, was as good as dead. But then again, as Pavan says he keeps hoping for, the suppressed finds utterance yet again and here I am, typing away on this keyboard of mine. It is a great morning in Delhi with just the right amount of chill, just the right amount of visibility or the lack of it, just the right amount of traffic and of course just the right kind of songs playing on the car radio.

The car radio mention, of course, was an announcement for all those who are not too dumb to realize that I have got a car now...nothing flashy as of now, just a simple, non-expensive, fuel efficient, with a good resale value Maruti Alto (the one with the Let's Go ads on TV and radio, if you are one of those who remember them and not the real thing).

Amongst other things, I am not married yet and despite the good intentions of all those who have been asking me about the probable time period for reversal of my marital status' amplitude's magnitude, anything less than 3 years does not do justice to the charts.

I still come to office everyday, work reasonably hard but unfortunately, have been hard pressed to show any results so far. With the batch of 2006 at Kotak Wealth now kicking in with their numbers, I am still short on results, despite the efforts being there. Stretched targets (missed by miles last month and increased even more this month) are not helping either. But then, that is a lot of crib and will pass with time, as it has always done.

Life, otherwise, is cruising along just fine and even though personal life is not too happening (as usual :-)). A good circle of friends helps, of course. With Nishith (from IIML), Himadri (from IIMC and ICICI), Kushagra (from IIMC), JC (from Fore and a lot of places), Nasir (from Cardiff and StanChart), and Manpreet (from IMI and Indiabulls), time has no reasons not to fly when we want it to. It is just that I keep losing touch with my past so quickly that I get scared at times. It was Loyola, DPS, and IT earlier, but Infosys and IIMK have been added to the list so fast that it is simply frightening. It is not that I do not make friends at these places or that I am identified as a recluse when I am at the campuses mentioned above but once I am out, I am out, literally.

I don't know if it is the same for everyone and if everyone is able to keep in touch with just a couple of friends each from the different place that one has been associated with in the past, but it has been so in my case. So much so, in fact, that I am seriously thinking about the root cause of it all, not that I am bothered to do anything about it but am just curious.

Continuing from where I left!

The journey never seems to stop but there are so many stoppages en route that at times, it becomes very difficult to maintain the same continuity from one destination to other. While there was a time when I used to think, write, and act in a routine manner, life currently has stopped giving me the same privileges. It has become increasingly difficult to really reflect about anything. Memory seems to have lost the knack of keeping things in limbo for at least as long as there is time to analyze them for whatever physiological gains one might think of.

In fact, even the previous blog post that I wrote here seems so very jarring as I go through it, now that I am writing this one. A clear case of trying to re-create a broken habit is very much evident. The spelling and grammar notwithstanding, even the flow is not the same. The same looks so true of life for me, currently. Full of meeting people, trying to profile the huge number of HNIs in Delhi to scope out further meetings, following up on whatever was discussed in the meeting, a different sort of coninuum is setting in.

Classes on campus, even seminars like the one going on at IIMK right now (http://www.aims-iimk.com), were a part of life not so long ago, a different flow that used to be much more juicy (at least for some readers of this blog). It is not to say that there is no juice in office but as is obvious, any mention of that on such a public forum and I will just be repeating past mistakes, and probably paying a much heavier fine than what I got away with earlier. Adding to the present and the immediate past, there was a different aroma of a little more distant past, that I realized so pleasantly a few days ago.

As I made a business visit to my school, DPS RK Puram, there couldn't have been a more amazed and incredulously happy boy in that school on that day. In fact, the two colleagues of mine who accompanied me on the visit were silently smiling at my antics. I made them go all over the place, trying to visit the places that used to be so dear at one point in time, so very taken for granted in the continuity of life at that instant, that their importance was never so apparent. But this day was different, was in a present so different from that past. The playground, the classrooms, the hostels, even the principal's office brought back so much and so well. I was oh-so-nostalgic that day.

Amongst other stuff, life has been kind to me. There have been things at workplace that have been lucky breaks, to say the least. Right from appreciation for jobs done, to actual probabilities of finally getting along with what I am supposed to do, life seems to be back on tracks, at least the professional aspects of it. Personally, things seem to be at a standstill and probably, they will remain so for quite some time...but more on that a little later.

My experiments with truth

More than the truth, I would say that these experiments were an indicator to where I stood as far as my job is concerned. Having worked for two years before joining work, it seemed like just an extension of the office culture I already had an experience of...till this date. Cold calling was what proved me wrong and resulted in my coming to the realization that thigns are not hunky dory as they used to seem to be. The prior work experience that I have is to no stead as far as my current job profile goes.

This does not mean for even a moment that I am cribbing about my job profile. In fact, I am probably one of the happiest people from my institute who got what they really wanted. Starting with a sales profile, my job promises to develop into a hardcore marketing thing and finally evolve into some heavy finance fundas. The best part is that I do all this with an eye on my own bottom line alone with no one to really hang the sword at my neck, except my own targets and my own bonus expectations.

At the same time, however, sales start with cold calling and after delaying the inevitable for many days, I finally gave myself a break and jumped headlong into the stuff. And what a jump it was! With responses ranging from "You are bothering us for nothing" to "I have had it, that's enough", it has all been a joy ride so far. There will be people, I am sure, who will listen to a line that is well past the second line of my script but that there are people like these, I have no proof of.

Things had been looking up, otherwise till today as I have been able to dig up a sort of HNI database for myself and have been to some meetings with a touch more of confidence that I used to have earlier during the first of my meetings. People at work have also proved to be quite a team with the initial formation taking no time at all...still waiting for the norming and the storming.

On a personal front, it has been all great going as I went to Bharat Bhaiya's place for birthday celebrations of Bade Papa and Bhabhi's father this Sunday. There is a lot to catch up with as far as movies are concerned and having a football crazy flat mate like Niranjan does not help one bit. Now that another flat mate in the form of Ashu has moved in (complete with the cooler and fridge), I have better hopes of catching a number of movies that will be higher than what I can necessarily consider to be the cause of my demise.

My home (would love to call and treat it as home instead of just a house) at IP Extension is pretty nice, too and has given no cause of complaints so far except exhorbitant charges for housekeeping, washing clothes, et al. Photographs of the place, especially the view from the balcony will follow in the next post. Till then, ciao!

Finally, an update

So many things have happened since the last time I wrote a really long post that I have completely lost count of what I have shared with my blog and what I haven't. Probably, it is quite as well that ways, too primarily because it reduces the strain on me of trying to bring the blog up to date. So, instead of boring whoever still checks this place out with the history that included an amazing Backwaters 2006, a great farewell party, some rocking campus placement stories (and some not-so-rocking ones), tales of my roaming all over India for a month and half, and of course, the two months I stayed at home, doing nothing but lazing around, I will come straight to the point, that is the present.

When I say present, however, it does not mean present as present with respect to the current day, but more like the events that are closely related to what I am doing as on this day today. It all started, obviously with my touching base in Bombay (I can not make myself call it Mumbai, as well, just like some other bloggers I have seen mentioning this city in their blogs) and moving into torrential rains of the city airport on board a much delayed flight.

Seven odd days of staying at the four star Ritz (the service was pretty decent but the place reeked of the past, certainly not chic and modern enough for the current times, I felt) and five odd days of attending induction programmes at World Trade Center with a bunch of intelligent, smart, and fun-filled people was what followed next. Life was good as we attended the lectures the whole day and I chilled out with my sister, Priya in the evenings. Priya's journey over the past two weeks has been eventful, as well, right from kicking at a secure job at LifeStyle just because she did not like her role (how can anyone do that to one's first job?), and then struggling with attempts at getting a new job for all of one day till she landed a plum post and salary at Shopper's Stop.

Filled with the Gyan of the different financial product sessions, we were soon sent for practical sessions with the product teams, which was pretty much good fun, if not great learning in the real sense. Whatever it was, it was supposed to get us ready for our jobs as I moved into Delhi with Nishith on my birthday and joined office on the same day. Yes, the day I really joined my job was my birthday (speaks a lot about fate indicating to make this company and job last at least a while for me).

I did have quite a nice birthday celebration of sorts when I went to Bharat Bhaiya's place and there on to Shalini Bhabhi's, who incidentally was born on the same day, month and year that I was (I still maintain that I am younger by a few hours, though). I also received indicators of things to come as on the first day of office, I saw people playing golf in the office (of all places!). Now that it has been nearly two weeks since I joined and the boss has returned from his sick leave and the golfstick has lost its putt, and I have been given my first targets, things are not the same but that is a different story altogether.

As things stand now, I am having a lot of problems commuting to and fro the office. The fact that I have got a place in Gazipur (the one in Delhi, not the one in UP but still seems just as far) coupled with the one that Jerin has been held up from sending my bike here because of an accident he had (poor chap!), makes life all the more difficult, not to mention the crazy trafic snarl-ups that happen on the highway and the alternate approach road to my residence. However, life is not all complaints as the house is really good and the society even better. More over, I am set to meet all my realtives (especially my dear cousins) pretty soon as next week is the marriage of Raja Bhaiya, my Bua's son. A lot to look forward to and update this place on but all that for another day, another time...

Still there

This is just to report that I am still alive and so is this blog. I will be back to regular posts pretty soon.

As of now, I am just getting inducted into Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. at Mumbai as a private banker (or a Wealth Manager, as Kotak calls the job). With the markets crashing like nine pins, it is certainly not a nice time to disturb people with queries and doubts but that's how it has been and will be for some time to come for me in this job.

More details and other stuff when I reach Delhi (where I have been posted, btw) two days later.