Random Thoughts

a visit by parents , i am sure, is uncomfortable for both the parents and the son (i dont know anything about girls. but judging from their fussy nature, i think girls would be happier than boys when their parents visit them). my parents are coming at 2 today, it is already 12, and till now i haven't even started cleaning my room. i have 4 beer bottles, 1 bottle of vodka and 40+ movie CDs in my room, and the state in which other supposedly "cleaner" things are is enough to faint my sweet mother.

so bye folks, i am off to clean my room. if i am alive in the evening after listening to the lectures of my mother, we will meet again. till then, plz wish me good luck !!!!!

either you love the 1-cr-offer guys or you hate them, but you can't ignore them. the whole country seems to be spellbound by their guts and confidence, but nobody sees the other side. yesterday i was having lunch with one of these guys. he told me that he had to go to bombay, and for the first time in the past 2 years he went to the railway station to book tickets. earlier he always used to fly, because he used to think that he would have enough to spend when he would get a job. but now his savings have all but vanished, and he is thinking of starting to give tutorials to CAT aspirants to make some money.

when you are sitting in front of a guy who you know is much smarter than you and could have made more money in one year than what you can only dream of, these words make you nervous. contrary to popular belief, they are having tough time persuading VCs to fund their business plan though they have got some good contacts also. he told me about a guy who passed out from our institute a few years ago and refused a lucrative international job offer to start a school. that guy used to say that if he could have collected 1 Re. from each and every person who took his interview, he could have got enough money to start not one but several schools. but in reality, nobody gave him a single paisa.

it takes guts to start a venture in these circumstances. people like to portray IIM guys as epitomes of brain-washed indians spoilt by money, but these examples show why they (or rather, some of them) get so much money. if you ask me, these guys deserve every pence of the offer that they got. and as i said him, i sincerely wish that i again see their names and faces in the newspapers a few years later.

having experience of different cultures can broaden your intellectual horizon, it is usually said. i used to believe it, up until a few hours ago. now i am all the more sure of it. i was having a lunchtime discussion with one of my friends today. he had gone to Sweden on exchange program. we were discussing the tax rates in different countries and i was cribbing about the 40% tax levied in UK. my friend said, in consolation, that in Scandinavia 48% is the minimum tax slab which can go as high as 70%. however, one good thing is that you get paid even if you dont work.

Why work at all then, we wondered.

and then he told me about a theory that he and his French boss had developed while he was working as as intern in a Swedish company. The reason Sweden is still a socialist country and not a capitalist one is that those bloody guys have everything. they have pigs to eat, booze to drink, and women (my friend considers Swedish women just slightly short of Greek Goddesses) to have fun with. why go to work when you can have fun all day long at your home? :) now i sincerely wish my next posting is in Sweden, Norway or Denmark, and i am still unmarried by that time. :)

it is one thing to get rich. even an illiterate politician does that. it is quite different to achieve greatness while doing that. today i watched the movie - pursuit of happyness. i couldn't help myself getting awed by Chris Gardner's determination. imagine a 30-yr single father taking his son daily from one homeless shelter to another, selling his blood to buy food while working in a firm where everybody is dressed in suits and most own Ferraris. most of the people will just jump in front of a moving train to end their misery. some, like Chris, will fight it. in words of 50 cent (american rapper, actual name Kurtis James Jackson III), they will either get rich or die trying. Chris fought to get on top of the firm, left it to open his own company, and sold a minority stake in 2006 for many millions of dollars.

i dont claim to have worked as hard as him, i leave it to others to decide. but yes, i also have had my own share of ups and downs. i spent my childhood at a place where english was considered an alien language. in my school all subjects were taught in hindi, and i still remember the day when i first picked up an english magazine and had 25 words in a single page which i didn't know anything about. in college, doing experiments meant giving 50 bucks to chaprasi to increase marks in the register. i didn't do any experiments in class XII for the simple reason that in government colleges of bihar, professors never come to class. and at those rare times when they do come and open the laboratory, no experiments are done because chemicals are not available. in engineering college, people used to mock me (in first year at least) because i came from a small city. fast forward the movie 5 years, and i was the last one to get summer internship. i had to walk 2 kms every day in the month of may in Delhi to the nearest metro station. my shirt used to get drenched with sweat, and since that was the only shirt i had i used to wash it every day in the night and then used to leave it to get dried so that i could wear it again next morning. i have slogged through the past two years, and have flipped pages of books in platforms of all major european cities, like Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome and Paris. imagine reading a 400-page thick book while standing in 100-strong queue outside Eiffel Tower. I have done that.

and today, i feel on top of the world. but it is not because of money. i feel proud because i have seen an investment bank's vice president calling me as the best mathematical brain on campus. i feel proud because i wasn't invited for a single interview last year and this time had 2 (well, almost 3) offers. i feel proud because i had the guts to go to an invesment bank's people and tell them that i didn't find their offer attractive enough. and i feel proud because i have seen that bank's biggest indian authority standing before me and pleading me to come to his firm.

the small boy has just found a treasure which will buy him a big castle one day. it will be filled with toys, and his sweetheart will not even look at others. it will be far, far away from all the bad things of the world. and that castle will be big enough for all his family members. this small boy has built many castles and has seen them getting destroyed by the cruel waves of the river. finally, a new morning has come. the sun has risen up in the sky, and this small boy has everything in this whole damn world.

please forgive me if you dont find my posts in the order in which events have happened. I am writing today in the order in which I am recalling events, and there may not be any apparent logical order.

So finally i got a job. after 21 years of hard work, giving 500+ examinations which included two of the toughest ones in India, burning many mid - night lamps (and sleeping halfway through most of them), enduring both praise and sarcasm (the latter much more than the former), finally i have ended my academic life on a good note. i will do Ph.D. a few years later, but for the forseeable future i do plan to get myself busy in the corporate world. I will be shifting to london a few months later. if things dont go bad, i really don't have any plans to come back to india. i might go to singapore (because they charge only 15% tax when compared to 40% in london), but that is the closest i want to get to india.

but coming back to the point, i really find these days very strange. I am the type of guy who feels good about keeping busy all day long, and i really find it very strange when i have absolutely nothing to do. and absolutely nothing means absolutely nothing. today i got up in the morning at 10, had breakfast, checked mails, and went to sleep once again since i had absolutely nothing to do.

apparently there are others also who are suffering from the same problem. i went to the mess in the morning. there i met my friend who was cribbing that even after getting a job he was too busy to find any time for himself. after probing furthur, he told me about his schedule - taking breakfast, watching movie, seeing off his friend, watching movie once again, sleeping after lunch, and playing corridor cricket in the evening. busy guy !!!

one by one, all my friends are leaving. though promising that they will meet at the time of convocation, they know as well as I do that on that particular day, we will rarely have time from our family members. I dont make friends very easily, and that's why I feel hurt when somebody very close to me leaves.

a few days ago, Anil left for Germany. i still remember that evening, when I was carrying his suitcase to campus gate, and we were still cracking jokes as if nothing was going to happen. he sat into the auto, we both waved our last goodbyes to each other, and then, suddenly, the true enormity of the event struck me. he was the only one i used to talk to for the past three months. how can you forget a guy who treats you like his own brother?

and tomorrow in the morning Adrish is leaving. today we had a good chat about our exchange days, his girlfriend, Slovania, and all the other things. soon he will be gone, we will talk once or twice to each other, will meet even less often, and soon we both will become just like another one of "good" acquaintances to each other. this is what happens when you close your eyes and pursue money with single - minded devotion. Adrish told me that he knew he was going to earn more money than he could ever imagine spending, but what he forgot to add was that he would be forced to spend that money among strangers who would care nothing as to how he felt about his Slovanian girl or how he thought he was going to do at times of recession. I hope to catch him while he would be in london a few months later, but i am not sure.

when we were leaving Germany, our Slovanian friend told with bloodshot eyes filled with tears - I dont like farewells.