Day 218: 7th Feb, 2010

After quite some time I donated blood. Thanks to the camp organised by Bhavishya. Got three punctures on my body, two attempts in vain as they tried to find my vein. Third time lucky when they tried to find one access point on my left arm. Pachpan's case was funnier. They found a vein on his right arm and inserted the needle. 1 min gone.. 2 min gone.. 5 min gone.. but no blood came out! :D . Then finally they shifted to his left arm for some success :-p

As part of our HRM submission, each group needs to read and summarise 15 journal articles on any one topic. I was alloted 3 articles from my group. Mahnnn.. I have no clue how people write such stuff! I was boreddddd to death (well, almost) reading one article. God knows how I am going to complete the other two.

It's almost 5. Were to have a brief INDEX meet at 2 .. for around 15-20 min. Turned out to be anything but that.. was the longest INDEX meet we ever had yet.. def a meeting to remember..

Day 217: 6th Feb, 2010

Boy, as I write this, my alarms to wake me up are going off :D . God knows why I set alarms at 6 am.. (Does it matter that I had a small nap from midnight to 4 am ;-) :-p )

As I spoke about the MIS class incident two days back, turns out the prof eventually asked the poor fellow to say sorry in front of the class. I don't think it achieved anything other than satisfying his ego.

Had a lecture on BTL marketing by a couple of guys from 141 Sercon. About the increasing relevance of using non-traditional methods of marketing esp. social networking. You could get more details on the session at my friend's blog.

Had our second SPIC MACAY performance, this time by the flute maestro Pt. Rajendra Prasanna. I don't understand much about the technicalities in music, but those natural sounds are very pleasant and soothing to hear.

Deshpande, Sud and me decided to have pizzas for dinner. We were randomly calling people to check if they would join us. Aman was one such call.

In that context, the conversation should have gone as:

Aman: Hi

Me: Oyee, pizza khaega?

Aman: blah blah ..

But it went like this:

Aman: Hi, who is this?

Me: (oh! so he doesn't recognise my number) .. (tough voice) Is this Aman Arora?

Aman: (a little nervous) Yea..

Me: This is the UP state police department speaking. (!!!!!! I have no clue why I thought of that!) Do you think you can get away with anything just because you are an IIM student?

Aman: (I can feel his voice becoming more tense) Sir, what have I done?

Me: (Raising my voice) Don't try to act. We know everything.

and so on for a good one minute.. and that was because I just HAD to laugh out loudly.. so I disconnected the call :D . Of course, we did tell him who we were in the next couple of minutes :p.

Chatted along for a while waiting for the pizzas. Ghate and Yogsconnect joined in later. Dominos cheese burst is so wow! :D

Day 216: 5th Feb, 2010

There are some things that only a middle class upbringing can make you value. Like not wasting stuff. Around 10-12 days back, I thought my toothpaste tube was over and got a new one. But somehow, everyday, I have been able to squeeze enough paste from the old tube itself and am yet to open the new tube! :D

Had a marathon 3 hour MM session today, after which I finally decided to finish the session. Missed two outing invitations because of that. But I like marketing reports. Why, eh? Simple, fathom this - I had some 3.5-4 pages of text and wanted to increase it to around six. What did I do? I just inserted some nice screenshots of advertisements :D

Day 215: 4th Feb, 2010

One thing I don't like at all is when profs continue teaching beyond their stipulated lecture hours. A one-off incident is OK, but some of them do this repeatedly. Two reasons why I don't like this happening. One, I feel a prof must have the ability to time his content. And two (more importantly), we often miss breakfast or even otherwise feel hungry after a session. Students look forward to grabbing a quick bite in the 15min break, and this is not possible if a prof extends the lec by 5-7 min.

Our MIS prof today asked us to start our presentation just 5 min before the lecture was to get over. Now that is unjust on two counts - no student would be interested in our presentation and our effort just goes waste + we miss our break. Even after pointing this out, he was pretty unrelenting and asked us to give our presentation anyways. A few people walked out, and unfortunately, one person was singled out by him. Not the kind of behaviour I would expect from a prof to a post-graduate student.

Had our first INDEX KT session - started with Shady's ancient wisdom. Session surprisingly went much beyond what I thought it would. The great thing was that it ended with us managing to convince him to give us all a treat (combined with Praveen). And so off we went to Genesis, all of us on bikes. Kisaan and Pachpan managed to even pull off the stunt on the pebble-laden road. Had a fun time there. I am loving INDEX more and more as the days pass by :)

Day 214: 3rd Feb, 2010

Management is a lot about introducing efficiency to save money, time or any such resource. And this is applicable to even small actions. I personally, over this one year and especially this term, have managed to improve one small action of mine which is extremely helpful every morning. And that is drinking tea while walking :-p

Had our CFM presentation today, which wasn't much of a bother because it was decided that I wasn't the one who was going to give it. Except for a small hiccup today. It suddenly came about that the task of giving the presentation somehow fell back on me. I was giving a stock reco report in a CFM class! The less I say about the content the better (though I doubt if I can say more in the first place). I only hope the evaluation is on the communication aspect :)

Day 213: 2nd Feb, 2010

Marathon in the library. Sat from 3pm to 3am straight. Working first on the MM report - made a mental (?) mind map. ('Coz the actual one is supposed to be drawn on paper :-p) Chucked it midway to start working on the higher priority CFM report.

One would feel in this age of internet, you would find information easily. But yet, when you are looking for specific data, it just does not seem to exist!

Though this has now introduced me to some aspects of IIML infrastructure which I hadn't used before - databases. I have heard seniors/alums say IIML has a great library and I always wondered why. Now slowly I realise that we have access to a lot of proprietary databases providing a lot of data on a lot of issues. After all this description, the anticlimax is that I was still not able to find the marketing data I needed :D . But I tend to feel that it's because I am not very familiar on which databases to use :-p . Saurabh did eventually point out the way to access the stock reports required for CFM.

The special thing about today's project effort was that my group tried to do it collaboratively using Google wave. I found the use interesting though I guess there is ample scope for improvement.

Had an HRM presentation in the morning. I keep landing in situations where there is little time for the second half of members of the group. I have become quite a pro at handling such sitations and skimming through the slides quickly :D. This was followed by the CFM presentations, people are going crazy over this - one team actually turned up in business formals! ( Aman, Yogesh, Soumen!) . Yuck!

Day 212: 1st Feb, 2010

I have seen peacocks on campus before, but today, one of them came right up to the common area between our hostels. I clicked this pic from some distance.

And even as I took just one step ahead, the peacock flew a whole two floors to reach the terrace! Woah.. I had never seen a peacock fly before :D

Had our QAM quiz. A 20min quiz for a problem that could be solved in 6-7 minutes, typical BKM :D . I still bungled up with the objective function! :( . Very very silly.

As I said, huge workload in the pipeline. Got bored of the whole thing in the evening and went for an 'introspective walk' :D . Stopped by at the temple. And also bought myself a snickers bar :D . Suddenly missing the snicker bar shake @ Mocha's! [if you are in Bombay, you just CANNOT miss it! it's divine!]