Passions in life??

Hi

So, what are your passions in life?? That's the most dreaded question i face...Uhhh...well, passions in life??? 'Listening to music, reading books, and watching movies', the mundane answer loomed large before me. But am i really interested in any of the things mentioned in this prosaic answer?? Music..well, Radio Mirchi is realllly Okkk...i mean, not everyone is totally into music is it??(for u music fans out there, believe me, there are ppl like me who do exist).. Okkk...then, am i interested in movies?? Uhhh...not really..i watch only the bollywood masala, preferably SRK movies!..well, english movies used to come all dubbed in hindi, so never did prefer watching those..just stopped fancying them wen i watched jurassic park and heard 'Bhaago Bhaago, peeche badi chipkali aa rahi hain!!'

Collecting stamps, cars, football, cricket, painting, quizzing, philosophy, trekking, mountaneering, travelling, drama, dance, singing, guitar....welll, i hardly have a finger into any of these pies, so now what??? Am i a total failure??..I have no passions in life :( ..An entirely boring person?? Well, considering the fact that it leaves only books, and again, i prefer the racy Jeffery Archers, and Frederic Forsyths, to all that managerial gyan, that again leaves me with no decent mentionable passion that ll sound a mite impressive!

But well...theres hope...I do realise one thing about myself..What i do love doing is trying to be interested in all the things i ve mentioned. Maybe i m not so much into these today, but perhaps, i shall certainly develop a liking which might turn into a passion into one of these very things. The bottom line i reckon, is to try all there is in this world to try. You never know, what you might just lovvve doing and what you might have missed. So, I ve started listening to lots of music, watch lots of the arty movies (okk..i mean non srk movies) blah blah..though i havent got down to painting and collcting stamps yet, i reckon that still leaves a whole lot of things to be tried out there.

The Write Way

As a kid, we always had all those crazy ambitions. I wanted to become a doctor, well a nurse actually coz I thought their uniforms were smart!, a librarian, coz then I could sit and read all those million books, a magician coz all those tricks impressed me infinitely and finally a writer. The first few ambitions whirled away as time did, but as I read and read and read I wished, I could write atleast one thriller in my life! However that writing streak just refuses to strike me.

I thought perhaps by reading all the tomes in the world I might just manage to get inspired and write realms of meaningful jibberish. However even after sifting through several Harry Potters, Roald Dahls, Jeffery Archers, Agatha Christies my mind stubbornly refused to comply in writing that best selling thriller.


I shifted to reading Newspapers and magazines hoping to become one of those awesome columnists who make their living out of writing those crazy or thought provoking articles. Well, did I succeed there??...naaah..negative again. Now what..my literary ambitions almost died. I had to hunt for a new avenue for inspiration..BLOGOSPHERE loomed large before me as I delved into the world of blogs. There are people who metarmorphosize the most mundane into acts of supreme excitement and then there are those who go totally mushy mushy in their blogs till u wanna puke, and then there are ones, who tell u all about themselves, their make ups and break ups, and then there are the professional bloggers who write for companies, write for brands etc. There is a huge wealth of information in those blogs that I get to know about.. Anyways, I reckon, writing is an innate talent, some have it, some don’t, no matter how hard they try to write that elusive story.. . No matter which side one falls, I reckon, its worth a try..who knows, wen the write chords ll be struck finally…

Customer is king!!

Hey

Customer is king..or queen…screams every marketing book there is. Customers can just not be taken for granted. Each customer contributes to a companies revenues which makes them the goliaths that they are.

I had a really annoying experience with the new Hutch connection that I had taken up. First, my caller identification service was barred and then... so were my outgoing calls…and this after submitting my documents twice and once even in the official hutch shop! And to add to my indignation, the pesky customer care officials harped on the fact that I needed to confirm that my docs were submitted. Getting to the customer care officials was a mammoth task in itself, with the lines busy forever and then listening to them blaming the hapless me was abominable.


But then customer is king right???....Where did all that evaporate?? I m supposed to be valuable and empowered…Hutch wouldn’t like to really lose me. Keeping my faith in Kotler I spoke to a senior official who mollified me and set things in working order. Phew!! Customer is indeed King!

Goooooooooooooogle

I wonder how life would have been had google not been invented, Microsoft Office didn’t exist, Orkut hadn’t come into existence and neither had Yahoo Messenger or Google talk…Imagine doing an MBA without these!! At office it is Ctrl C and Ctrl V all through the day with me grappling with the Brilliant MS Excel..F 1 is my lifeline as I discover Data Validation, Macros, Advanced Filters, Solvers, Mathematical functions, Statistical functions and seek to complicate simple matters!

*Iwantthispresentation.ppt……….Hit GO… and voila…Google digs out all the presentations in the world for me to CCP for my classroom presentation ;-). Caution…there are always others doing the same thing in class..so have to tweak the presentations here and there. Online assignments are a pleasure to copy. All that needs to be done is to change the name of the file before submitting it! Orkutting and bitching abt lectures from one end of the wifi classroom to the other end is another good pastime.



Where is this internet age leading to?? Hasn’t it severely mutilated our ability to think?? …any damn thing that we are expected to think of is thoroughly googled and ideas sought out…Preconceived ideas mar new ones and severly narrow the realms of ones perspective. Gone are the days of the wildest of imagination.. Creativity does not stem from google..Google indeed is a powerful tool for all the information sought but at the end of the day, it ll remain information, never a new idea. An assignment at the end of the day is about new inputs, not old battered ideas. Young brains are sought at companies because they are supposedly teeming with ideas, not because they are search engines..Computers without brains are purchased for that.

The feel of the crinkly paper from the envelope with different stamps has now been replaced with impersonal emails..sadly even those have been replaced by Scraps that are for everyone to see. Now the only place where we do write is during exams..grumbling all along, how much faster typing out exam papers would have been! Now break ups, resignations, pink slips are all doled out using the ubiquitous email..a service that prevents any personal contact between the parties.. ......

Anways, I ve no time for more…I ve to check my orkut and chat with ppl I hardly talk to besides of course googling for this silly assignment that we have to submit tomorrow. Adios!!

Campus again...

Hi
Its been eons since i wrote last i reckon. Well, I ve finally crossed the portals of a B School now...a new phase, a new life, a new destiny. SIBM it will be for the next two years.

Our induction program that went on for the past two weeks has finally reached its end. Apart from the outbound program that went down really went with all of us, i suppose the rest of it was pure gyan, that we are likely to forget. But then thats what an MBA is supposed to be about like they say. But v ll find out about that in the next two years i reckon.

Its certainly awesome to get back to campus and back to the student life after the mundane and dreary routine at office, albeit a lot different from the engineering days. MBA is certainly not gonna be cake walk with all those zillion assignments to be done all at once, but it ll be a lot more interesting all the same. The nebulous haze that had enveloped me a couple of days back regd the obfuscating choice between an MS at US and MBA in here, has finally lifted now and I do think I made the right choice in sticking to my stand of not going.

The best part of campus life is obviously the people i meet. Cant have friends without studies, so will have to study as well!! Being from varied backgrounds, its a totally ballgame here than was at engineering which i daresay was a mite sheltered.

Anyways, we start classes next week onwards..Looking fwd to that now.

I ll write realms abt the last two exciting weeks, the new phase of life that i entered. But here i sign off.

Richa

Choices...contd

Let me continue with my previous theme, that of destiny and choice...

I recently read two intersting books..'Rich Dad Poor Dad'and ''The google Story'. The first book was all about choices. It talked about changing conventions, talked of getting out of the mundane existence,it juxtaposed two ways to live life...One..the risk free existence of getting a good education, getting a good job, settling down and retiring happily and option two...branching out, applying your talents and holding your own. That risk free existence holds no excitement of doing your own thing, carving a niche for yourself, essentially being job makers instead of jobseekers. Like I said earlier, it takes the guts and tenacity to go ahead and take that decision. Thats where the Google guys come in. The google guys refused to take a comfy job at Microsoft and be software geeks owned by Bill Gates, they went on and challenged the might of Microsoft in a blitzgrieg that lasted less than a decade that sent the whole world reeling under the Google revolution.

Well, I have the highest regards for all the entrepreneurs of this world who turned the spark in them into a blazing fire, as well as the ones who are stuggling to get a hold, these are the people responsible for changing the world, doing a service to the world, and most importantly doing a service to themselves.

Dream on thats the first step i reckon...but sadly apart from trying to inspire myself into doing something, I havent really found anything that I ll really wanna do heart and soul...Till then I ll dream on...he he.

You do the same.

Richa

My first blog... 'Choices'

Well, my first blog...here goes...Let me start with these words of wisdom...

"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice.
It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

We are the masters of our own fates. People who have the courage to make a choice and the intelligence to make the right one earn the right to shape their destiny"

Choices are things that we are inundated with in our lives all the time. With no options we crib, with two or more we find oursevles in a fix again. The human mind is eternally insatiable. That is where the conviction of making the choice we belive right comes in.

Our schooldays are the supposedly hunky dory times when everything is compulsary and we slog it out on social science and math alike. Then we have to start taking our paths, science or humanities or commerce, engineering or medicine or architecture or music or writing...., IT or Non IT, MBA or MS or M.Tech, India or abroad, career or marriage......It goes on and on and on.

Robert Frosts lines ring so true...
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could."

At this juncture of my life, I m standing at the precincts of SIBM to do my MBA after doing my Chemical Engineering at LIT and working in a core engineering company Thermax for the past two years. I wonder where the other roads might have led me.

Well I have made my choice.

Only time will tell
If all will be well

What really matters is the conviction
The guts, the desire, the will and the passion

There should be no looking back, no regret
For its only pain that you ll get.

If you give in your best, then
Believe in yourself
Believe in the best
Believe in Him to carry you through
And Believe me this is true!!

I ll sign off now,

Richa