you have to give up.

you are the same decaying matter as everything else. you are not the contents of your profile. you are not the cuisines you write about. nor the movies you see. or the music you hear. you are not the idea of your perfect date. you are not your best feature. you are not your testimonials :D

we are turning into zombie customers. remember how google adsense works inside your gmail. if you write about a breakup, it will give ads on psychiatrists. if you write about somebody's death, it will give you ads on undertakers. for google, you are nothing. you are just a worldwide corporation's revenue stream...

you have to give up. you are just another entry in a database profile. people add you as a friend, become a fan, accept you as their crush but behind you they might spite you. we are all part of the same compost heap...

for the place of phone, they will scrap you. instead of meeting you, they will send messages. they dont want to see you. they dont want to hear from you. yet they want to communitize. its futile. because this social circus has already hit ground zero...

you are more than a printout of your orkut homepage pasted upon your face. you have to give up.

#$%^& orkut. fukk the songs i like. and fukk my turn ons. let me never be complete. let me never be perfect...

we need to evolve.

'welcome to fight club'

That was what Manan had to say about himself.

Long live Scott

Scott Adams.

Don’t we love this guy who makes a living making mockery of us I-am-a-MBA-turned-manager types? He is such a prolific writer with really diverse topics. You can check out his blog. A new post everyday! Even during his wedding he managed to publish some articles on his blog and people have the gall to say that they are busy and hence cannot post! His latest books God’s Debris and The Religion War are very different from the Dilbert stuff that made him so famous. I would love to be like him. Draw a couple of pictures and write four lines and Bingo! Well, Scott says,” Just be glad you are not me”.

Manfest is the annual management festival conducted at IIML. Yeah, Manfest..I know..very imaginative on our part! Z had this idea to take this event to the next level and do something different from the other B-schools. The never-say-die guy he is, he mailed Scott Adams requesting him to address us during our fest. Since it is too costly to get him down here, he was told that it will be a video conference. We really didn’t expect an answer from him. It is Scott Adams dude..he is so famous and so busy and all that jazz. Why would he ever take time out for a college he never heard of! But there are a few good men left in this world. Scott replied saying he would do it. Free of cost. No strings attached. We couldn’t believe it. No way! Especially after another very famous CEO asked us $100,000 for a 45 minute videoconference! Of course all the money would be donated to his charity foundation!!

I was still skeptical. I thought it was some guy masquerading as Scott. Or even better, it is Scott himself and he is doing this for some new material for the Dilbert strip. Another example of how stoopid MBAs are! But it was true. It was really Scott Adams and we couldn’t believe our luck. We were so happy that Z actually pulled it off. Bur all those happy moments were short lived. We got a mail from Scott saying that he has been diagnosed with spasmodic dystonia. It was so bizarre. He can speak to a huge audience but cannot hold a one-on-one conversation. Since we were set up for a video conference, it cannot be done. We were devastated. We actually prayed that his condition is not so serious and he would be able to talk to us. Yes, I know it is a very selfish thought but still…we wanted to hear him talk to us so badly. The videoconference facility was booked and we did not cancel it until the event was over. The talk never happened.

When I looked back at those series of events and read the mails sent by him, I was struck by the fact that he was such a nice guy. A very simple person. You can see it in the way he mails us and responds to us. There is really a lot to learn from him. In spite of all that success, he remains a simple guy. In spite of all the difficulties he faces in drawing, he continues to regale us everyday.

Bow.

Truly, an inspiration.

Here’s to you Scott.

Orkut Rocks!!!

Today's Fortune:
You are soon going to change your present line of work.

I hope this comes true ;)

Goofy. Pluto. Dwarf. Planet.

Scott Adams wrote this. Damn Funny.

First we had 9. Then 10. Increased to 12.

Now it is down to 8. Some fun these astronomers have.

I read a little about Pluto and it does have some signifcance in astrology. Now I wonder what happens to those poor souls whose lives were supposed to have been affected by the planet. If you were told that since Pluto is behind Uranus, you need to do something to get it off your back. You start being nice to dogs and start eating with Uranus (Southpark Style!) to ward off the evil planet. One fine day you wake up and you were told that it was all a joke. Pluto was never a planet and hence it couldn’t have any affect on you. How would you feel? Miserable. Pathetic. Maybe you would want to end your life!!

Let’s take this a parsec ahead. Sometime in the distant future, a panel of scientists sits down and decides that there is no God. They got proof for it. How would the believers feel? All the good deeds done in hope of getting a place in the heaven for you and hell for your neighbor are meaningless. How would they feel? I bet that some of them would want to end their lives. God might not be there but Heaven might still keep its gates open for a while!

...And the sun still shines.

The world is definitely not lacking in fools. Remember the issue of orkut and the crush list. Well it is back again. I got the message from my not-so-dear friend AB, a week after the first message. I assumed that most people will realise that it is a joke in a day or two. But this guy is too much. One week after the joke started, he still fell for it.

Evolution is a natural process :) Some guy wanted to make the message more believable and hence adds a small piece of code to the message and sends it across. He finishes the message by saying " this really works dude!!".

There goes my faith in humanity and its intelligence.

:)

courtesy: http://www.nicklewis.org/art/photos-and-graphics/fukitol-the-new-miracle-drug

Scrambled eggs all over my face

Hey baby, I hear the blues a-callin',

Tossed salad and scrambled eggs

Oh My

Mercy

And maybe I seem a bit confused,

Yeah maybe, but I got you pegged!

Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!

But I don't know what to do with those tossed salads and scrambled eggs.

They're callin' again.

Of late, I have fallen in love with Jazz and Blues and Oldies. They are really charming and can set the perfect mood for reading a book or having a drink.

Arbit thought: Has it become mandatory to listen to psychedelic music when you are either boozing or doping? Is this the only kind of music which enhances the experience of going high? Apparently trance music is supposed to take us to a high without the help of any alcohol or narcotics. The speed of the beats in the music affects the brain waves. Some kind of frequency matching occurs and resonance sets in and takes us to a higher plane. I do not know whether this makes any scientific sense or not but I think it is worth a try. Booze and Trance.

Worst Job Ever

The stud in a pondy movie. Poor Guy! Sweats it out in the gym. Sweats it out on the sets. But in the end...he is left to his own devices. Poor Guy!

Next in contention: Me. Not for the stud. For the Job (pun tried, very much intended) ;)

Life is full of surprises. I log on to orkut and this is the scrap I get from some stranger.

Hai friend,

there is a special reason for sending this msg especially 4u.This msg is a love story of mine (sounds good !!!)My name is Yugesh and i hav completed my B.E from vizag n i am a vizag localite.I n a girl named KHANNA r in love from march 27,2004.we loved eachother in such a way that we r ready 2 die 4 one another,n we had gone 4 the engagement in Jun 2005,in the fear of missing eachother,but until his brother named XXX,came 2 know about this matter and tried to influence her ,but when she disagrees ,he made her stop her studies and took away from my life in feb 24,2006,leaving me alone n mad .I searched 4 her a lot but they influenced her in such a manner that she sacrifisied her love for her parents leaving me ,I am really unable to live without her and her caring ,i am unable to decide what to do ,as i am spoling my futher,Do u believe i did not go to US 4 MS in fear of missing her. Frd i know ,u may be thinking ,y this dude! is telling his story especially 4 me ,the reason is ,her brother XXX is yr frd in yr frds list ,GUESS WHO??? n reply me if u can.the most important thing ,i want is yr precious advice to what to do ,as i cann't be able 2 decide what to do !!!!,Pls send me yr advices .expecting reply

yrs frd YUGESH

Funny, aint it!!

@Chasing: Can you psychoanalyze this guy for me. It should be interesting!!

Saala, uska toh daal diya. Mera haath mein leke kyun kada hoon?

Overheard in the Local.

Check out Overheard in New York

R. O. T. E.

With this post, I am practically begging to be hanged by my balls and lowered into the grave which I have dug. All six feet of it! But, who the heck cares.

For all those who care about me or have the habit of storing useless information in their head know that I am single and going strong at that. There were a couple of times when I was close to changing that status. The only reason/consolation they could offer me was that they never looked at me that way. To be frank, I never understood that. In the recent past, a couple of events have unfolded which did not aid me in understanding that statement, but maybe, maybe accept it at its face value.

The first one happened around three months ago. My friends and I were sharing a drink when we were joined by a lady, a thirty-something year old HR executive in charge of my friends. To cut to the chase, she told my friends that she finds me cute and if I were ten years older or she ten years younger, she would have asked me on a date. I took the information in and with good spirit. Strike one.

The second one happened a week ago. This was a conversation I had with a colleague.

“Arrey Vittal, junta tere pe fida hai”

“Kya bol rahe ho sir”

“Tere jawaani pe fida hai”

“Duh!”

He comes to me later again and starts off with the same line. This time I asked him what exactly is he talking about. He tells me that there is this lady who “likes” me. A little elderly to my liking. Strike Two!

Twice is no coincidence my man. Strike three and I am out for good. I really don’t know what they see in me. Next time a girl tells me that she never looked at me that way, well, I can at least nod my head in acceptance, if not understanding. Some things are hard to explain. Damn this empirical evidence!

Ok Zarda. Go ahead. Do the honors. :)

Dominos Pizza Independence Day Offer!!

Buy One. Get Free.

:)

Orkut Spam - Contd.

Ok. Let us take this step by step. If you send this message to everyone on the list and press F8, all the people who have a crush on you will magically reveal themselves. There is nothing special in this message: Just plain text. No scripts or some intelligent piece of code to do the magic. It is like sending any other message and pressing F8 for that result. How stupid can you be to fall for it? I am wondering how many morons are desperately banging their keyboard waiting for that all-elusive list of people. And nothing ever comes up. That could be the reason why this female sent the mail a couple of times. She is a hottie for sure. Imagine her surprise when she presses F8 and no names appear! I did press F8 (w/o sending any message) to test my theory and nothing happened. Well maybe there are no names to show or the trick doesn’t work. I chose to believe in the latter. ;)

It was pretty sad to see some of my friends fall for this. Dude, I am sorry but how dumb can you get? If you really want to know if someone has a crush on you, go ask. Doing these cheap things to get information sounds pathetic and desperate! Grow up. Use your brain. Stop forwarding that mail which says if you don’t forward this mail within ten seconds to hundred people, Mr. Garrison will come and screw your dog and leave lemmiwinks up your ass!!

Arrrrrrrrgh.

Best Opening Lines

"Chutiye or bevkoof main dhage bhar ka fark hota hai"

I liked the opening lines of Satya too. Beautiful introduction to Mumbai. I cannot recollect those lines now. If any of you know the lines, please pass it on to me.

What is your favorite opening line/s?

Orkut Spam

I log on to Orkut and there are some infinite unread messages waiting for me. This was what was in store from me: "man,this is creepy ....its called mind reader. send this to every1 on ur list and then press F8 and ur crushes name will appear on ur screen" Everyone is sending it. Some female sent the same message thrice. She must be expecting a huge number.

There is something funny about this message and junta's reaction to it. Cannot go into it without invoking the Holier-than-thou or the sour grapes argument.

I have some arbit thoughts on this. Will write when I get free from work.

Until then, have a great day.

Girls. Cute creatures, aint they?

Once upon a time, when we were young, when we started wielding razor blades for the first time, back at our engineering college, we used to lament the fact that there are not enough girls in our college.(Not that I could have done anything in any situation) There was a serious lack of quality and quantity. The joke that used to go around was that 99% of the girls in India are pretty and the rest ended up in our college. Some idiot got a brainwave and made shit loads of money when he made a tee shirt out of it.

Fast forward a few years, I found myself in the big bad city of Bombay. As any engineer worth his drafter and letters to penthouse would do, I was preparing for CAT. One of the coaching institutes organized a one day session for this and invited all the students preparing for the exam. The day being a Sunday and not much for me to do in the hot and happening kopar khairane bachelors pad that I inhabit, I decided to go and spend some time in the real Bombay. The session was nothing great and didn’t offer me any hope that I would be making truckloads of dollars two years down the line and I will be riding with four dumb blondes in my imported convertible. But the motivation for me to enter IIMs came from a totally different, if not unexpected direction. Yes, you guessed it. From those cute creatures called Girls. There were so many of them and so pretty and hot and all those adjectives. This session happened at a management school in Bombay and I had a chance to see the college students that day. God, it was like a fashion parade! I naively assumed, in spite of my past experiences, that at least some of them would be smart enough to make it all the way to the end.

The smart guy I am, I was able to fool two old guys (one of them had a bladder problem and didn’t ask too many questions and went out to pee as soon as I started talking about power factors) to let me into the hallowed portals (Ahem!) of management education. I entered the college with my eyes wide open, as wide as I could without letting the sun roast my already damaged retina (watching too much of the blue color has negative effects on the optical apparatus, apparently). The campus reminded me of my engineering college in more ways than one. It was huge, green and very much like my old college. The other common feature was the girls. I have a knack of getting into these places where the female species is grossly underrepresented (Proof: my office, yet again). Disappointment haunted all my life.

Things weren’t that bad for our seniors. In fact, in fact they were ecstatic. It was like a blind man was able to see Chasey Lain and Tera Patrick in the same frame. It was like a catholic priest who became the head of Doon school (Hi Kalluri!!) The female population had shot up by 300% at our campus. You can imagine what would have happened to those testosterone driven, sex starved horny bulls. No stone unturned, no chance went wasted. They were in a full flow giving gyaan on how to handle the stress, how to manage manac and how a shoulder to lean on can be quite comforting in these troubled times. Things reached their zenith/depths when the committee selection began. At our college there are these useless committees to do those useless things which somehow everyone finds useful and hence want to be part of a committee. CV point, you see. This was a golden chance for the guys to get a “good” girl into their fold and work from there towards the ultimate goal. From here it gets deplorable or outright funny, it depends on your perspective. A Kiran would want a Neha in his committee, come what may. But Neha is wanted by five other Kirans. So they strike a deal. “I will give you Heena, do the CorVal and Crest projects for you and let you copy in the mid terms. Pleeeeaseee give me Neha maga. I think I am in love with her and this is my only chance. Pleeeeaseee!” All these issues got settled over a matter of time and everyone started leading their lives the same old way. A peg of whisky, some healthy ogling, and good old “Wow! The best brunette ever” played in a loop.

Cut the present, I am in a similar state. My manager thanked me profusely for being single handedly responsible for bringing down the average age from 41 to 40.95. His KRA on diversity was achieved, thanks to me. I usually have lunch alone in the cafeteria downstairs. I took a sweeping look around the floor and all I could see was either white hair or bald heads or a combination of the two! Not a lady to look at and appreciate ;) I told you before; I got that knack of ending up at these places.

So given these circumstances, past present and the future, I think it is high time I called up my mom and ask her to fulfill her duty towards me and find herself a daughter-in-law.

Unless you, yes you my lady, have some better plans.

:)

And God rested on the seventh day.

Very apt, isnt it? Given the six day week at my company.

--------------------

When the company was split into two recently, there was a huge problem of talent retention. Either company didnt want to lose the best people and see them join the other group. Many strategies were formulated to retain the talent. I heard the salaries were hiked and stuff like that. I have a simple solution to all this and am sure it is going to work. Make it a five day week. Everyone would love to join your company. Beautifu, isnt it?

Simple solutions to complex problems. Contact God. Ony cash. No coconuts and bananas, please.
Guaahahahaha <Lightning and thunderbolts in the background>

The star has finally set.
And my world has lightened up.

Welcome back to Life.

Quick Update

Last four days have been very busy and hectic. No time for anything else at office other than work. I guess this was the busiest I have been in the last three months. It all began with an innocuous meeting to which I was called to attend. The CEO of our business was there. His opening lines were that this is going to change our lives and he swore us to secrecy. (Haha. I am breaking the rule here. Not completely though.)

I hope it really changes. Wait and watch.

With a little help from my friends

Acquaintances by Chance.
Friends by Choice.

Happy Friendship Day Buddy!

What would you think if I sang out of tune,
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sing out of key.

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends

What do I do when my love is away
(Does it worry you to be alone?)
How do I feel by the end of the day,
(Are you sad because you're on your own?)

No, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends

Do you need anybody
I need somebody to love
Could it be anybody
I want somebody to love.

Would you believe in a love at first sight
Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time
What do you see when you turn out the light
I can't tell you but I know it's mine,

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends

Do you need anybody
I just need someone to love
Could it be anybody
I want somebody to love.

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
With a little help from my friends.

Learning

If you dont know where you are going, you will never get there.
courtesy:me

Unlearning

If you dont know where you are going, any road will take you there.
courtesy:abhisar

??

I know where I am going because I know where I am from.
courtesy:kc

--------------------------------------------------
Comment promoted to post
Evolutionary learning (?)

It doesn't matter where I am going because I am always on the move.
courtesy:Bala

Exciting!!

Most of you must have heard of the major private companies planning their foray into retailing. One of them is a very ambitious project and is already giving jitters to other players in the value chain and its competitors. Statistics say that less than 10% of retailing in India is organized. I do not remember the exact numbers here but it is very obvious that a hell lot of money is tied up with the small kirana and department stores. Organized retailing is making way slowly and steadily and this is seen as a danger to the small shopkeepers. Not if they are smart!

A couple of my friends and me took part in a competition in college wherein we have to come up with an entry strategy for a new retailer. We came up with a model in which the new retailer takes advantage of the existing network of kirana stores in the city. They got advantages one cannot beat for quite a long time. The small guys cannot really compete with the organized retailers as they whole lot of other disavantages like their small size. As long as they are small with no sourcing power, the organized retailers can provide goods at a lower cost to the end consumer. This is one of the USP of huge retailers. E.g. Big Bazaar

Imagine if all the small kirana store guys come together and form a group. They buy as one and sell as one under an umbrella brand. There will be consistency in service and all the stores will be seen as one by the customer. They are availing the benefits of a huge retailer and also getting the advantage of being smaller and closer to the customer. The trust and relationship with the customer is already there. It is a killer combo! Isn’t this exciting? It is happening in Rajkot. Read about it here.

The power of buying as one is immense and can change the contours of an industry and economy too. China does most of its raw materials purchases through a single body. Imagine the power they exert on the global economy. If you take an industry and see its changing fortunes, the reasons usually given are 1. US recession; 2. 9/11 attacks; 3. China stopped buying! That is the power of single sourcing. I am really excited at this development in Rajkot. I hope these guys put aside their petty differences and actually pull this off! All the major FMCG companies must be pissing in their pants.

This development will upset the strategies of the big retailers. Can India do what the US could not?

Today's Fortune on Orkut

The time is right to make new friends.

Very Ironic ;)