Sing out loud

A few have noted that I sing out loud while walking back to my block in Student Village 1. I can't help it; most of the time it's because of the weather and the plush greenery around here. I was never a stage singer. The only 5 songs I have sung on stage are, Neele Neele Ambar Par, Seconds for It's my life - Bon Jovi, Jaan-e-Jaan and Saamne Ye kaun Aaya. (Neele twice... once at Ad's Bhaiya's wedding). Well, I also remember singing Jumma Chumma De De in my 7th standard for the whole class. The class was sitting idle and Patil sir wanted some entertainment. He knew I sing okay... and I had heard this  number from Hum a while back. I was a kid... didn't know that it was certainly not a good idea to pick that song. I did the whole thing ... starting with 'Arre O Jumma, Meri Jaan-e-man'. I felt proud after I finished the song that day. I feel embarrassed ever since, when I think about it.

 

Why am I writing this? I feel like singing out loud right now... No wait, I am singing out loud right now. There is nothing green in my room, though. Can you hear me Pg and Pg?

Little works

Run for your dear life downhill, ya!
That Little devil is out to kill ya!
But Ere you can run free,
Stay in the queue, says he
And tell me its average I & T, will ya?

Four-No

There are four things I should never do while at ISB. 1) Sleep more 2) Talk less 3) Forget ... and well 4) Remember.

Jaya He!

Jai Hind. Swatantrata diwas sabko mubarak ho. Yes, I will sleep through the Independence day, mostly. It's a holiday, but it also feels good to be free. Or does it? Oh sure! By the way, Tagore wrote the first English translation of our National Anthem in a small town in AP. Read...

 

I am going to teach Tanmay the anthem tomorrow! He can now read sheet music... well almost. Can he read (Jana Gana Mana)? Well, can I?

To kill the wrong bird

Watched two movies in quick succession... one got my mind racing backwards and the other got my mores reaching out for the past - Memento and To Kill a Mockingbird. While Atticus (Gregory Peck) fought every front to save innocent Tom Robinson convicted of rape by the judgmental whites of Maycomb, Alabama... Lenny (Guy Pearce) in Memento went around searching and killing John G's, his wife's rapist and murderer.

Great movies... and well, I really have no business trying to find commonality or contrast between two very different genres. But somehow the intellectual tax levied by Memento was diametrically opposite the warm simplicity of To Kill a Mockingbird. However, while I would remember cute Jean Louis 'Scout' more fondly, I may love more to talk about Memento to friends...

'You see there are these two lines of the same story, one in color running backwards and a b&w narration running forwards'. That's enough to draw attention even without mentioning Lenny or Korsakov's syndrome (Short term memory lapse).

'Well, there is this languid little town where lives this real Gentleman of a lawyer with his two little kids' will probably draw a yawn.

Which one did I like better? Memento. Which one will stay with me? To Kill a Mockingbird.

CFIN midterm

As I walk out of the Student Village - 1 for the mid-term exams of Corporate Finance, I remember Dharmendra standing atop the paani-tanki... "Gaanv waalon, main jaa raha hoon, Bhagwan main aa raha hoon".

 

Good luck to everyone except the IIT'ians.

EMRI 108 - Dial One Zero Eight

Have to do my little due diligence to popularise the 108 Emergency Response service of Satyam's not-for-profit Emergency Management Research Institute group, launched recently across Andhra Pradesh.

 

We had a talk at ISB by Mr. Venkat Chengavalli, CEO, EMRI, who has taken the 911 system and improved it to suit hub-and-spoke instead of the US multi-center operation. The topic of the talk was "Transformation of emergency management with comments on entrepreneurship in the Non profit/healthcare sector". The most amazing thing was his expertise in medical emergencies although he was an engineer by education and profession till late. Brilliant ideas presented in simple words and his down-to-earth simplicity reminded me of Mr. K Pandirajan, MD, Ma Foi, who was here at the Career Perspective seminar during Pre-terms.

 

The goal is to respond withing 2 rings to every call and to ensure medical emergencies are serviced within 30 minutes (the nearest ambulance is tracked using GIS). EMRI has 70 ambulances now. It takes care of paperwork in accident cases too. Police emergencies are relayed to nearest police control room. India has peculiar problems: 1) City road traffic 2) Address complexities 3) Scarcity of good hospitals. "What if the emergency caller is affluent and only wants to go to the Apollo Hospital which is an hour away, while there is another emergency that the van needs to attend to immediately?" asked Mr. Venkat. He went on to relate some life-saving stories and some funny anecdotes from the EMRI call-centre.

 

The business model has worked quite well. It has saved more than 3000 lives since its start earlier this year. It's free for all. Where will revenues come from then? By becoming Robinhood. Charge the rich emergency callers for the ambulance services, keep it free for the poor.

 

Some links below ... and for all emergencies in Andhra Pradesh please

 

DIAL 108

 

1. IBN: Dial 108 in case of emergency

2. Hindu: Satyam's non-profit group rolls out emergency service 

3. AP Health Call Center - Project listing at the Stockholm Challenge 2006

NFS - 3

No Faff Subject #1 was Statistical Methods and #2 was Global Economics. NFS #3 in the term three is Corporate Finance. Prof. Bhagwan Chowdhry from UCLA has talked about Valuation of Corporate Projects - Domestic, International and with Options. He knows what ideas need drilling in and what details need glossing over - belabored the intuitive idea of stock Beta for an hour (Only market-associated risks of a stock matter in a portfolio), while not staying more than 5 minutes on the fancied-by-all-since-pre-terms Black-Scholes slide. Seniors said he's the Bhagwan for finance wannabe-switchovers.

And only if I wasn't so bent on the technical side of his lectures, I'd have noted and posted each of his jokes. Very smart, quite funny, yet I can see a dadaji'ish nicety - Chacha Chowdhry, kya?

Time to etch something forever (Interest Rate Parity Theorem)... Have struggled to get an intuitive feel for currency exchange rates...

Assuming free money markets, Interest rate difference between countries A and B compensates for the Spot/Forward Exchange rate. If India has a greater interest rate, (8%) than US (6%), USD should be expected to appreciate 2% against INR to compensate for this difference, which then drives the Forward Exchange Rate. Simple enough, I know... but remember!

Sailing on to the role of Debt in a Firm's Market Value (Nil - Modigliani & Miller Theorem), said Prof. Chowdhry, introducing the topic: "We've been doing easy stuff; it's going to get subtler now. If you've been thinking 'Is this what I paid 15 lacs for?', here is your money's worth!"

Pared

So I remember the list when I want to:

Kumar's HMTG

Satish's Lord

Bonet's 1YearStand

Prashanth's Giyummy

AlokBhagwat's iUnknown

AlokJain's Blog

Ramendra's Odyssey

Aniruddha's Kahani

Nissim's LateralThinking

Soumya's Life

AlokGoel's Vision

Rujuta ObliqueRays

Anu's Itzmylife

Abhisek's Thirteen

Swapnil's Dream

Deepak's Light

Kapil's Random

Karthik's vineyard

Kiran's Confusions

Sukalps' reflections

Rishik's Elysium

Priyanka's Musings

Leon's Clueless

Nikhil's Musings

Vithal's isbpal

Santosh's Metamorphose

Sharad's OffToSchool

Kandisa and Kavi

I am listening to Kandisa after a long time and I remember the 2400 GRE crack'er school friend of mine, who had almost as much bent for music as for mush and love - nil. Kandisa was the first album he actually went out and bought with his own money (the perennial baniya, he was). N was the first and only girl he went ga-ga over. I am sure he still loves both of them.

 

An Encore of Kandisa.... for you, Kavi!

Tiny Dots

It had been grey all this while for a long time. This evening it turned orange, and then green. Green for a minute or two and then poof, two dots went grey again. When I have learnt to live with grey, I can't withstand a green any more. I continue reading 'An Equal Music' by Vikram Seth. Before turning each page, I remind myself about the to-do's for tomorrow, about my 8-hour sleep requirement, that I need to 'ferme le livre' (learning French). And then I start reading the next page. Three dots, a tri-colour'ed ellipsis ...

A Talk by the ISB Store

And this, obviously, did make it... A talk with Mr. Kumar Ketkar, Editor, Loksatta, who was in ISB for the Editor's Round Table. Thirty minutes, sitting by the ISB store listening to some old anecdotes of journalism and some tempered opinions on the glamorization of media. Samples:

The brand of the typewriter, in those days, signified the seniority in the journalist world. There were no vernacular portable typewriters to begin with, which was a big incentive for opting instead for English journalism.

Suppose tomorrow, the newspapers stop glamorizing the headlines and depicting our Finance Minister as a superhero with guns, people would still buy and read. The pink papers are not bought because of the glamour; they are bought in spite of it.

Yeah, I know I had said 'pasting is not blogging', but this one is somewhere in between, isn't it?

Bananas Split

This didn't make it.

 

I met myself in my head...

I: Who are you?

Me: I?

I: No that's me.

Me: But I am me.

I: And, I am I.

Me: Good, glad we could sort that out before April next.

I: Capital. Dude, I've been seeing you tad too often. You belong here?

Me: Its debatable who owns this place, friend. Who came here first?

I: Dunno man, I have trouble remembering things, you see.

Me: And I remember everything; everything, except this one piece of the jigsaw. You don't want me to leave, do you?

I: Oh no, no. There's enough room for a hundred in here. Big, warm, cozy... it's a happy brain, ain't it?

Me: Aah. That I doubt prima facie. It works for me... but could do with a Porche 'esque engine and style.

I: You got to balance the drive and dough man. See the ground it covers on minimum feed at .

Me: You mean the miles per gallon.

I: ... or gallons per mile, or whatever makes that graph line straight without using that log thingy.

Me: Regression. I see you've learnt well. Now, did you manage to get a life eventually?

I: Oh apples... I mean ample. Sure, don't you think it's fun? Look at the people, place, parties... profs too. It's cool. I just can't get enough of it! Can't wait for the party tonight. Rocking!

Me: You on steroids or speed?

I: Hey, watch it. No drugs in here.

Me: Was a joke. You seem to have lost your brain, which is ironical, because you live in one. Anyhow I wrote a little something for you.

Yawn yawn lack sleep. Do I look cool?

Yes sir, yes, red eyes sag, you drool

on for a nap here, on for that dame,

on for a little joy 'ere its late again.

I: Hey that's nice. I dunno if you're taking my trip in those lines, but I like it. Agree, that sums up my life, but what about you, man?

Me: Figured out my direction finally, the path where money lies, though only to be played with. But then, the leader turned out to seem a fuehrer to few. Mutiny is checked, but bile remains.

I: What was that? I got hints but...

Me: Like deciphering the photocopies of color-coded histograms in course packs?

I: Exactly. Even with several good guesses, I still ain't sure.

Me: The best nations have the greatest turmoil. It's sort of... you know, unfortunate but inevitable.

I: I know... Aaaarhhh, at some point of time, you got to start thinking big.

Me: Precisely. Are you with me on this?

I: Yep, but guess we should just let the wonderful things happen.

Me: Well, I would rate my current state of affairs as 'Low, Medium, High'

I: Haha. But, I wouldn't trade this life for anything.

Me: Yes, and I've learnt the tricks of free trade. Coming for a walk around the cortex?

I: Sure. Give me a minute  to make this guy comb his hair. No one likes his ruffled look here.

Me: And after the walk let's conspire to make him go gym a bit. We need his fitness. Bye.

I: Adios! 

Me: Salut! Let's go learn Japanese too.

Tagged!

Back, I rise from the ashes of a bad term-end's aftermath... Tagged! by Swapnil, Chiranth, Vinay and read by a few others who prefer art or music to blog-words as their preferred mode of expression, I feel awright. Here goes... reminds me of the multicolored slam-books of yore.

I am thinking
I could have done better than that. I should have had better than this.

I said
I believe... I am not obsessed

I want
To see the world, before making one for myself.

I wish
I was 25 years old. Umm... make that 24.

I miss
My nostalgia

I hear
Bhagwan speak into my ears that Forward Rate Premium equals Interest Rate Differential.

I wonder
If I will need to fallback on my fallback, and if it IS after all a fallback.

I regret
Forgetting... everything.

I am
Analytical.

I dance
like Mithun... say some. They call me Disco.

I sing!

I cry
when I have to absolutely.

I am not
sorted out about my priorities yet.

I write
so that I can reach out to myself

I confuse
Phoenix with Sphinx... which one rose from the ashes?

I need
to sleep less.

I should
stop dreaming about what's already real.

I finish
by tagging Shivangi and P ... (who won't tell me the blog address). And being almost last in the game, everyone else is already 'taken'.