22.8.07

Navy blue and brown

I just have to have to go to Ladakh sometime. sooner than later. was planning last year, but the timing was wrong, Rohtang pass remains closed in May. this year too it dint work out, the timing was alrite, but i dint have enuf time. and no company!

A friend had just been there. Alone! adore him for that. and he just sent across the pics. they look awesum. better than the pics Id seen before. Ladakh is so colourful; yet there are not many colours, just 2 infact, blue and brown. The sky is blue. not azure, but blue. and the lakes, they are like gigantic mirrors. and in between there is brown. miles of brown. miles of nothingness. rocks, sand, pebbles, all brown!! It's like uve entered a painting, not that of an expert, no skill, no finesse. a kid's painting; just took the tubes and sprayed them across the canvas. got the shades all wrong too.. simple, innocent, naive!

I just have to go there!

14.8.07

Information

If you know things that others dont, dark things, bad things, things that are twisted and gnarled, you have value. You have the greens and you have the power. Why else do you think the investment banks are so powerful. If I tell you that the oil industry is what it is today because a few investment banks want it to be so, it would sound incredible. They are the Barbarians at the Gate, guarding your destiny of corporate existence. And you thought it was all about how innovative your firm's strategy is!

Information flows very slowly. And as it flows further downstream, it loses value. The earlier you capture it, the richer you are. By the time you and I go long based on the information available in the public domain, those smart people there are selling the same assets and raking in all the moolah!

So the bottomline is: You dont need capital. You dont need foresight. You dont need to have that elusive business idea that would create wealth for you or thousands of people around you. All you need to be is smart to read between the lines or to have the right contacts.

1.8.07

Sepia and Chai, early morning.

After a night out completing the BizVal project, I was only too tired and sleepy to accompany fellow wingies to the roadside 'tapri' for an early morning session of chai, 'Gugni' and 'bakar'. However, I reluctantly agreed and I am glad I did.

0530 in Calcutta is more the 0630 in Bombay. Being out so early after such a long time actually made me a bit nostalgic. The whiff of fresh morning air, the tinge of humidity in the air and the pale blue of the sky were reminiscent of those summer days of lining up at the first sight of dawn at the cycle shop for the best cycle, the one that had 14 painted on it OR of waking up early on 1st day of vacations, which also coincided with the South Indian New Year and making a morning trip to the temple with friends.

The subsidized chai was refreshing accompanied with some typical B school glob. Gugni with 'Anda pav' lived up to its expectation of being one of the most edible dishes in and around campus. The hordes of tapris, the numerous cyclists and cycle rickshaw pullers, the Ambassadors lined up at the taxi stand and the blue KMC buses zooming past at the DH road made an ideal setting for the creative mind. What ensued was an impromptu photo shoot, of experimentation with light, with angles, with still and moving objects and with 'Sepia' and 'Black and White'.

Then the slow walk back and much awaited sleep, not before uploading some of the pics on your orkut profile.

No decision is absolutely rational!

His lectures started getting monotonous. It seemed that there was a pattern to all his analyses. The discussions seemed too black and white and predictable. While at the start, one would dare not miss any of his classes, now the numbers were dwindling and class participation was dropping exponentially. The word was that D, considered one of the profs here, was too rigid with his point of view.

But it all changed today. Today's was easily his best case discussion. Not many would agree with me though, because most of them were dozing away towards utopia. For them, I would really reiterate what one B here, who has a penchant for Quotable Quotes once said, "you are sleeping over your career, Mister!" B has enough substance to form the subject of one long post. But more on him later. BTW, D himself is well known for his 'Hall of Fame' dialogues, though they all sounded like cliches to me, until now. But some of his quotes today were vintage. "No decision is absolutely rational", ''Better work with known devils, than dark horses" and "skill is acquired, competence is applied' to name a few. His take that if you want to ignore power and politics in corporations and not be part of the rat race, better join an NGO although a bit radical, made a lot of sense; Politics exit in organizations, infact it exists in every walk of life. That cases are not to have solutions only discussions shows that there is certain flexibilty to his rigidity.