Monday, November 28, 2005

Team for the World Cup

i was standing in front of the mess the other day when i heard a great roar of spectators coming from the T.V. in the MPH upstairs. Sensing a blistering knock from Tendulkar or Dhoni, I ran upstairs to see the match. What i saw on the screen was something completely different. Tendulkar was dejectedly walking back to the pavilion after having made a painstaking 2 runs from 15 balls. India had lost their second wicket. India went on to lose the match by a record breaking 10 wickets. They had achieved this feat only 3 times previous to this, once before against the proteas. Big deal...u may feel. India is known to be unreliable in terms of cinsistent performances anyways. But the deal is big...this time, it was the first time that a home crowd was cheering for the visitors...and cheering in one voice. It was the first time that a state or a region had taken so much importance over the country for so many people at one place. It was for the first time that just because a Bengali was not playing in the match, the crowd was willing to change their dedication to an alien nation. It was in my reckoning, the first time that the true nature of this regional snake has shown its fangs.

Are not the other players of the team not Indians? Are they not playing for the country? Are they not representing the people of India (which in my knowledge also includes West Bengal)? This is the same team which convincingly defeated the Lankans and had just broken the record of unbeaten south africans. Would they have lost in this way had the crowd behaved as they shld have....For the Country...?

From next time I feel the selectors have one more criteria to fill before deciding on the team for home matches...the venue will have to be decided first and then a reservation has to be made in the team that at least one player in the playing 11 has to come from that state.

If these are the reservations that are going to come to the team...why not have the usual SC/ST etc reservations? Possibly we could even incorporate one for the part of the country....say...2 places for a North paw, etc etc etc etc....and the team for the World Cup is ready!!!

Saturday, November 26, 2005

The World as I see it

The World as I see it

This blog belongs to a senior in XIMB...some awesome pics that he has taken. Chk it out

Monday, November 21, 2005

Friends

With so many things at hand, you would never expect someone to have time to just sit idle. That is what I felt like doing for some days now. It is in times like this that the true value of friendship is seen. Somehow, friends will just sense something wrong....somehow they will know that you are not feeling good...somehow you will give urself away even if u try ur best not to. Then that friend will just take in their hand to guide u out of the rut and back on the track. Such an amazing feeling it is to feel that way...to either get urself pulled out or to pull someone out who u really care for.

A friend can easily change ur mind from feeling like nothing could go right to the point where u just start murmuring "I believe I can fly" and actually feel that u can.

Thanks to the world for giving such good friends to me. Hope I can keep upto the expectations of my friends...

Friday, November 04, 2005

Ironies abound

I was going through an old episode of "The Great Indian Laughter Challenge"...it seems to have taken our campus by storm...every dialogue/joke is listened to with the utmost attention and then repeated almost everywhere across the campus. One guy who was not even selected (his jokes were really pathetic...probably that was the reason for his rejection) gave this really nice seeming sentence..."What an irony in life that Diwali has Ali (Diw'Ali') in it and Ramzan has Ram ('Ram'zan) and still the two religions find it so difficult to coexist in so many parts of our country.Cant we just stay together and work together?

Nice thought...I really feel it merits more than a small mention in a laughter show amidst so many other PJ's which are being told at a dime a dozen...

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Life is full of ironies. Or I seem to be experiencing more than my fair share of them. Our B-school follows a mixed way of teaching. What I mean is that we do a lot of theory through the Stanford way of teaching through books and class discussions but almost similar amounts of work using Harvard style case studies where we get to experience the problem as it took place in some organisation and then solve it.

I really dont mind either of them and truthfully feel that both Stanford and Harvard should follow our style of teaching. My current apathy is towards the cases as we discuss them in class. The company in concern has a problem (most likely they have got into one). Among all the things that we will see, there will be the way that things would have been done so as to have avoided the problem alltogether. And mostly, this is the teaching that we are supposed to get from the case. "How could things have been done so that this problem would not have occurred?" Wonderful, right? But a small problem. Dont these companies have managers who have also done their MBA from some b-schools? OF course they do. Then would not they have thought of all these things before going for the step that they did? Of course they would have. Even then they decided to go ahead with this idea. Why dont we discuss that?

e.g. the HLL's merger with Tomco was being discussed in one class. Final decision was that the only person that it benefited was the promoters of HLL. If that was the case, why the hell did eveyone else still go ahead with it? It has been found clearly that they all could have known about this imbalance of synergy before going for the merger. Did they not do the simple valuation calculations that are required to do this? I dont think so. Then why did they go ahead with this? The case is over but we still dont know.