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Showing posts from January, 2011

Secure Celebrations

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I picked up today's newspaper to read about the soon to be republic day celebrations. But what caught my attention was two other pieces of news. One was about how security was tightened in light of the republic day celebrations. It is a necessary and needed of course. But it saddens me that it is required. That we live in a world where we cannot celebrate a national holiday proudly where the head is held high without fear! The second piece was the killing of an assistant collection in a fight against corruption drawing parallel with Manjunath Shanmugham and Satyendra Dubey.

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

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It was beautifully shot. Almost poetic. When I watched the movie, I thought it had three main characters: Munna, Shia and Arun. But after looking at the poster, now I feel there are five characters adding Yasmeen and the city of Mumbai. Munna was the most striking character. A washer boy in Dhobi Ghat, Prateik played his role so perfectly, it is hard to tell he was not picked up from the ghat. Every emotion so clearly spelt. His open admiration and unsure love for Shia spoke volumes about his talent as an actor. Shia was irritating I thought when the movie began, but as the movie progressed she gained momentum and different angles to her character. An "investment banking consultant" on sabatical, she is Mumbai to do what I did not understand but basically take photographs of Dhobi Ghat and stalk Arun. Arun, the divorcee painter, played by Aamir Khan was almost boring. As a usual reclusive, chain smoker, always drinking painter, Aamir Khan portrayed below average acting skills

Man those ManGames

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As part of the curriculum at IIM Cal the entire batch plays a strategy game called “management games”. It’s interesting. We play it once in Term I as novices and once in Term VI before we graduate. I guess the idea is to understand what we learn over the two years. I am not so sure what happened though. Common sense prevails every time J Btw, one of hostels has something called the ManGames Puja. All its inmates going for the presentation that year are adorned with a mala and tilak wishing them luck and congratulating them on success. The industry is oil and gas and we play a few quarters spread over a few days (this time it was nights) and then we present our “strategy” on how to go about it. There are also some interesting external factors like we started with a regulated environment which then became deregulated and there were forced expansions and planned expansions. But nothing beats the fun of presenting it. To present you need to understand what happened and how you explain it

Intaglio

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This is our annual “international” business meet organized by my institute. Sure it’s good. We have awesome speakers, awesome competitions and well in general nice. I did not really do much but felt good to just have it. I was too busy sleepy most of the times. I wish I could have attended more talks. We also had a performance by Kunal Ganjawala. It was a big hit though I could not connect to the songs he was singing. But it was fun.

Breathless ! In Bombay !!!

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I wondered how come all the books I read claimed to be best sellers and wondered if there would be any good books that are not best sellers. Well, this is one. It is a good book. But it is not a best seller. And now I know the difference. It is a beautiful piece yet the style of writing is not that captivating. The idea was brilliant, the stories good, the writing not so much. Yet, it captivated me. It is a collection of short stories about different kinds of people in Mumbai by a man passionate about Mumbai called Murzban F. Shroff. It talks about how the city breaks the ethics of a Victoriawala and how it slaps a taxiwala in the face making him face his own unethicalness and how it makes a Parsi woman trust a Bihari labourer and how it traps a woman in an abusive relationship with schizophrenic. The title story talks about a man who rises from the slums to become rich and hit page 3 and yet he finds his peace out of the attention and finds love from a social worker. It’s

2010: The Year That Was

This year has been very eventful for me. January: Had a boring new year's party and felt bad about not being able to vote . February: Err. I acted in a play and walked down the ramp at the culfest. March: I read a lot of books . I almost read like a book a day during my wait for my UK visa. April: I went to Mumbai, stayed in Colaba and worked in Nariman for about 25 days which is almost like a dream come true ! (I promised a post and never wrote it) May: I went to the City of London , stayed at Tower Hill and worked on Liverpool Street which was way beyond my dreams ! This was also my first trip abroad. June: I went to Scotland . I got a job ! Followed FIFA from start to end for the first time (London inspired me). July: Nothing happened, including my birthday. I got my US visa. August: I went to Boston, MA to stay for the next 3 months. I enrolled in an all girls college which I have never done ! I heard I failed a course back at IIMCal. September: I went to my sister

New Header for the New Year

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I realized that I have had a lot of different headers but none for the city of Kolkata. So here goes !!

New Year's Eve 2011

I really can't remember what I did for NYE last year. So I looked up my blog. Last year was by far the worst NYE of my life and this year the best !!! 31st Dec 2010 I woke up to pack my bags and run to class. An interesting class it was. We were 5 girls + 7 boys. Then we all picked our bags and stuffed into two cars and left for Mandarmani. One car with 4 (+1) left earlier. Our sumo with 9(+1) left at about 7.00pm It's about 166km from Joka. It took us forever. We made through half the way well and then we got stuck in (guess what?) fog !!! I have never seen so much fog. The visibility was like some 10 feet !!! So we drove, slow and steady. Once we caught a bus and sped up behind it and then we lost it at a toll booth so we were back to slow and steady. No, we did not win the race. The other car reached the resort at 11.50pm right in time for new years. We put in a count down and screamed and wished each other right in the 10 people stuffed sumo !!! 1st Jan 2011 We reached ab

Christmas RED

Came back to Joka on a weekend. But our entire wing was not back yet. So a few days later, on a nice Wednesday we had a wing party. H1 top : All That Jazz. To Jazz it up we got lights: red green and purple. To make it fun we got a theme: Christmas To make a theme we got a dress code: Girls in RED and boys in white. People did not stick to it. Yet it was fun !!! And then there was Christmas which coincides with Reminiscence always. Reminiscence is an alumni meet where in the batch that graduated 25 years ago is invited. Any alumnus is always welcome of course. The 20th batch that came up was a lot of fun. The 45th batch that graduated this year also found their way to Joka and made it a lot more fun. So Christmas was fun in spite of having nothing to do with Christmas. Oh wait! our mess had two little trees and the cutest tiny Santa Claus put up. !!!

The Assignment 3

Didn't happen ! btw, thats Joka for you !

The Assignment 2

There is a competition called The Assignment. I made through round 1 which was basically situational questions. Round 2 has two parts Round 2 Part 1: I have already talked about Round 2 part 2: We were each given one episode and asked to analyse the episode of The Assignment, the show on Bloomberg UTV. This was the episode alloted: Episode 12 and this was my Analysis . Happy New Year !!! Will come back with a recap on my activities during the moments this weekend and last !!!