The Road Traveled #2

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So continue my narration, from my earlier post, after joining TIME Mumbai things were not showing hope immediately for me. I started to struggle in class, as CAT comprises of three major areas - Verbal Ability and Reasoning , Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation. I must accept I am neither strong or weak in any areas. With an average aptitude in all the areas, the classes were a big learning for me. I understood the effect of  skipping some areas in lower standards at school.
The first of that I struggled was Basic Geometry. Its only in  Tamil Nadu I hope there are four boards for passing your 10th Standard. State Board, Matriculation Board, Anglo Indian Board and the CBSC Board. How far 4 different boards for a high school education with in a state effective is a debatable question. Because of this you cannot judge performance of the students till the high school based on their grades as there is additional parameter required to weigh the grade. State Board - easiest of the lot to study, so of course its more crowded with students who like to boost up their scores. There is always an argument made by the students of CBSC board that their education standard is high and State Board syllabus is no match and of course its like that. I understood this arguments validity in my CAT coaching class. I had sailed through my School education without learning basic concepts of Geometry, and the best part is I scored a 100% in my Mathematics board exam. This was easy because I can leave the complete geometry chapter and still manage a 100 because of the question paper pattern and the content in the chapter.
I had to cope up with this problem, so I revisited the NCERT 8th, 9th and 10th standard mathematics book to understand the basic axioms and theorems. So that was about My Quantitative Struggle to score. The next dreaded area for many and also loved by many is Verbal Section. Here Norman Lewis gave me a little confidence that I too can perform well in this section. With that confidence I followed the sample question booklets to manage the other section. I would suggest people who feel they are very bad in Verbal skills especially with words Norman Lewis is my recommendation to start with.
The TIME mock cat series was like a struggle for me in the initial exams, where every 20 Sunday afternoon I after the test I would think am I in the right place trying for the right thing. I could not find out any pattern in my exam results, sometimes I performed Quantitative section extremely well but the next time I failed to clear my cut offs also. All these were a better learning to show my instability :).
After all the struggle On the D-day, November 18th 2007, when I saw the CAT paper the paper had no surprise in terms of number of questions. But that is the only thing familiar, the quantitative section this time had gone through a big upturn with really teasing questions. The Data Interpretation was full of calculation intensive sets instead of logic based. Verbal section which I though was the easiest and attended the maximum count of 17 questions. I did not know I have entered into the trap myself by attempting these many questions in verbal section. The result was some thing that was totally disastrous for me when it came January 2008.   (To be continued....)

The Road Traveled #1

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"Profits are a Signal to resources holders where resources are mostly highly values in society"


- Michael R Baye

I think, I was fascinated a lot about Economics before landing here at XL, because of  Tim Harford's Under Cover Economist. This book was the eye opener for me. And Why I started to say all these, Profits are Signal, we always are in search of becoming a unique from one group and that is a never ending process. When we are in school we would like to go to college which is the best and that gives you an identity, so we would look for "Signals", like which is the best college to join, based on the "Profits of others", may be the advantages of the existing students of the college.

Once we reach that college do our search stops. That again starts, we would like to make our self Individualize and would want to look for the best company. And the search continues there on...Now I had two question. Are we looking for excellence and perfection ? If So what is that will end this search?.


From Here on I would give my narration of how I ended up in this institute at Jamshedpur . I still remember the first time I read this name of the city during my Social Science class, when I read about the revolution of Jamshedji Tata and Tata Steel. I never thought I would land up in this city and would spend a couple of years in this place.


Doing an MBA was a major aspiration in my life, but I never had a plan to do it after my Graduation. So I ended up working with TCS for the last two years. As I loved Mumbai a lot after a visit during my college days for a South East Asian Rotaract conference at Daman. The packed train I boarded at Dadar was the biggest attraction for me to spend my initial two years of career in Mumbai. So I landed the same way in Mumbai working for TCS.

Joined a Domestic project of TCS, since technology interests me a lot, the big Implementation project for the domestic client was a Huge learning opportunity for me. I had a good mentor, Arun, who taught me the skills required and that really helped me in delivering my work with a sustained high performance. I made some Friends here at TCS, the list I am giving is not exhaustive so I can name a few, Vivek, Charan, Karthi, Gokulan, Niraj, Ram, Prasanna, Rakesh, Chezhian, Archana, Vidya, Anu, Amol, Pulkit, Ashish & POS Team...and the list does not end there.... it goes on. So when I started to work I was not in any idea of doing my MBA in my near future. I started my preparations for management entrance exam off late in 2006 in December.


As I never researched on this, I did not have any Idea of what all B schools exist. I was aware of only 2 exams one was the CAT and other was GMAT. I was planning of GMAT. The first day I saw the astronomical fee I need to spend stumped me and that was the end of GMAT story. The next Best option was CAT. So I started my preparations aiming at CAT 2007 from December 2006 by joining TIME Mumbai.

(Will be Contd... # 2....)

This blog, now on Sits on my own Domain

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Addressed To : The very few readers of this blog, my good friends and those people who come accidentally because directed by Google.com or any other search engines.
Subject:  This Blog, from now on is moved to my new domain name.
So after a long time I now write a blog in my own domain.
Next Target: Host my own site and blog, but since monetary situations at present do not help me now to do that so. Wait for that to happen soon.
Thanks for spending time to read this Rant from your Weblog writer.

Lively is bit lively But...May be for Children to Enjoy

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Today I had some time to look into the new Google labs innovation Lively. The idea looks the same old chat rooms of the past with a only new thing seems to be lot of efforts have been put in the look and feel. 
Lively, the efforts spent on the interface is good but as you can see the time consumption in loading is horrible as they are 3D models. The avatar concepts are not an innovation. So as such I expected quite very new from Google and they have also started to give some look and feel bloated applications usually done by Microsoft. I still love Gmail for its simplicity and Google.com for its elegance and minimalist approach. This lively I feel, at least for now is a waste of time for me. May be for kids its a big time entertainment. But one warning already there are so many Adult only rooms opened. So you need to keep watch if you children are into it. :)

When I Double click the Drives - Open With dialog box appears

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I had this weird problem when I clicked the Drives in Windows Explorer. The Open with dialog box appears and asks me to choose the program to open. I did not have enough time to find out the resolution for this as I thought, I would have screwed my registry accidentally while researching my new laptop.
To tell about my new laptop its a Dell Vostro 1400 series. Full black in color and I find it quite compact. You can refer the link to find the special features of the laptop and other usual features like 3 year warranty, Graphic card etc, I do not want to bore you with those details. Only thing attractive in this deal was it came with a DOS OS, which gave the freedom to load the favorite Windows XP, expecting to load Fedora soon. Licensed XP was provided in college, that was an additional bonus I got. XP on 2 GB RAM and 2.1Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, is giving lightning speed boot up. That is enough boasting I did about my laptop.
I wanted to fix the Problem, mentioned above very badly because it was irritating me at times when I have some urgent work. In my lecture classes today, the classroom system had the same problem. The Professor was also not able to access his flash drive, because he was trying to double-click the drive. Temporarily I just gave the drive name in the address bar to continue with the lecture. Came back to room and did a bit of Googling for some time to fix the issue in my laptop. Yes, it was a worm attack which had screwed the registry settings.It was the stupid W32/RJump.worm. I tried with Windows Drive Fix Registry File downloaded from Microsoft site. It made a different problem. It fixed in some drives leaving some drives the same way.Finally this forum gave me the actual file I need to run to clean the worm and access the drive freely. So you may well check with that if you too have the same problem by referring the forum. Hope this will reduce the time to fix the problem :) I have to try the same in my lecture hall system Monday to fix this.
Update 24 July 2008 :  As I can see a huge hit for this post from search engines dear readers you need not follow that forum and find that tool to clear your Problem. Please download the Flash Disinfector Tool from here. Run this tool after download to clear your problem.

Loser but a Winner of Hearts

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I am still thinking, whether the match I saw today was the real match and the player was Don of the All England Club. But its a reality. Roger Federer after fighting till the last moment showed me who he could have been. Down with 4-6, 4-6 in first two sets and taking the next two sets in 7-6, 7-6 is not an easy thing against the No.2 player. The most important thing to note here is the mental strength he showed at the third and fourth set says " I am Roger."
But Federer did not give away easily his sixth title, fought till the end of the fifth set to 9-7. He really would have won the hearts of many who lose their mental strength when we are down and out after the initial struggle.
In fact this is a great lesson for me, Roger you are still my Favorite not because you have won 12 Slams but you are a Real Character in my Life.

Self Interests - Ever Maximizing Function

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"Its not out of the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the banker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regards to their own interest"
These lines make me write again after a short break in posts in this log. I could state multiple reasons for not posting but still it could not be replaced for the act of not doing. There has been a lot change in the environment when I started this blog to this day. People changed , places changed even my self has gone through a lot of changes to adapt to the external environment. Now I sleep and eat at weird timings, because that is the culture here. Should I adapt to that is the biggest question. When I read the above quoted lines today in Baye's book on "Managerial Economics and Business Strategy", this showed it is not that bad to be a self-interested person and after all the whole world is full of them.
That will be my ice-breaking post as a new B School student, after a stint as a software engineer ( I am not sure, can I call myself like this, may be my colleagues can really say). So what made me come here is all I would be briefing more as it would make myself clear and also could be of great help for others who may have Self-Interests in my similar lines.