Mid-Feb update

Like I told someone the other day, I am regularly irregular. I post once a month. On trivial things. Like websites and marriages.

February has been quite eventful so far. Good events and bad events.

Bad first. Of course. Increased pressure at work. The “recession” or “econamageddon” as someone called it on NPR’s Planet Money podcast isn’t exactly easy on capital equipment sales. And there are other issues too.

Then Voteyatra had to be put in the cold storage. This is all that’s left of it now.

Voteyatra in hibernation

So we’ll have to wait for another day, for it to rise like the phoenix. (pardon the exaggeration). That’s been the most startup-y thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Now for the good. Late January was a visit to Pondicherry (on work). There wasn’t any time for sight seeing, the way the whole thing was planned, but we sneaked in a detour at Mahabalipuram to take in the Shore Temple.

Shore temple at Mahabalipuram

Three weeks later, I was back in the south, this time to Chennai to attend a good friend’s wedding. More on that here.

The week following that was Startup Saturday Delhi #2 which was not as great a success as the first one, but quite decent enough. The networking session seemed quite a busy one. Surely a few things to be learnt from that experience. Ritesh has a more detailed post here.

Last weekend was wordcamp. With Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and Om Malik, of GigaOM as honoured guests. Quite a lot of interesting (and boring) topics. Met a number of friends there, put some faces to twitter ids, and got acquainted with some new people. Wordcamp was trending on twitter, with the tag #wci. Of course there were a lot of non-specific tweets with that tag, but it gave a good account of the whole event along with all the happenings on the sidelines. A few people have blogged (and live blogged the event) and a google search for WordCamp India will throw them up. For me it was just an inspiration to start blogging again.

Next week is BarCamp Delhi at MDI Gurgaon. So its a trip back to the alma mater. Hope to meet old friends there. Not the twittering type.

Been quite a long post by my standards, and its been a good day.

It rained or what reminds me of home

April showers bring Mayflowers
March showers bring me joy
The grey sky above the campus towers
I feel again like a little boy.

The rains remind me so much of home and of Goa. So I went around with a cam (thanks Jai) and took some pics.

Feel free to comment on the pics and the unseasonal rains.

Raindrops keep falling on my head (and everywhere else).

The washed roads glistened.

The sky was grey and calm and the trees swayed in the breeze.

This rose giggled.

The flowers were happy

This one was shy.

The Feel Good Factor or why I love Harvard Business School

High expectation
Its like a balloon
Sometimes there’s no sense
In looking at the moon

The moon has spots
And balloons burst
To avoid getting hurt
Do your research first

And all the castles I had built about Harvard students came tumbling down like a pack of cards. And just like all the spam floating around: MDI Rocks.

Our strategy professor showed us a video of a case discussion in Michael Porter’s class and I came away impressed.
At the level of my fellow students.

The only other differences between us and them are:
1) probably that their class is quiet
2) they have greater work experience

And I don’t think that they really prepared the case as much as our prof. tells us they do. But all said and done they produce more reputed people. Why?

1) Harvard has a “brand” name
2) They have a huge roster of alumni and consequently very dense alumni network
3) Well if they admit a batch of 900, atleast 10 have to make it big!

Thinkfart would probably have asked them to look at the “numbers”. Then he would send out an evaluation mail saying,

Dear students,

Today’s discussion shows that the rigour in ur(sic!) analysis was missing. You need to understand this from the gestaldt (sic) view. The requisite skills in number crunching are sorely lacking. I expect u to perform to better standards. I have attached a matrix on which your performance can be evaluated

Rigour of research and analysis (including number crunching): 3
Application of strategic thought: 3
Presentation Dynamics: 4

Regards

Thinkfart
COO
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