CATastrophe

Who will bell the CAT you ask eh? I don’t know who will but what I know is that I definitely won’t be among that lot… this year at least. Yes, this year means I am going to attempt it next year as well. My friends have been attempting to crack the supposedly toughest and trickiest exam for the last 3 years and that too after studying a lot. Did I study? Oh yes I did but only for 13 days before the exam. But I did study seriously for those many days except for the fact that the paper setter knew what I was studying and decided to ask questions from the topics I had left for option :(. Seriously I was skimming through the paper trying to find questions on geometry and number system. Luckily that was the case with Mathematics only and the other 2 sections went fine. Now if they didn’t have sectional cut offs I would have hoped to bell the CAT but alas… now I know what to study (or not to study) for the next year so I will be prepared. I just hope that the paper setter doesn’t read my blog.

This image is related to the post somehow. Those who are aware of world politics might get the joke (no personal issues with any of these personalities).

I also attempted the IIFT, Delhi exam a fortnight back (the last post was from that). Those guys don’t have Pune as their test centre so had to go to Mumbai (Vaibhav’s city for Sean’s reference) with a colleague. His cousin studies dentistry in a college there so she managed to get us a room to share with her friends… in boys’ hostel and I had thought she had arranged in girls’ hostel! Kidding, I knew it was a boys’ hostel and though I had been to my college hostel rooms with my friends living there I had never stayed there overnight so the ‘hostel experience’ was new for me. I tried hard not to think of being bound to the dentist chair and getting my tooth pulled out under the pretext of ragging. But the ‘seniors’ there were so timid that later my colleague and I felt ashamed for pulling their legs... seriously those guys were very sweet, probably they are taught to be so to become a good doctor. The room where we stayed was quite clean; might be I had expected it to be in a huge mess and it was not that much so it looked clean. The walls were replete with posters of all the femme fantasies in bare minimum. When I slept my legs were touching Maria Sharapova’s long legs and Bipasha Basu’s bare torso touched mine on the right. Sometime past midnight the guy with whom we were sharing the room barged in and woke us up to announce that a bomb had been found in the nearby railway station. So he advised us not to go for sight-seeing. I was like dude we are here for an exam not sight-seeing. My colleague had a restless sleep after that but I slept peacefully. I don’t know whether the reason was being tired after the travel or Maria and Bips giving me company. The exam was on Sunday and we were told that the traffic on road would not be heavy but we hadn’t thought that it would be so less that even a taxi was not in sight. Somehow we got hold of a taxi after walking a bit. The much fancied fast-pace life of Mumbai was evident from the hustling crowd at the railway stations. For a person like me who has been brought up and acclimatized to the laid-back life of Pune, it was no less than a horror. Trying to alight from the local trains was itself a Herculean task. Somehow we passed away the weekend in Mumbai among the bomb-scares (hoax or not we don’t know), exam terror (real, I can vouch for that) and I really didn’t have the energy to meet anyone in Mumbai so called up all those whom I had promised to catch up with and said “Hey, maybe next year I will be attempting this exam again, so please not today.”

How horrible is it that the exam for the colleges for which you are not eligible is much better than the earlier ones! I was not aware that to appear for JMET one has to have 60+ aggregate percentage in engineering (damn! 60+??) and the form didn’t mention it so I had filled it up. After one of my friends told me about the eligibility for a call from the colleges I decided to attempt the exam for practice (I have other exams lined up as well) and to my surprise and dismay it went off extremely well. That’s life eh?

By the way, blogspot is giving me troubles (not blogger though) and I am not able to comment on blogs so please bear with me for a while to comment on yours’ and reply on mine.

S - O - R - R - Y

The entrance exam season for MBA courses kicked off in great style with the CAT 2007 on 18th Nov. I will write more on that in the next post but after that I gave IIFT, Delhi exam. This exam has a GK section in addition to the maths, logical and verbal sections and whoa! it was a lengthy paper. So I didn’t manage to reach the last page of my GK section, in time, on which the questions were as if drafted only for me :(. In one question I had to match the creator of Calvin & Hobbes cartoon characters (Yashita stop grinning)… yes the same characters which open all the posts on this blog. Another question asked the candidates to match Bond girls with their movies. I could match the names of the actresses with their faces in my mind but I have not seen a Bond movie yet. Yeah no need to revisit the earlier sentence.. I am yet to see a Bond movie. I know Pierce Brosnan was the previous Bond guy so when I saw The Thomas Crown Affair movie on television sometime back I was quite amused and confused seeing ‘James Bond’ stealing. Later a friend told me that it was not a Bond movie *ahem*… I hope Bond fans are not reading this post. A few other questions which I could have managed to answer just slipped out. Moral: Never read the unattempted questions after going home.

So I would like to tender heartfelt apologies to Mr. Bill Watterson and James Bond & his babes. As a punishment I have been reading my C&H books daily, for at least 1 hour before sleeping. Also I will be updating the Desktop Goddess series with a Bond girl and might watch a 007 movie in near future. Yes, I like to inflict nice punishments on myself ;-) This post is dedicated to Watterson :)

Jack and the beanstalk(er)

Hi! How are you dear?

Who is this?

I did not send you my new number? Now guess

This was the rough start of a chain messaging with an anonymous number who one fine afternoon messaged me. I don’t know how to frame this sentence correctly but... the person insists that he/she/it is a female and knows almost everything about me. Added advantage is that she is single *ahem*. Now I am quite sure that it is some friend who is playing a prank coz I don’t have my mobile number displayed anywhere in public and more so coz I changed my own number a few weeks back. My first suspect was Aditi coz I had played the ‘stalker-on-cell prank’ on her with help from her sister Pooja he he he… it was fun :P. But then now it seems she is not the culprit :D. So who might be the person on the other end? I don’t know and don’t want to know coz the person is really smart in her (let’s stick to one pronoun) replies and if her identity is revealed then I would lose fun in those replies. Now I am safely assuming here that she is someone I know but what if she is really a stalker? He he... now if that person is reading this space by some chance I am not calling you a stalker but just thought of this so chill! Why I am thinking this is not coz of the anonymous sender but recently the newspaper was swamped with stories of stalking. Cyber stalking is not a new phenomenon but with media coverage and public awareness more and more stories are coming forth. But a new trend has started that whenever a crime under this is reported everyone blames the social networking sites like orkut, facebook etc. for this. I mean it is right up to an extent that we meet and tend to get close with unknown people but turning these sites into a scapegoat is not the solution. In Mumbai, a rich man’s son was murdered after being kidnapped by his new found friends on orkut. So when the news reports were being widely publicized, my cousins were ‘scrapping’ on orkut. Dad was at home on a leave and he got curious from the news reports that what the hell is orkut all about. So he finally managed to convince my sis that he wanted to know about it. When he came to know that I was also a member of orkut he was like “Really?” Probably my dad still thinks that all I know is MS Word and Excel… he he he. I knew this day was gonna come and I had already spruced up my profile and mainly removed the link of this space. I don’t have any particular reason to keep this site away from parents and relatives but yeah I would like to keep it that way. Luckily there is so much in the profile there that he never managed to read it. I know we have digressed from the stalking issue. I was talking to a colleague last week and one of her ardent admirers (she might have many coz she is pretty) had created a fake profile of hers on orkut. Generally fake profiles contain objectionable matter but this profile was kept so clean that none of her friends had an idea that they were talking to her stalker and not her. Luckily she and her boyfriend managed to nail the person and a simple threat worked. But the need of the hour is strengthening of laws to curb this stalking menace. Some people are demanding banning of orkut in the wake of these cases but I don’t think banning a site is the solution. Remember the ban on blogspot by the government? It is quite a debatable issue and what we can pray is that everyone is safe among the stalkers roaming around in the virtual and real life.

I am going on a 2 week leave for preparing for the exam on 18th of this month. After that as well a couple of exams are lined up. So won’t be around for a while... all of you take good care of yourselves and keep smiling.

Every story has a line..

and every line has a story

One of my colleagues requested me to keep all my whiteboard lines saved somewhere and this is one place where I can easily do it though I have been clicking them as and when I change them. But some of the lines which came into my mind but did not make it to the board have to be mentioned somewhere. So here is first part of the lines I can remember.. will be updated as and when I have new ones. Disclaimer: I think all the lines are original but if there is any copyright infringement then yeah go ahead and sue me. Just make sure that I win the case :p. Many say that some of the lines are obscene but I would defend myself by saying that many say pornography is obscene but there are people who say it is an art. It is just a matter of one’s perception :D

It is almost 2 years that I had put up this one on my desktop in office and later had created a good one by merging some pics but sadly it got lost during the machine upgradation. But later didn’t do anything using pics until last week. It has been two and half years in this company and I am sitting in the same place since the first day and have had more than a dozen cubicle partners till date. Even now as teams are being shuffled people are being shifted to different places. So I used one of my childhood pics and added to it..

If you sit in the same place for a long time, you start thinking that you are the king.. or you really turn into one :-)

Sometime back my friend had forwarded me a text message which read..
‘Board outside a red light area: Married men not allowed. We serve the needy, not the greedy.’
This message had me smiling for its sheer creative brilliance. Later I wrote..

Seen outside a whore-house: Tit for that

I have been attending workshops of my class on weekends, and trust me after every workshop I feel attempting the upcoming CAT exam is even more difficult. One such geometry workshop later we guys came out swearing and some of us decided to grab a beer at a nearby bar. I too joined in coz it had a TV set and India-Australia match was being aired. Since I don’t drink one of my friends came up with a nice nickname for me, ‘tea-toddler’ instead of teetotaler.. he he. I remember someone asking me in a party the reason for not drinking. “Driving?” he had asked. I had said, I don't drink so that the sloshed up gals have a sober guy to make out with, which later went on the whiteboard. Now you know why the gals were drinking a lot that night ;-)

Then there was a government ban in some country on kissing and my take on that had left Keshi & Kathy hot.. with anger of course :D
If it is not allowed to kiss in public places is it ok in private...?

Ha ha.. I got the most brickbats in company for this one.

Pam and Rick got a marriage license this week and there was a discussion in my cubicle on the movie King Solomon’s Mines so..
If you can’t be King Solomon then give a try to be Rick Salomon

If you don’t know who Rick Salomon is then you will have to catch the next flight to fly down to Paris and stay for one night there :D

Have a nice weekend :-)

The buck doesn’t stop here..

it dies a silent death at the hands of #%#*@ like Salman Khan

Media circus will soon descend on the city after a long time.. after the Brangelina episode I guess. This time the reason is, perhaps the ‘most famous and most talked’ about accused of the 1993 Bombay blasts case, film star Sanjay Dutt. He has been shifted to a jail here, which is just a few kms from my office, from Mumbai for security reasons. My mom and I were having a debatable discussion whether the punishment meted out to him (6 yrs RI) was correct. Mom was of the opinion that he should have been released on probation for his exemplary behaviour while I said that it was a good judgement which would set a high standard for the judiciary. Here is my take on the whole fracas over his imprisonment..

Rarely do Bollywood stars get punished for their crimes (note that I am not calling all Bollywood stars criminals but you are mature enough to get the hint) and this seems to have made the stars comfortable to go on committing ‘mistakes’ and go unpunished like many politicians & influential people and their kith and kin. Sanjay Dutt has confessed to having friendship with some of the big names of the underworld mafia and possessing gun/s so it would have been very unfair to all those who are convicted and sentenced & especially the victims of the blasts and their families, to let him go scot-free even after the confessions. Regarding the point that the 6 years punishment is huge, yes I agree that it does seem big when you compare it to other movie stars like Salman Khan (running his vehicle over people on road while driving in an inebriated condition and shooting endangered species of black buck) and Fardeen Khan (possessing drugs in person) who were simply let off or the case is still pending? The masses are defending Sanjay Dutt saying he is a messiah of peace and goodwill now after his on-screen character Munnabhai has topped charts and he is spreading Mahatma Gandhi’s message of non-violence across the world with his movies. Excuse me but he was paid for enacting that character and a reel character is different from a real person so one cannot pardon him for his good roles. I believe that it is appropriate that he got sentenced for the crime he committed.. regarding the term of imprisonment I am not a lawyer to know intricacies of how long a convict should serve for the crimes so won’t comment on that.

Today I got my hands on the CAT (the exam which I would be giving for admission to MBA course) form after a frantic run from branch to branch of UTI bank. For the last 3 days not a single employee of the bank (they have the rights to sell the forms) was aware when the new set of forms would be available after the earlier stock got exhausted. Last year the form was available online but this year they don’t even have it online. What a shame that the premier management institutions which are compared with the Stanfords’ and Harvards’ don’t have the basic form online. I had to wait for almost one and half hour in a queue to get the form which I think sucks especially when last time I had filled it online. In the last few days I saw hundreds of students waiting for the forms and no one to give an answer as when they will be available. Who is to be held responsible?

I had a fight with the seniors (management) in the company when they expelled 8 junior people for ‘non-performance’ even after their team leads had rated them well in their performance. The HR person and my project manager said that they couldn’t do anything for them and can’t do anything either coz it is not in their hands to argue with the top rungs of the hierarchy. Then why the hell are you in that position? If you can’t fight for your people then what a wasted life you are living. I had a meeting with the senior project manager where I got a letter of promotion and he asked what suggestions I would like to give. I told him that I am really disappointed with the administration and I won’t be giving any suggestions coz they are never considered and just for formality we are being asked about those. Why I am still in this company.. I have some reasons to stay back but the fiscal year 2007-08 would be my last here is a sure thing. I hate people who can only accept appreciation and not digest criticism and accept blame.

Mr. Truman, sorry but the buck doesn’t stop anywhere.