bullet point hell

I once read something a highly successful alum had written about IIM grads. It went something like this.

“The most important thing we learn at IIMs is the art of making a presentation. It is unfair, the kind of advantage we derive in the corporate world from this single attribute.”

Hard to believe. If what’s on offer everyday here is anything to go by. The truth is, in IIMs, presentations suck! Period.

(Note: I am referring to presentations, not just ppt slides, but the whole process of presenting anything to an audience. The difference is massive)

Lets accept it. We make bad presentations, backed by ppts containing slide upon slide of bullet points coupled with gaudy templates and microscopic font narrating extremely verbose stories. We stutter from one bullet point to the other spending a niggardly amount of time on each before we look to the next point on the slide to rescue us from moronic silence. In short, we suck.

I know what you’re thinking.

‘Nobody cares. Who the hell will put in effort for such a silly class presentation? OF COURSE we can make a good (nay, excellent) presentation if we really wanted to.’

I know a presentation with something at stake will definitely turn out better than the ‘read paragraph – convert into 3 bullets – read out bullets in class’ type of junk we regularly churn out. But let’s be realistic with ourselves.

After 2 years of this crap, we aren’t going to wake up one day and make an outstanding presentation. We might accomplish a decent one, but definitely not anything that’ll leave the audience wanting more.

Have a look at the presentations handed out by the alumnus visiting the college for summer ppts. They WANT to make a good impression, being an alumnus and all that. They WANT to make their company look good. They WANT people not to fall asleep. Surprise! Surprise! They suck too. And this is going to be us in the very near future.

At this point of time you’re probably thinking about the handful of people who do make good presentations. DON’T. Because the argument is for the batch as a whole. At the end of the day, its the majority that matters.

Think about it.

PS: Will come up with another post on this topic soon. Promise.

getting a kick out of life

(Disclaimer: The incidents described below are totally fictitious and any resemblance to any person, living or dead (which, by the way, will emerge as a distinct possibility), is totally incidental.

You Wish.)

Humanity has reached the end of the road.

There was a time when birthdays used to be peaceful affairs celebrated with nothing more dangerous than sharp wit or blunt humour.

Now they are occasions marked by inglorious kicking sessions dominated by monsters with blood in their eyes and anything from bats to sticks to pipes and footwear in their hands. You get walked down death row, drenched in (preferably) cold water, beaten to near (in some cases actual)unconscious, splattered with eggs and cake, and if unlucky enough to have a lot of caring friends, get your balls smashed against the nearest pillar.

I know you’re thinking, “Where’s the fun in that?”

Here’s the good part. This unholy ritual is then followed by people hugging you, along with reluctant sighs of “happy birthday, dude” whispered in your ear. You then get the honor of taking them to the mess and throwing an open party where people eat some and then carry some more back to their rooms. Everyone’s happy including the birthday boy who is nearly in tears (of joy, they say). The guy calculates his popularity in accordance with the pain in his ass and feels happy enough to have gotten through alive.

Long after I’ve accepted the barbaric kicks and physical torture, there are still a few things that trouble me. There are always less “Happy Birthday”s then the number of people kicking the shit out of the poor soul. Simple logic leads me to understand that there are at least a few people out there who come in, kick the guy, then go back without even a customary, if reluctant, birthday wish.

I wonder how they manage to sleep at night.

But if the new trend is to be believed, those were the good old days. Just today I heard of this shocking incident that occurred sometime back. The birthday boy in question was throwing a party. It was celebrated with the customary kicks, followed by a night of heavy boozing (to relieve the pain, one supposes). Now, comes the scary part. The poor soul, now totally inebriated, was walked to his room, where he was then kicked, again (!), for good effect. The troubling thing is that the guy obviously had no idea he was being wished (?) the seven seas and the seven heavens in his drunken state. But in his oblivious state, he got a few heavy rounds of merciless birthday bumps, and then some.

In short, a drunk guy got the shit kicked out of him for no obvious reason.

Seriously, what have we turned into?

quote hanger?

Generally speaking, there can be three reactions that can occur when you read a quote.

1. You feel truly inspired / heady / drunk / like a stupid moron in comparison to the enormous intellect displayed through the quote in question.
2. You go like this. “OK.”
3. And then the truly special one comes along. And you go “what the bloody $#%^&!”.

Here’s one. (Today's 'quote of the day' from google reader)

“"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."

One soggy brown banana for guessing where this one goes.

Or like Iyer says “Kuch bhi bolege kya!?”

a class apart

Today’s four hour class on retail merchandising was a real eye opener. For the ill-informed (the small group of people who haven’t yet made fun of the retail guys who attended the class), this was a guest lecture by some industry guy (from somewhere out there) which was supposed to take place between 2:00 and 6:15 pm.

Yes. 4 hours and 15 mins precisely.

Meaning some guy was supposed to come over and tell us that the way we learn it is not the way it’s done in the REAL world (followed by a meaningful smile at the students).

“No. I don’t mean to say that what you are studying is not useful (surreptitious glance towards the prof.). What I mean is … blah blah blah… “

This precious gyaan would then be followed by a majority (nay, all) students patting their backs about validity of their opinion that everything taught in the class room is (pardon me) BULLSHIT. To be followed by a session of bitching about how pathetic the professors are and how outdated the course material is and so on and so forth. Everyone’s happy. Except the prof. who got the guy down in the first place.

Well, here’s what really happened.

To start off with, the class was supposed to be for 4 hours. My observation says that a guest lecture of an hour and a half gets about 7 mins to prove himself. If he doesn’t curse or declare that everything we learn in college is utter crap, he’s dead. This guy looked short on confidence, stood leaning on the chair, and declared in a mousy voice (without the aid of a microphone), “I am going to talk about retail merchandising”. At which point 100+ students decided that their time was better spent fantasizing about the projector screen falling on his head than listen to him. He could have gone on to demonstrate the top 100 positions from kamasutra and nobody would have given a damn.

Nobody could hear him beyond the first 2 rows. The only person who was even making an effort to pay attention reminded the guy to use a mike, following which his family was cursed up to 8 generations on either side.

The smart ones had foreseen all this and had come fully prepared with newspapers, books, biscuits and the like. The dumb ones tried sleeping or borrowed from those who had backups (extra books, newspaper supplements etc).

The guy went on for 3 hours, interrupted by questions from the only guy in class who was still awake, (the professor), after which he decided to spare us the misery of the last hour and hastily dismissed the class. “Any questions?” he asked and was met by a hundred incredulous smirks.

People got 2 classes worth of attendance, the professor got an industry lecture, some guys got a few hours of sleep while the remaining managed a few pages of their current book (which ironically included a book titled “What they don’t teach you at B-School).

By the way, did I mention that he got a standing ovation? Meaning people had gotten up to leave when some guy gave what sounded like a vote of thanks, and people banged on the tables. Because that’s what we do.

So help us god.

pool friend

I have a friend.

We play pool.

Yes, that’s it. That’s the best and probably only way to describe him now. We used to be great friends once, and share our deepest secrets with each other. Even though I know he would definitely be around when I need him, that’s not the defining feature of our friendship. It most definitely is the fact that we play pool.

It’s been 5 years since I’ve left my native town. I used to return about once a month to visit. Now, I come once in three months. That’s all that’s changed. The rest always goes like this.

“Hi.”

“Hi! You’re in town! Great! When did you get here?”

(No names needed.)

“Two days ago. So, free in the evening?

(No need to mention pool. It’s understood.)

“Ya. Sure. What time are you coming?”

“Will be there at EXACTLY 7:30. Same place”

(I always stress on ‘exactly’. It’s always the ‘same place’.)

He always makes me wait for 15 mins. I always promise myself to stress more on ‘exactly’ the next time. He comes, we hug.

“How’s Life?”

“Screwed up!”

“How’s your’s?”

“Frikkin Pathetic!”

It’s always snooker. Always one hour. I always lose.

“Ok then. See you tomorrow?”

“I’ll try. Difficult”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

We never meet the next day. We always meet the next time I’m home.

“Hi”

“Hi! You’re in town! Great! When did you get here?”

And so it goes…

Ps: He’s the best friend I have in this town. Yes, I need to get a life.

the commoner

(This blog was written a year back, when i was just another fresher... couldn't resist uploading it though. I view things very differently now)

It’s been a long journey.

I was once the best. Just like everyone else here. One of the elite. One of the few selected into the IIMs. Just like everyone else here. But in these 2 years here, I shall be a commoner. It’s the price I have to pay for the acclaim to come. 2 years spent being just like everyone else.

Maybe one day I’ll be the best again. An IIM alumnus. A manager (?) from one of the most premier institutes in the country. A young man with the hopes of the country on his shoulders. Just like everyone else here.

Maybe one day I’m going to wake up and discover that my glory days are over. That these days in college were the finest and most happiest days of my life. That I would have then turned into either an ‘executive’ or ‘manager’, just one more nondescript guy who goes to work at 9 in the morning and comes back late for dinner. Maybe these are supposed to be my last few years of glory. Maybe I’m supposed to value them more with each passing day. Before I become a commoner. Just like everyone else here.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

a file named suhaib

Every once in a while i get disgusted by the state of disarray that my lappie usually falls into. And every once in so many times when I've thought about it, i also go one step ahead and try doing something about it.

And that’s when I find it.

The file named 'suhaib'.

That being the most descriptive name that would have occurred to me when naming that particular masterpiece. It doesn't matter what I have stored in it. Downloads from the net, projects reports, jokes, photos, a note telling myself to clean my lappie. All of them have the same inexplicably perplexing and bewildering name.

Happens to folders too. The clincher is when I find files named ‘suhaib’ inside folders named (surprise!) ‘suhaib’. Of course I never stop at just the one file name inside the folder. There’s inadvertently one ‘suhaib’ of each kind. One word doc, one pdf, one playlist, you name it! (pun unintended)

And there are always the edited versions. And in my infinite creativity I would have named them ‘suhaib1’, ‘suhaib2’ and so on.

And not necessarily in order!

I do agree that I’m not always this moronic when naming files. Sometimes I name them ‘suhaib revised’, ‘suhaib edited’, ‘suhaib v1’ and ‘suhaib v2’. Lucky me!

A virus trying to screw up my comp by filling it with suhaib files wouldn’t have been able to do a job nearly as comparable.

He who should not be (thus) named

Before you Harry Potter fans start planning on planting Dungbombs in my room or surreptitiously slipping a few Puking Pastilles into my food at dinnertime, let me explain my intentions for having written this article. Though I could have come up with about a thousand reasons for trashing a Harry Potter book in the time it takes me to tie my shoelaces, most of them would be argued on the basis of the ‘perspective’ argument , meaning “I think its bulls***”. To this end, I propose to present the one single argument which I believe is irrefutable, even by the most hardcore of Harry Potter fans.

It hit me at 7:35 in the morning, after a night spent reading Harry Potter’s newest adventure. I was in the middle of yet another uninteresting and drawn out Potter book, when it stuck me (on page 327, to be exact) that J K Rowling couldn’t have come up with a single decent name for a character if her life depended on it. Come to think of it, she probably made up all the names in the books as a personal joke just to keep herself awake while writing them. God knows there wasn’t any other way she could have survived them all.

The way I see it, she probably started earnestly naming the characters in her book in order of importance and then got just plain bored. That, by me, would have happened around name three. So we have exactly three acceptable names in the whole book. Potter, Hermione, and Dumbledore. That’s where the naming stops and the fun begins. After that, she probably put in as much thought into it as I do in deciding how exactly to break my eggs for breakfast. I can clearly imagine her now, sitting at her table, trying to come up with new names.

“Ok. I need to name one of the villains, the teacher who is very strict. Hmm… strict... severe… Severus! Yes! … And he’s the head of the house with the stupid snake logo… Snake… snate… snale.. (naa…too slow)… snape!.. that’s it. Severus Snape! God! That was tough. Guess I’ll go grab me a large cappuccino and a couple of aspirins.”

She could just as well have named him Mr. Poisonious Piethone.

Before you trash this as being imbecile Potter bashing, try coming up with just 3 names that have absolutely no silly connection with something else in the book. (You may even be able to accomplish it, but don’t even try bluffing me that it wasn’t bloody hard!)

Let me just clear up a point here. I have absolutely nothing against her naming all the spells in her books in accordance with the English translations of the effect they have, like ‘Expelliarmus’. That, to me, is acceptable, because the spells could have been named after the effects that they had and since they live in Britain… blah blah. But try telling me that Luna Lovegood was named that way because she was obviously loony by birth itself, and I’ll get the distinct feeling that you’re trying to yank my chain here.

I’m also fully convinced she was on speed when she came up with the founders of Hogwarts. Pray, how else could all four of them have had rhyming names to begin with? To top things off nice and good, there’s the matter of the characteristics of the houses to match the names. Rawenclaw is for sharp wit. Gryffindor is for bravery and ferociousness (or something like that). Hufflepuff (I really think she could have done better than that) is for huffing, puffing and working hard! (Duh!), and finally the snake house, Slytherin. (At this point I try hard to shake off the image of the students slithering along like snakes into the common room. It doesn’t work.) Some would call it being imaginative. I would call it one joint too many.

Add to that the Weasleys, who live in ‘The Burrow’ (frankly, who would name their own house that way), and who’s patronus is a weasel (Duh!), OlliVANDer who makes (you guessed it!) wands, and the non-human elf who is called (a) Kreacher, and Voila! You have one author, seven books and a truckload of ridiculous names.

This was the point at which I became inspired to secretly rechristen her Miss. Nutty Nitwitious in my mind.

Going by her standards, I don’t think she was very satisfied by the name Lord Voldemort. It’s too random. Too unconnected. Too normal. That’s the precise reason why she gets everyone to call him “He Who Should Not Be Named”! Makes perfect sense to me.

Come to think of it, “You Know Who” is by far the most outstanding and inspired name across all her books by a long shot!