The smartest guys in the room

I haven’t been updating my blogs very frequently because of what is now the routine I have to go through and hence, I thought of writing a few specific updates about some people I got to meet and listen to recently. First, I attended a speaker series on ethics in corporate world that had two different speakers on two of the biggest corporate scandals in early 2000, the collapse of WorldCom and Enron, by one who committed one of the crimes and the other who investigated the other scandal. I also got to listen and later meet two senior vice presidents of two interesting companies, Pepsi Co and Emirates.

Walt Pavlo was an Engineer and later did his MBA to join one of the largest long distance call service provider known as MCI. His job was to manage the collectables from his customers and when he realized those credit could never be repaid, he did certain manipulations in the accounts and made the book look good. The company and the top management loved the fact that numbers were very good and he was rewarded with a promotion. Later, the company got acquired by WorldCom and later WorldCom collapsed due to a huge write off in the accounts receivables. Walt was then serving his term in prison and informed the authorities of where the bad debts (that were written off) came from and was later interviewed by FBI. After serving his term of 2 years in prison he started a second career in public speaking. He also told that he was helped by Frank Abignale (The name must be familiar from the movie “catch me if you can”). Around the same time another big company, the seventh largest corporation in the US then, Enron, collapsed. This is a pretty interesting case from an Organization Behavior point of view. As Enron issued many employee stock options and bonuses based on stock performances, the primary goal of the company/ management became “To increase the stock prices”. When they felt that the company was not meeting targets they found ways to cook the books and look good in the market. They found loopholes within the laws/ regulatory body and found many creative ways to show their numbers good including ways of how to book profits much in advance for an asset they didn’t even purchase. They were smart!

One common thing among both the crimes was that these crimes were not well planned or intentional, rather were things that just happened out of coincidence to make everything look good. When Walt Pavlo first reported that the creditors were not paying the dues, his boss was not happy about it and asked him to somehow make the numbers look good. Similarly when Andy Fastow, the then CFO of Enron was interviewed by the FBI, he said that he is not a criminal as all that he did was for his employees. When the final draft of the annual report used to come to his table with numbers cooked, he couldn’t refrain from signing the report as it would effect the bonuses of his colleagues. Second thing is that these white collar crimes happen because no one asks questions when there is some good news. We have a tendency to introspect only when there is any bad news or results and when everything is good, we just don’t bother about anything. So, its very important to be honest and not lose it for the temptation of being praised by the boss or an extra bonus, else one could land up in prison.

Pepsi Co has been an interesting company especially its marketing has fascinated me ever since childhood. I got more fascinated about Pepsi Co after reading the book by Roger Enrico “The Other Guy Blinked”. In fact Sr. Vice president Luis Montayo started  his speech with “We are the No. 2 company in food and Beverages industry and No. 1 is not the company in Atlanta”, it reminded me of the book a lot and wondered whether their rivalry against Coke would ever end. But there is another reason to why I like Pepsi Co. Pepsi Co has been doing well in the environmental sustainability since a long time, even before 1990s, when many corporations didn’t even know about Environmental sustainability. In fact a recent report (I don’t remember where I read this) said that Pepsi Co is the reason why India’s Production of potatoes increased and India, which was once importing potatoes has now started exporting potatoes. It would be interesting to see whether the increase in production was an increase in supply or an increase in quantity supplied. Anyway this was an interesting topic to discuss with him later during the reception.

“When was the last time you tried something for the first time. Fly Emirates” was an interesting caption (not the current one though) that captures anyone who likes to be challenged once in a while. Emirates has been in the international airlines services since 1985 and became the most preferred airlines in the whole of 2000 with their flagship campaign where they could fly you from any source to any destination with just one stop in the middle. That has to be Dubai. The company is an interesting case because in an industry where macro economic factors affects the most, and most airlines show losses or go bankrupt during recessions, this company has been in profit for 22 years consecutively. When the Senior vice president, Dr. Brenden Noonan visited our campus, someone did ask him whether it was because the company was strategically located in UAE as the fuel cost is the major cost component in airline industry for which he replied that UAE can only produce crude oil while the airline fuel has to be purchased from a refinery abroad at the same price as everyone else. Also, he spoke about marketing by sponsoring sports teams/ events. Interestingly, they constructing a new stadium for an English club “Arsenal” has got them a market in South America! Also, they got a contract from ICC to sponsor T-Shirts of umpires for all ICC matches for some no.of years for just $10,000 simply because they were the first to spot an opportunity (which the ICC also didn’t notice). But, what an opportunity it is; no matter who plays, the umpire has to be on the field whole day!

One common thing among all the people I’ve mentioned above, the guys at Enron or WorldCom, the FBI agents including  Frank Abignale or the executives of Pepsi Co and Emirates, is that they are all exceptionally smart. Its been a long post, but that’s a price one has to pay for not regularly updating the blog. I’ve to get smart here, maybe.

A recap and few updates of my previous posts..

I’ve been sharing a few of my experiences here at Purdue for quite a while and its definitely worth it, if, I could add more value to it by giving more information to the readers of this blog. So here are a few things I found on the net. First, the movie “the social network” is releasing on, I believe, Nov 2 in India and here is how you can win free tickets for the premier show. Attending marketing classes this module, I kind of understand why there is such a competition (event) and if I were to be Mark Zukerberg (CEO of facebook, assuming he is involved), I would give away free tickets to almost everyone who writes. So, you have 3 days, write in 20 words, how social network has changed your life and chances that you might win a free ticket is more.
Second, you might recollect the story of Kiva. Here is the speech she delivered on TED. The speech was delivered in July. So, the speech was very much similar except that she wasn’t so emotional when she was at Purdue. Pay attention to the Profounder concept, I did forget to mention about that. Now, for those who haven’t seen TED should indeed check the website ted.com. I often listen to these speeches and every speech has only motivated and inspired me.
If you had observed I mentioned competition and in braces, I mentioned event because my Economics Prof. makes us think of Competition as “Conflict over scarce resources”. Well, if there is a conflict in this case (too many entries than the no. of seats available in the hall), then I can’t guarantee of the free ticket. However, the opportunity cost (cost one has to forego to do an activity) is small when it comes to writing 20 words. So, give it a try!

Module Break: Time to think about everything else

This blog isn’t anything about any (MBA) experiences rather its more about the first part of the title of this blog. We have finished our first module and are having a short break for two days and a weekend and what better time than this to ponder on some other thoughts. This break had been quite useful as to make a visit to Indianapolis to get a correction done in my I-20 at the Borders and Customs office, to talk to the Director of IT resources about Assistantship opportunities, to apply for a Indiana Drivers license, to hang out with a few friends, to do some laundry, to watch some movies, to do some shopping and to follow some of my favorite writers on net. BTW did you observe that Nirmal Shekar has been writing articles very often, almost twice a month. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his articles.

Last Saturday, we invited a few American friends at Sino’s place for a Indian dinner. Sino made a Kerala style beef curry and I prepared my signature chicken curry and we had a good time that night. It was interesting to see how the guests fell in love with the pressure cooker and got excited every time the steam came out of it. That night while discussing cultures and history, Rob’s roommate asked me about the religion I follow. I casually said “My family follows Hinduism”. Then he asked me specifically about the religion that I follow. That put me to think for a while and I said “I kind of follow all religions but by birth I’m a Hindu”. To me all religions are great and calling myself an atheist wouldn’t be quite true. I kind of believe in practices of many religions and participate in all their festivals. I enjoy the wine and plum cake at Christmas to observing a short fast (only to eat haleem in the evening, sometimes two), during Ramzan. And participate in Ganesh Chaturti processions and play around with fireworks for Diwali. Oh Boy! I’m missing India now! 

Then he asked me whether it represents our generation that we are not particular about following any religious faiths. Honestly, I was drunk that night and don’t really remember what I told him. But that question remained in my mind and I thought a little more about that after reading this Tasneem Nashrulla’s post. While I know many of my friends who are pantheists or atheists that makes me think “yes, this generation is not very particular about any such faiths”, on the other hand, the frequent chaos in the name of religion makes me think otherwise. While following a faith and not following any are quite debatable, it can be argued that by not being particular about any faiths, we can avoid many potential communal clashes. On the other hand, the young generation could be aimless without following any faith and it would be easy for the perpetrators of false believes to attract these youngsters. My point is, more than religion what makes me worried are the infamous faiths starting from Jihad to anti-westernizing processions of Bhajrang dal.

Moving away from that topic, I, as always, differed with P. Sainath’s recent articles, but somehow I keep reading them as it always gives me a different point of view. But I was enraged by this article, specifically when he wrote about the movie Slumdog millionaire. I understood why the elite personalities protested against it only after coming to the US. Honestly, when someone tells me today that he/she loved the movie slumdog millionaire, I kind of feel very embarrassed. It represented an India which we do not want to be, which we have long forgotten and which is not how we should be looked at.

I wish, I had more such breaks. The break ended with shopping on the touchdown discount. Touchdown discount are Mondays after a home game when Purdue wins there would be a discount on apparels by no. of touchdowns times 5 percent. There were 4 touchdowns and a 20% discount this time. It seems like more than the actual game of football, what matters is everything else. Anyways, Boiler Up!

The social network and the parting gift

There are actually two things in my mind that I wanted to include in this blog, but since I didn’t have enough time to write 2 different blogs, I thought of clubbing them both together. One, I saw the movie “The Social Network” on Monday night and two, today is the last day of classes in this first module.

Monday evening, I had a some free tickets with me for a movie that night called “the social network”. I got those free tickets for volunteering in a net impact club activity. So, I decided to take a break from my daily chores and enjoy the movie with a few friends. The movie was about facebook, on how the idea came up and was developed. Another thing the movie concentrated is on the people involved in the development of the idea and ironically, they ended up suing each other. I loved the way the idea was developed and it resembled quite very much of how “Hobbies n You” was developed. Although HNU is no facebook, it was inspiring to see a few similarities in the development aspects of facebook and in HNU especially when they were working on creating a USP. And I recommend you all to watch this movie, even if you were not part of HNU. Focus on the exclusivity part they tried to bring in the development of facebook. To me, what I enjoyed during the entire HNU episode was the ways we tried about making an idea come to life, all on our own. It might not have been a genius but it certainly was indigenous. And it often makes me think, when there is so much satisfaction in just what we have done, how wonderful it could have been, if we were to take it further.

Second, today is the last day of our classes of our first module. That means I wouldn’t have any more of quant, Accounting and Organizational Behavior class and I will have to take exams next week. On top of these, there is a lot of pressure to get a internship. I was enjoying the bliss of being back to school and suddenly all of these come pounding. Its like you were enjoying a nice little early morning dream and suddenly someone wakes you up.

There are numerous philosophies developed on a train and I’ve heard people sharing a train example for explaining some of the philosophies they believe. One of the most resounding example was from Satish Jayaraman from Cognizant. He said that his life is like a train, like many passengers who get in and get out, but the train goes on… etc. The train examples have been so much of a cliché that many-a-times when something ends and something else is going to begin, I feel like I’m travelling in a train. Yesterday, on our final OB class, after the lecture, I went to my professor, shook his hands and told him that it was a pleasure to be in his class. He said that he appreciate that and handed out a piece of paper calling it as a “parting gift”. I took a glance at the paper and the first line that I read was… “We are travelling in a train.” I was like “oh no, not again!”. Here is the parting gift he had for us. I like it, hope you will too!

Stretching the boundaries in classroom

Now that I’m attending classes in a college for a while, I thought of writing down about how much I’m enjoying my classes here. It might be because a) It’s exciting to be back to school and b) The professors are really cool here. When I think of some of my favorite teachers, there are a few prominent faces that cross my mind. I can’t rank them in any order but each of them were different in their ways. However, what differentiates them from rest of the teachers I have faced is their approaches in teaching. Whether it be a mock election process or an “extempore skit about influencing people” in a classroom, the innovative approaches that these teachers bring in fascinates me the most. In this post I’m particularly writing about one such approaches, I appreciate in some of my favorite teachers.
There used to be a lecturer in Gowtham, who used to teach us physics. A typical class of his would begin with news updates, which was necessary in those days as we almost stayed isolated from rest of the world. Then for 15-20 minutes, he used to take a class which used to be more of diagrams on the board. There were many days that I can think of when he drew a diagram on the board and just walked out of the class without even saying a word. A closer look at the diagram for a while often revealed some of the concepts in physics. It was beautiful to discover a concept hidden somewhere while trying to decode the diagram. It was kind of a piece of art like the one in “Da Vinci Code”. There are many such instances when he used to leave us with an unfinished example, prompting us to think. Oh boy! that was stretching the limits of one’s thinking capability at least in physics.
What I appreciate in the Professors here is the innovativeness they bring in their teaching. Almost every other professor has his/ her own different approaches which will vary depending on the subject it is (with reference to Quantitative and Qualitative!). Okay, I’m talking about the Qualitative subject: Organizational Behavior (This class is so interesting that I can’t stop writing about it!). For every class we have to be prepared with a case analysis and often it is seen that the discussion in the class next day would be quite different yet related to the same topic. For instance there was this case about how conflicts arise in a team and team politics and blah blah blah! So, we were mostly prepared on those and the class begins with our Professor asking “Tell me about instances where there are teams with no/ least conflicts”. A good amount of time was spent on discussing why are conflicts rare in such teams? What are the disadvantages of having “no conflicts” in a team? Oh boy! I tell ya, its much easier to answer why conflicts arise than to answer why they don’t. And disadvantages of having no conflicts in a team! My first thoughts were “are you kidding?”. The idea is that by directing our thoughts in exact opposite direction, our professor brought the point of how to resolve conflicts and foster healthy team spirit. Today, in class we were shown slides with 8 different definitions of leadership (developed in various times) and the Prof asked us to critique each of the definitions. How better is it than someone just standing on the dais and defining “Leadership” and explaining the qualities of a good leader.
Later our professor throws out a statement: “Hitler was an effective leader but not a great leader” and asks us to comment on that. People brought in various ideas and the class discussion later narrowed to why Hitler turned out to be “not a great leader”. To summarize, Hitler’s motives were such because “Desperate times calls for desperate actions”. Felix (a German in our class), brought in the perspective of the people of Germany then. Hitler was admired in Germany when he was rising to power because Unemployment and bad debts were primary concerns of the people and Hitler gave a hope to the people through his inspirational speeches. Later he started exploiting his people and then people started fearing him. They had to succumb to his pressure!
I don’t think that someone can be a great leader unless he gets his motives right from an ethical and a moral stand point. To know more about Hitler as a leader, our professor recommended a movie called “Downfall”. I have it with me and this is gonna be my weekend watch! And hope yours too!

Net Impact and Creating Opportunities

Last Friday I joined the Net Impact club at our school. Having joined in two other clubs at Krannert, I was a little reluctant because of the time constraints I have here. There are some really cool clubs here, one of them called student managed Investment fund, where, as students we get funds from the university (an undisclosed 6 digit figure) to invest in the market. Having played around with real money, it was very tempting for me to bounce upon the opportunity. But I kind of saved it for later, in fact, I was choosing between Net Impact and SMIF as the third club, after Consulting and Operations club. The reason I chose to be in this club is because the club’s motive is so consistent with my idea of social service.
At this point, for those who think of MBA grads as greedy young chaps trying to improve their pay scale, should try to change their perception. Social service is in the heart of almost everyone I’ve met here. In fact, my team mate Josh is pursuing MBA because he can go back to the Non Profit sector and improve some organizations he consulted before joining the school.
Next, I never considered Charity/ donation as doing social service. To me giving some money, or some other materialistic things like cloths, books didn’t really make sense. I believe that Social service is done by creating opportunities to elevate people living under the clutches of poverty or any other sort of disabilities. Its like an old saying that goes something like “Feed a man with a fish, he might not starve for a day; teach him how to fish, he would never starve”.
Today, we had Jessica Jackley tell her story of Kiva.org. in the wonderful speech she delivered on “The power of harnessing Perspective” She has been recently shortlisted for the Forbes 100 most influential people on earth along Sonia Gandhi, Mukesh Ambani etc. Please do check in the website to know more about the organization she founded. As a kid, she was afraid of learning about poor people. (In fact to me as well, whenever i hear stories of poverty, I used to kind of refrain myself. It used to scare me as a kid, thinking what if I were in those shoes.) Then one day, she happen to listen to Dr. Muhammad Yunus, 3 years before he was given the nobel prize, and her perspective changed since then. She started believing that she could help people come out of the vicious circle of poverty. She thought of micro financing as a solution to help few of those living in poverty. The idea of Kiva is that, you can loan any amount (even 25$) to an individual who wants to scale up his business or start a new business. It could be a small loan to buy a sewing machine. The beauty of Kiva is next. You will know to whom the money has gone to, what is he doing with that money, and constant updates through e-mails about his progress. There is a connection established between the borrower and the lender. The borrower also returns this 25$ or so by the specified time. Then you invest this 25$ into someone else’s idea and so on. How cool it would be to track the changes that you are bringing to lives of the people. The happiness in that is your incentive, ain’t it a better incentive than tax breaks or any other form of ROI? Amazingly, the default rate at Kiva is quite comparable with Industry standards, may be because of the connection established! She had recently rejected a $10 million donation from a corporate because it would kill the very idea of Kiva.
The reason I wrote this post at 2am amidst a busy schedule is that those who think creating opportunities as “quite impossible because I never get any time in doing all these, rather I’ll just give away some money”, to change their perspective. A change in perspective could come up with something as wonderful as Kiva, then its time to rethink about our perspectives, at least in this regard!

Quantum increase in Knowledge

Flashback: In mid may 2006, ironically, on a not-so-hot summer evening, Nikhil, Hari and I were passing by our college canteen after our project evaluations were done. Life was almost on the edge of being messed up, after our evaluator slammed our project calling it theoretical, and new hopes/ excitement of getting into the corporate world. We crashed onto Mr. Anjeneya Murthy, who taught us Analog, Digital and what not! communications subjects, for a small chat. He asked us this question in the middle of the discussion “Why do you need internals?” Now, we were in no mood to answer that question. And so, we kept our mouths shut… BAU! After a brief silence, Mr Murthy volunteered to answer the question himself. “When ever there is an internal, you guys will study at least for a day. You see, there is a small but quantum increase in knowledge”. To an extend that was true. We used to study a day ahead of exams, what we used to call one day batting (I wonder what they call it here… a home run may be… whatever!). And such internals always brought in that bit of knowledge which we could sometimes recollect for the finals.

Back to today, We are done with our first exam in accounting. I’m not discussing that because I messed it up. Anyway, I get another chance to cover this marks in my finals. The way it works for this subject is that we can chose whether to consider this marks or not, in our finals. The reason for the little flashback I brought in was that I found the relevance of the phrase “Quantum increase in knowledge” here as I was preparing the “cheat sheet” for today’s exam. Yes, you read it right, we were allowed to take one “8x11” paper, printed front and back, in any font, with whatever we want on it. Oh boy! I tell ya, people found innovative ways of preparing that cheat sheet. As I was trying to compress the 240 pages syllabus into that one sheet, I realized that the process did help me understand many concepts. In fact for many, that preparation of cheat sheets was itself a bigger task than actually taking the exam; it was like another exam. In a different perspective, the cheat sheet concept is like an assignment with a question “Summarize chapter 1-6 in one page”. And because we are doing it for ourselves (to be used in exam), there is lot of intrinsic motivation to do the best! Irony is that the cheat sheet was of no help for me in the exam. I didn’t have any time to look into it at all.

I was wondering what if we had such system in place in engineering! How wonderfully we could have micro xeroxed everyone else’s’ cheat sheet into one and then again micro xerox it. Oh boy! the Xerox shops in Kachiguda might have made hellava money.

For those who follow the links that I post sometimes, there is an article on the net (Its copyrighted so i don’t think I can link here) called “On the folly of rewarding A while Hopping for B”. Here is your Quantum increase in knowledge.

Seasons, Déjà Vu and more…

It happens sometimes when you are updating a blog after really long gap that you come up with a title as weird and vague like this. I’ve been busy keeping up my schedule on reading, case analysis, home works, mid term and what not? But I did miss the writing as much as you missed reading (For those who follow this blog).

The first part of my title is probably because I saw a malayalam movie by name Ritu (means Seasons), where the movie ended with a question “Seasons change, do we?”. What I understood from the movie is ‘Yes, we should change like seasons’, but its highly unlikely that we return to where we were. May be because of too much of Organizational behaviour class, I started analyzing characteristic analysis of the characters in the movie. Oh I’m not getting into details though. The movie kind of moved me though. Do comment in this post if any of you have a different opinion on the  movie.

Another reason is that the season here has changed from Summer to Fall. And I tell ya, Weather is awesome! Temperature fluctuate between 11 and 25, no humidity and cool breeze most of the time. Today, as I write, we are almost at the ending of Labor Day weekend, which is when officially fall begins. I’m Hoping to see the colors of fall soon and hoping that we get a delayed winter.

The second part of my heading is because of the quant classes that I’m attending. It was in 2nd year 2nd sem, when we had Prof. Rajan lecturing on Probability and Random variables. The entire semester’s syllabus + some linear programming is our Quantitative analysis subject. The application of those theorems and concepts is different. I’ve faint memories of that class, so every day, every topic that I see on the slides is like… Déjà Vu, though I don’t feel very nostalgic about them! Good thing in Quant is that I don’t have to learn any derivation. It’s a joke here in MBA that Engineers are always behind deriving formulas than actually applying them. Sometimes our professor after explaining a theorem says “If Engineers are interested in proving this theorem, they are welcome, but only after the class”!

Coming to some specific events that happened in the last 10 days in the reverse chronological order, we had labor day off today, so this weekend was kind of relaxed. So I did my laundry along with Sino and Rolince (fellow batchmates). Kinsley and Sibin (phd students here) visited my place on Friday. John, a US Coast guard commander now, who sits beside me in my OB class, threw a party on thursday for a promotion from Lieutenant to Commander. I did go to have a few beers. On the same day we had Real Admiral Tom Ostebo, in charge of the logistics and Engineering of the Coast Guard deliver a lecture on leadership and ethics. All the military folks in our Class were dressed up in their uniforms and it was good to know that more than 15 people in our batch is from military of different countries.

Last weekend Rakesh and Laxman, visited my place. They had come to see the Moto GP race in Indianapolis. Though I couldn’t join them for the race, I definitely enjoyed their company on that weekend. It was so much like old days. This time, I did feel Nostalgic! One of the things that I’m happy about after coming to the US is that, I never felt away from home so much. The first week here, I was busy speaking to many of my friends that I almost felt like home here. Many a times I felt like I had just moved from Kochi to Hyderabad again!

Last Friday of august, we were taken to a camp nearby, where we did a bunch of team building activities. It was kind of fun to do those activities and we did take a few lesson while returning home. Below are some pictures taken on that day. I’ll introduce some of the folks I work with here…

We were trying to balance a seesaw kind of a thing. Team mates Josh (in Blue) and Chun chun seen in picture. The one behind me is Kijee.

While trying to cross a fictitious acid river with just 3 planks of wood and 25 people.

Together, trying to place one tennis ball in its place holder.

Josh, me and Steve caught napping in the middle of the event!

That’s team Tune up: Standing beside me is Jeremy, our team mentor and others sitting  from left are Kwanshik, Kijee, Somak, Steve, Tao; second row: Chun Chun, Amber, Pierson (Team mate), next two names I’m unable to recollect!, third row from left: Josh, Mike, Teresa, Deena and Amilcar.

P.S. I’m sorry, if any of you read this post and find your name spelt incorrectly. I’m too bad in spelling.

Later that week in our OB class, our Professor explained about why such camps are necessary and why do Organizations spend a lot of money on such activities. He taught about Hawthorne effect which was very interesting. To me the Hawthorne moment was when many asked me over the weekend about the inactiveness of my blog. I’m glad that I could post again, and I will keep posting.

Qualitative Vs Quantitative subjects

I didn’t like theoretical subjects in School or at College because mugging was something I always hated to do. I don’t claim to have never done mugging, because you have no choice when a) you haven’t been very attentive in classes; b) when you are left with only 11 hours for final exam and c) you are still trying to make some sense of the countless pages of text floating around. But over here, these subjects are called “Qualitative” (I emphasize the double quotes) subjects. And any subject with numbers in them are called quantitative subjects. I couldn’t understood that because my perception was otherwise.

A title that seems as boring as Organizational Behavior, where you don’t expect to see anything other that hundreds of pages about how an Organization Structure has to be, what are the values should they posses etc etc, is classified under “qualitative”! (Again, quotes emphasized). But not after attending a class and discussing 2 cases of Organizational Behavior (OB), where the Entire class is discussion oriented and there is significant marks for it. OB professor seems pretty smart. He would award 90% of the participation marks at the beginning of the class for everyone. Then if you make an Exceptional point or share a relevant experience, you get bonus. Where as if you make an irrelevant point, your points are gone. And if you don’t even try to open up, then your points fall drastically. You got to risk it!

The Americans here are pretty good at discussions. They bring in really wonderful points onto the table that sometimes I feel like “wow! where was that from”. I believe they love these discussions and hence the classes are called qualitative. Yeah, even I enjoyed the class and I seem to have understood the point. And it is qualitative, as I tend to understand some of the practices in Cognizant such as why often we were assigned into more than one project, why our project leads sit along with us etc. Work experience is indeed a good thing to have for this class!

Well, rest of the classes are quantitative in nature and have a lot of assignments and case studies to do; so its kind of boring. Its been just 2 days into classes and I’m spending most of my time in the school.

Oh Yes, Monday evening we got to attend a presentation by Tim Koegel and I must say that he is indeed an exceptional presenter (just like the title of his book). He even gave us some tips to be one like him and made us do some practice such as how to use your hands etc. It was like a ballet dance practice session.

End of honeymoon period

It has been 3 weeks in US and I had a great time so far. I was kind of enjoying a holiday period, almost all by myself. From Monday onwards, its serious business as classes are about to begin. I’ll still keep updating my experiences in this blog.
Unite week ended with a lecture by Samuel R Allen, Chairman and CEO of John Deere. His speech was mainly about the challenges in a Globalized world and how John Deere is committed to meet the requirements of the increasing population. He also spoke about the three superpowers of the World: USA, China and India. The reason he mentioned these three countries as superpowers was the dynamism the companies in these coutries are bringing into the global market. For instance, he applauded the Tata ‘Nano’ car, that changed the pricing strategy in the auto industry. He had also mentioned about the partnership with Ashok Leyland for entry into the construction space and also about the progress of the company entering in India into the agricultural equipments market, which is the flagship business of John Deere. Later during the reception, I got to meet Sam Allen, I asked him specifically about the strategy the company used while entering Indian market, considering the challenge of small size fields owned by many farmers in India. He told me that the company has products for operation in small scale and has also come up with addressing other issues such as drift irrigation that can help small farmers grow. The idea is that when the small farmers grow and start owning big farms, they would stick to John Deere.
Monday onwards, our classes will begin and that means my schedule would be mostly to meet the pre reading requirements, assignments, case study, exams. By the way, the first mid term exam is on 9th sep. And yeah, we have to start searching for jobs for internship as well. I have to find this job in the next 3 months and I want to find a job that I’m really interested into not just ending up with any job.
Sunday, 3 pm, we have a lecture organized by the University to be presented by Khaled Hosseini, author of the book "Kite runner" and I’m pretty much excited about that!

Update on Sunday 7pm:

I attended the Khaled Hosseini’s public speech along with may be more than 5000 folks at Purdue. It was such amazing to see so many people being moved by his story and narration. He said that the main character of Kite runner “Aamir” was his alter ego. He said many things about him, as an author, that he does not make any profile of characters, rather the characters build their profile themselves as the story progresses. He also mentioned that he is more interested in bringing out the characters and their relationships in most of his writings than highlight an event or a particular situation. Probably, that’s why his writings are bit more emotional. He also said that he had actually finished the book even before visiting Afghanistan several years after his family moved to the United States. So, most of the book was written imagining how it would be if he were to visit Afghanistan. One prominent thing he told was that he would feel guilty because he has been able to live a better life while many of his countrymen were in the clutches of Soviet Union, Taliban and the US. I was just wondering how people would be living there for almost half a century when rest of the world was progressing in Industrial revolution and the IT revolution. The third wave might have never hit those shores!

Thursdays are fun @ Purdue

We had a session on Purdue libraries and it was interesting to know how the concept of libraries with millions of books have turned into a bunch of databases. Being a student is often a luxury. For instance, we have access to reports that are worth some millions of Dollars. Information has so much value in the real world! I was kind of struggling to find the latest IRS (Indian readership survey) back in India. All I could get was some bits and pieces. Now its just a click of a button away! This session also had a 20 minutes session on the Capital IQ database, which, as Krannert students we have access to. And that too for free. Some of the finance freaks where like “wow!” I was like “Hey, I know someone who works there!”. Honestly, Data monitor, Capital IQ were mere “just another IT firms”, back in India. Now I’m kind of a user here. Some other fascinating things here are Online classrooms, submission of home work by uploading into a sharepoint server, and then reviewing, grading and almost everything is online here.

Classrooms are so much fun here, not just in Purdue, in all of US I believe. You can eat in the classroom, I’m Kind of carrying a cup of coffee for every class. We get free Starbucks coffee every morning! That caffeine keeps me awake in class. People do eat their lunch and breakfast during class. I’m kind of imagining those days when we had to hide a box under the table, if we had to eat in the classroom! Another cool or rather not so cool thing is that we call our professors by Name. Not so cool because I’m still struggling to do so. These guys here are like “hey John.. what was that you said just now?”.

Coming back to Thursdays, we kind of have a schedule where classes are only from Monday to Thursdays. Fridays are usually for leadership speaker series when we have guest speakers in our campus. We have pretty interesting speakers in the 1st module such as Steven Levitt, author of freakanomics, some FBI Agents who cracked down the Enron case etc. Yeah, So by Thursdays all assignment submissions and class work is over and from Friday afternoon we begin preparing for the next week. That’s the system here. Thursday nights are meant for chilling out like I mentioned about Cactus nights last time. Today, I went out to Lafayette Brewing Co., a popular pub where we get locally brewed Beers (Of course, this was a school sponsored event!). And I tell ya, these beers are nothing before Kingfisher! But I like hanging out with these American guys. I like their sense of Humor!

Happy hollow adventure

I know, this sounds like the title of a horror movie, but the adventure we had was not any less. On the day when we had gone out for a picnic (read free food) organize by our school for “Socializing with team mates” (imagine: both hands held up symbolizing double quotes”), Ayan and I ended up in a misadventure and got lost in the woods.

Today, we were divided into teams. My team consists of an American guy, in fact a local, Joshua (Josh), Pierson from Tiwan and Erica from China. Josh is a History major with considerable experience working with NGOs and Pierson is an Economics graduate from USA and later worked in Tiwan. Both these guys are here for MBA. Erica is a graduate in Labor relations and is here for MSHRM (Human resource management) and is straight out of college. For the first module, we’ll share classes with MSHRM and MSIA (industrial Admin) folks. But the group looks pretty diversified. One of the team goals that we set up is to maintain a good work life balance, which Josh likes to call PPA (Professional and Personal alignment).  Nice one!

Then we were into case studies and related discussions. One of the case study was about Google entering into social gaming market and being a threat to Facebook. When I raised a point saying that Google can increase its customer base in the social networking domain, my professor asked “Is Google into social networking?'” Then I said “Yes, it has a product called Orkut”. He was like “Or.. what? I’ve never heard of that!”. Strange, Orkut was like one amazing invention which many reading this blog has embraced, something like a Thomas Alva Edison’s bulb, is never heard of in this part of the world. In fact, for half the class Orkut was a new term. People are so obsessed with Facebook. It seems, in Korea, the government had to ban Facebook during certain time of the day so that the Kids can stop playing Farmville and go to school. I just got bored harvesting…

One of our seniors told us that one of the good things about Krannert is that there is lot of free food. Yes indeed there is. This whole week we have breakfasts and lunch. There was a picnic at Happy Hollow park (if you are wondering where the title came up from,) where we were invited. Many came there with families. We honestly went there to eat and probably catch up some seniors for free advise. We were quite early there and quickly had our food. When we were finished, everyone just started eating. We thought of taking a short walk along a trail in the woods near by. At one point it almost seemed like the trail took a U-turn but it didn’t. And by the end of the trail we realized that we had almost walked in woods for more than an hour. and wanted to return quickly. We had to find our way out to a cemetery and to a road which was quite on the opposite side of where the picnic was held. Then, thanks to Google maps, we found our way through the streets and thus walked for almost 4 miles for 2 hours. Man (pronounced as Myean here), that was tiring!.  We did manage to capture some pictures in the woods.

There was a junction in this trail where there were two roads. Inspired from a famous Robert Frost Poem, we took the road not taken and ended up in a road like this…

Had it not been for some interesting places like below, I would have sued Robert Frost!

Induction to Krannert

Today was kind of the first day for our batch. This is known as “Unite week”, where we get to meet our team mates for the coming module. To introduce the system here in Krannert, we have 2 modules per semester, each running for 7 weeks. And we have to work through the module in teams. This week we will be introduced to our teams. I’m excited about that!
The first day started with photographs that we’ll have in our profiles. We had to be in business formals for this event. A first look in business formals…

Its kind-a weird, considering that I’m not very comfortable in formals even without a suit. But I guess there is no other go. I got to suit-up for every occasion.
Few of the important things that I can remember from today’s events are the guest lecture by Kevin Sullivan, who served as Assistant (Communications) to George W Bush, the Alumni advise and the business ethics session by KGSA (Krannert Graduate Student Association) president Ben. Almost everyone unanimously emphasized on one thing; Building a brand for yourself. “You have to Build a brand of your own to sell yourself in the market”. Brand building is an important activity to focus on in the coming years. One of the line items in this task is to be associated with certain brands, because it speaks out the person you are. Sometimes it shows your character and virtues. And its true to an extend I see it. For instance, I prefer drinking Starbucks coffee because I appreciate the values, which forms the foundation of the company. In fact one of the first things I wanted to do in US was to go to Starbucks and experience it. One another thing I remember about branding is a statement made by one of our managers after our campus placements. He said “You have a brand known as ‘Vasavi’, now you have another brand ‘Cognizant’!, it is your responsibility to preserve them”. Well, Cognizant Brand really helped!. Now an additional Brand (read responsibility) is “Purdue”.
We had a diverse alumni panel. Paroon Chadha, an MBA grad and an Entrepreneur, John Goodrich, MBA grad, previously served in the US military as a helicopter pilot, Rebecca humphery, an MSIA grad and is pursuing her passion, working for NGOs after graduation, Koji Sado, an MBA grad and working in P&G in corporate finance and Adrien Green, an MSHRM grad working as a consultant in Deloitte. Everyone in the panel had one thing in common: They pursued what was their passion. John went on saying “I worked as a Helicopter pilot and now I’m managing operations in a helicopter manufacturing company. Every morning I’m excited to go to work”.
Ben was amazing in his oratory skills. He brought in an important aspect of team spirit through an analogy of a karabiner used in mountaineering. When a team is climbing up, every member has to double check if their karabiner is right. And not just his/hers but also of all the team members. Even if one member doesn’t fasten his, all the members in the team will fall down. Interesting analogy.
Paroon left us with telling a fact, that the more you dig into Purdue, you would learn more. For example, Purdue’s Golf course, considered the 2nd best Golf course in the country in campuses, is designed by a famous designer Pete Dye, who has designed courses for many PGA tours. I’m enrolling for the golf course next year!
One another thing emphasized today was networking, networking, networking. Paroon gave a good tip: to follow American Football, baseball, basketball etc. And I’m a Boilermaker from now on, supporting my home team…

Another Welcome coffee

Okay, There is nothing much I did over the week except for the International students orientation. So, there wasn’t much to write. I’ve been covering all the malayalam movies that I didn’t get to see in the last 3-4 years, in this week. I’m all relaxing before the rough time begins. Today, there was another Welcome coffee. The gathering was pretty huge today. Seemed like the entire batch turned up, however the Chinese invasion didn’t appear any less (No offense, I’m just Kidding).
There was a senior guy who helped me in setting up my laptop. He told a lot of things about the curriculum. According to him, the major difference between undergrad and the MBA is that, during undergrad, you have to do all the stuff on your own: your course work, assignments, preparation for exams etc whereas in MBA, its a team effort. i.e one who is good at one thing does the job for his/ her team in case of an assignments. Similarly during exams, not everyone gets to study everything; you do it as a team like everyone prepares his part and help others understand. Any bells ringing (to Nikhil and Surender, if they are reading this)? This ain’t new practice!
I got to meet a few folks from my batch as well. There are people from all over America: Texas, Colorado, Alaska! and from all over the world. Honestly, until a few years back I thought there were no human settlement in Alaska! There are folks with really diverse backgrounds, from arts to commerce to languages etc. except for one set of folks who were from the companies we know a lot (Infy, CTS, TCS). In all, I believe, there are 15 folks from India this time for the MBA course.
So much has been talked about malluization (a term i coined out of globalization) that there is a popular joke in Kerala that, when Neil Armstrong landed on moon, he found a tea shop run by a mallu! Then it might not be very surprising for him that there are few mallus right in his backyard. There are four mallus in our MBA batch. One guy from Kochi, another from Thrissur (The only two places in Kerala I’m associated with, rather lived in); And there is a girl, who is a mallu brought up in Hyderabad. Strange, this world is such a small place!

Time to click some photos

It has been quite a while I’m here that I thought of uploading few photos (nothing much to do these days). After all, last few days I’ve been walking around the campus and nearby areas that I’ve figured out a few places to take photographs; I didn’t want to be photographed in front of some random buildings.

First, Here is where I live…

To attend the school…

in the University…

The below statue in the picture is one of the legendary alums of Purdue, situated right at the entrance of Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering. Well, there has been conspiracies around his accomplishment but I don’t want to believe in any of them now!

“One Small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”…

Then there is the Purdue Engineering fountain right in the middle of Engineering…

What is not seen in the picture is: where the fountain is located. so, here is a picture (though not captured by our camera), that can give a sense of the location…

Then the Purdue memorial union…

Well, that’s it: Purdue University, Indiana State, United States of America!

Welcome coffee

Yesterday morning we had been to the Welcome coffee organized by our school. The objective was to meet up the new class and get familiarized with the environment.
We did reach there on time and found many students there already. We were asked to pin on the world map where we belonged to with our name plates. We could find some Indian faces and got ourselves introduced. Interestingly I found another cognizant guy, who is from Pune. But seems like most of the students were from China, Tiwan, Korea, Vietnam etc. At our table, we had two Koreans and an American and a senior along with us. We shot all the questions we had to know with the senior including those about the cactus nights. He was kind enough to explain all that we wanted. One thing he told us was that, they spend 80 hours a week in the building. hmm, that’s a correction in my first post!
Back home I was quite bored by evening, that I took a walk along the campus. Now I feel much more comfortable roaming around the campus. Kind of got familiarized with the roads and buildings. I found a Mc D within the campus and had a Mc Chicken. And contrary to how its in India, Mc Chicken is better here. But I see why not many eat it here, very fatty. For about 2 hours i walked, met a couple of neighbors. Also cooked Chicken at my place.
So that was a hearty welcome to the campus!

Being a Roman when in Rome.

It has been a week exactly after I landed up here in the US. I thought of putting down some of my experiences about living in US. I’m not commenting about the commodes here anyway, but anything other than that. When touring around places, I like interacting with the locals, eating local food, exploring the roads and famous landmarks and visiting Markets, Restaurants and Bars, inspired by a program called Sancharam in Asianet.

There aren’t enough locals as such in the campus. Seriously seems like this territory has just been occupied by the Chinese troops. Lots of Chinese folks around that its not like being in America itself. This apart, I find people here cool. One thing I like about the Americans is their communication skills. When we go into the shops we get to see such amazing way they market the products. They never look shy and are pretty much willing to help. Every other person on the road greets saying “how are you” or “Good morning”. The young chaps address saying “Wazz up?”. In a quest to find out the correct response to “whazz up?”, I tried greeting a guy, who simply nodded his head. I guess that’s the best response. I had been to a walmart in the nearby town, Lafayette. On our way back, we took a cab. The Cab driver, a local here, gave us an overview of the two cities here divided by the Wabash river. He also told us about one of the biggest party in the campus, the cactus nights on every thursdays, where we get one mug of beer for 25 cents. What 12 Rs?

This place is not a very big city as such, in fact there are two cities: Lafayette and West Lafayette separated by a river known as wabash. Purdue university occupies most of West Lafayette. University is huge. The first day I went around the campus, I got lost many-a- times. Since this being a very old university, the roads are not very huge. Most of the lanes inside the campus are one way. I took a map and started exploring the places, yet I used to get lost somewhere in the middle. Some Korean folks came to rescue one day. They were kind enough to walk along with me and show a few buildings where I needed to go. West Lafayette has only a few market places around the boundaries of the university. We live in a place called south chauncey avenue, which according to the folks here is the most happening place in west Lafayette. There are many restaurants, and food stores and bars out here. But, its all too costly here. Interestingly there are two Indian stores also here, including a pakistani store (Somehow Indo-pak ties here seems pretty good).

Some of the strange things I see here are the obsession of folks with anything that’s large. I ask for a small coke cup, the guy gives me a cup that can hold half a liter of coke and guess what, with unlimited refills, all for one dollar. The smallest Pizza is 10” in size. And you go to walmart, everything is so big. Juice, starts from one gallon, that is what more than 3 liters. Milk also the same. These things are preserved for weeks in the refrigerator. I got a few beef patties, some eggs and bread and got cereals for breakfasts. I’m waiting for a day to come when I’ll put some cereals into a bowl and pour chilled milk straight into that bowl and eat that as breakfast. Also, I’m mostly munching on frozen parathas reheated in oven. Somehow that seems to the only go for food here. Another strange thing is drinking water directly from the Kitchen pipe. At first, I felt a little shy to drink directly from pipe, but now I kind of got used to.

Weather seems horrible. Outside, its so muggy (that’s what humidity is known as) that it would put Chennai, Mumbai at shame. 30C seems like 40C in India. God knew what it was like when the temperatures touched its peak at 45C. The sun raises at 5am and doesn’t set until its like 9pm. Pretty strange; I was mistaken many times thinking it was just 5:30 – 6, only to discover it to be 8:30 in the night. Nights are quite pleasant here, however.

Just as they say Rome was not built in a day, you can’t be roman overnight!

Dollar syndrome

Back in India, money was never on my mind first. Yes of course bad debts brought hell of a time when I had to think about money a lot. Before coming to US people often warned me of the conversion habit that Indians have. To spend every dollar, people convert it into Rupees and then decide. Apparently, I too have fell into the same trap. After all, my source is from India and the money first converts from rupees to dollars.


In India Rs 350 for an 8” pizza seems pretty okay kind of “Chalta hai”. But 7 dollars for the same Pizza in US seems too expensive. Well dispossession of those 7 dollars somehow brings in a sense of insecurity!

I couldn’t understand cents at all. A dime (10 cents) looks cheaper than 1 cent. While travelling to Purdue from Chicago, I wanted to buy a water bottle. I went to a vending machine and it was mentioned $1.25 for a bottle of water. In India it would take a maximum of 5 coins to make up for Re. 1.25. I had twelve coins in my hand and I kept on putting coins into the vending machine (I was running short of time, so didn’t check the value on those coins). I was surprised that despite putting in 12 coins, I was short of $1.25 by 20 cents.

Strange! I'm yet to adjust to this new currency!

Back to School

When I was working, I missed my college life a lot. There was work pressure, deadlines to meet etc., that care free life was something I missed. The very thought of going back to school was so exciting and I’m glad that I’m back.


I’m not too sure whether the school life is going to be as much fun as it was. First, back in college, the fun aspects were friends, bunking classes, endless discussions in the canteen from politics to sports and lots of extracurricular activities. Yes, extracurriculars would be there but the major difference I see is that, extracurriculars in college were meant to be fun and we did it out of interest such as Organizing industrial tour or the Robotics. But here extracurriculars seems so much as a resume’ building activity, something that’s forced upon.

Second, everyone here is scaring me about the curriculum. Folks here say “Relax this week, from next week onwards, it will break havoc”. We have about 16 credits to finish that means 64 hours of a week I’m occupied for the coming semester. That’s 1.5 times the work load at office.

School life is something we always love. I still remember in Gowtham Junior college, we were literally treated like prisoners; those beds, nine in a small room; the canteen (aka mess), all seems so scary now to even think of. Yet we managed to find some pleasures in many ways. The very thought of that always gives me a confidence, thinking “I’ve seen even worse”.

Anyway, I’m happy that I’m back to school!