दो साल baad

namaskar mandali,

much time and water has passed beneath the bridge that connects 17th may 05 to 19th may 07!!! i've been itching on n off to write on this blog, or rather should i say itching to blog here...."blog" has now become a verb in itself....

so i guess this write up will have to be dedicated to try n explain where on earth was i....

well, going back in time....almost a month after watching DDLJ in b'lore, on 26th june 05 i was given my 1st job posting in life....to become the AREA BUSINESS MANAGER for Rest of Maharashtra for channel sales, located in Pune. The stint lasted for 13 months, till August 2006, post which i moved to Mumbai in the same capacity.

this posting required me to handle sales of UPS, DMP, Retail (POS) printers, networking products right from Jalgaon to Sindhudurg, from Pune to Latur. I had 4 big distributors contributing between 6 to 10 lacs of business and others that i appointed. United Peripherals, Suntech Computers, Microdot and Aditya Peripherals Pvt Ltd located in Pune, Aurangabad, Nasik and Kolhapur were my bread n butter. I was lucky to have the opportunity to appoint budding distributors like Viren Infosystems in Latur, Yash Computers in Ahmednagar and Mithicomp in Sangli.

Business grew during my stint and the average more than doubled in 13 months. The biggies were sufficiently stocked, keeping company perspectives in mind, and their channel retailer width was sufficiently expanded, keeping in mind their rotation of money. I had a very faithful and hardworking salesman in Mohsin, who excellently developed North Maharashtra for us. Pune remained underachieved and underdeveloped as a totally wrong resource (a fresh young girl - who never wanted this job) was deployed by the company for this market.

March 2006 was a highlight, with me achieving my AAKRAMAN target for the DJFM programme of selling DMPs. 555 was the figure i clocked!!

Parallel to i was going the whole hog on the roller coaster of personal life, with Ashita's parents suddenly denying and then 2 days later announcing our marriage plans!! I plan to blog snippets of my love life (till date!!) in another blog, with due editing and permission from the Mrs.!!

I missed the Mumbai floods of 26 July 2006, but was forced to declare a holiday even at my Pune office as Mula-Mutha had flooded some of Pune's bridges. By august, i was threatening to leave wep, had they not moved me into the ABM vacancy at Mumbai, my favourite city yet and a common 1st destination for both Ashita and I.

She moved into Mumbai late August 2006, and thus started a very interesting phase of pre-marital love life for both of us. Planning to meet only on weekends, and ending up doing so during weekdays, with me having to travel back home to Thane (during bachelorhood, i stayed with my aaji - nani for hindi readers - in Thane) very late in the nights, we both had a good time.

Mumbai was a tough posting as WeP had historically messed up in that city!! And much as i was trying, there was little cooperation from company's side and the distributors had started switching to other businesses one by one.

By January things became evident कि दाल नही गलने वाली. My old boss - who was my 1st in life and best till now - Rasti Shroff - had left and so had the next, Jayant Kaup. Many others in the organization were in a state of flight, and so i was left with no other career option than to choose the way out.

Sumit Mittal came up with the option of StanChart having openings for Sales Managers in Personal Loans, which is where i ended up promptly 22 days before i was wedded to Ashita!!

And here i am today, staying at J-16, Jalvayu Vihar, Powai....happily typing this blog away from Nikhil's lappy....

Do look forward to my next blog, which if all things fall into place will be my love story!!

Signing off for now....अलविदा

DDLJ rediscovered....10 years later!!

namaskar mandali,

firstly a very big sorry to all who bother to frequent this place. haven't written anything since end of March. so here goes, and once again, toasted to the free time i am spending at WeP!!

my projects, cut down to 2 after the midterm review, are over. one is a success in terms of its deliverables, the other not so much. the task was a little odd one. catching 30 each of CEOs, CFOs and CTOs within 15 days without any prior information about doing this...

so since this last week in office was supposed to be presentation week and report making, printing etc (which is also done) there is nothing to do!! and thats how the blog gets this title...

Bangalore ke PVR multiplex mein DDLJ lag gaya, one show in the morning (50 bucks a ticket) per day! and its going houseful. today we, josyula, nandini and i, contributed to the crowd. now i can swear to GOD that excluding me almost everyone in the theatre had seen the movie atleast 5-10 times earlier.

having no work to do, there we were!! in row no. 3, trying hard not to spoil our eyes...now this movie, was released sometime in september of 1995. but i saw it, i must admit, in its entirety only for the first time!! and i liked it....

it had all the works of a typical family bollywood flick. loads of senti dialogues, those inspirational, those patriotic, and little comedy too!! the story does prove to be a treat, taking u across the english channel from london to all over europe and then straight into the khets of sarson in punjab.

i always wonder why more than half the bollywood heroes are called "Raj Malhotra"; both name and surname either together or separate always make their presence felt there. and again, i wonder why Bollywood, which is in Mumbai, has more than half its movies scripted in the land of Punjab. somehow i feel intrigued that india is known more by its punjabi culture (in restaurants, in music, in the "aish life", and in movies). aren't the other cultures vibrant enough? don't they have stories worth portraying into films?

moving on, i wonder if the film was remade, how wud mallika sherawat look if put in kajol's shoes. ofcourse King Khan will remain King Khan, mebbe with a more sober hair cut!! it was a treat to watch amrish puri in the best of roles. i know, i know...mogambo might have been better!!

much has been written, said, discussed, thought about in the past 10 years about yash chopra's DDLJ (i tried to remember that, i hope its correct).....but since it was my first time, i just felt like "pouring my heart out" on this one!!

so till i blog again, its "tata" from me for now...

VIVA Goa!!!

hey folks,

a 3 day weekend (gud friday, holi saturday & easter sunday) made it almost necessary to make a visit home. so here i was, on friday morning 10 am, chilling at home, in GOA. the 16 hour overnite bus journey did make the travel rather taxing on my back and my sleep, but i guess it's worth the cause.

friday evening was well spent with dutta (he's working at the P&G plant in goa). at dona paula, with the moon a huge yellow disc rising over the zuari river, it was quite a romantic scene. but i wasn't exactly in the right company for romance though!! dona paula is a place where a mr. paul and a ms. dona were supposed to have jumped onto the rocks where the sea hits with a lot of surf to keep their love alive, while they themselves died doing so!! one can see the mormugao port of vasco city, the big ships anchored out in the arabian sea, the national institute of oceanography (where my dad works) and the Cidade - de - Goa, a much known 5 star hotel from the top of a rock at this place. makes for a lovely sight for sure...

next morning was HOLI. and the goan way of celebrating this festival of colours is to get ur vehicle running and be all over the place, meet people on the roads or at their homes, exchange colours, the excitement and keep making the gang bigger with each visit. finally it culminates with an almost regular dip into the sea. saline waters seem to be the best remedy for washing off persistent colours. this time, i picked dutta, manish, met many goan pals and ended up with a gang of P&G plant manager, HR manager, operations manager, R&D guy, etc. was glad to be able to take them to bambolim beach, where we frequent each holi for the customary dip!!

afternoon dutta was invited to feast puran polis with us at my place. this is a traditional marathi sweet. chana daal is first steamed, crushed to powder, mixed with jaggery, and then inserted into lumps of atta. these balls are then rolled into chapatis and roasted like a normal chapati is. eaten with spoonfulls of ghee, this makes for a lovely meal.

evening was a big get together at the beach of all goans who had made it back home for the weekend and others who are still stuck there. met a lot of friends, and some people who were friends of friends. had a gud time generally sharing info bout each other's jobs, and lives.

dinner with dutta and the chitchatting with him at his guesthouse. slept there overnite, in AC!! sunday morning watched "million dollar baby" and wud've given it the oscar myself also....major awesome movie....

and then, the nemesis of travelling back to work, reached today morning 10 a.m. and here i am, blogging from office. gotta meet boss now, at 4 p.m. so till there's more news, ciao public!!

Mysore Trip

A weekend, a bike, 2 guys with the enthu and a place to go to is all it took to make a trip to mysore. Early morning 4.30am on 12th march, manish and i pulled ourselves out of our beds. The plan was to travel in the morning cool and be in mysore, about 150kms from our home, by 9.00 am. And so we did, despite the thunder, lightning and rains that lashed bangalore the previous night at around 10pm.

We set off with gam's address (my pal who is working at the nanjagod plant of nestle india and staying in the nestle chummery in mysore) at 5.30am from our kodihalli home. by 6.30 we realized that we were on the wrong road out of bangalore, and this one headed to coimbatore. we were just about 8kms away from the wrong turn we took. backtracking our steps (wheels mebbe), we then found our way to the "actual" mysore bound road.

now this road, for the past 4 years or more is being converted from 2 lane to a 4 lane thing. and these guys seem to have found the smartest way to do so...every 10 odd kms, the laning work has been done alternately on the left and right of the entire stretch. The travel therefore, wasn't all that rosy, what with those wretched speed breakers dotting each such small patch!!

by 9.30 am we were in gam's chummery!! that dude had given us very good directions to reach his home. after settling down, having breakfast, and gam having bathed, we started off sightseeing.

the first place was ofcourse the Wadiyar's palace of mysore. built magnificiently over a huge area in the heart of the city, this palace is made entirely of granite rock of 3-4 varieties. the tourism deptt. had properly organized the movement of sightseers like us and a path was marked out to cover all parts of the multistoreyed palace. from the household pottery, furniture, clothing being used by the royal family, the rooms they lived and used, to the magnificient stands on the front side where the raja and his durbaris must've once sat to view festival proceedings, we saw it all. all barefoot!! no footwear is allowed inside here!!

our next stop was the mysore zoo. many would say, what were 3 guys, in their early 20s doing at a zoo on a bright sunny weekend afternoon!! but the mysore zoo does offer an exquisite collection of animals not normally seen in other zoos. giraffes, gorillas (only zoo in india to house one), zebras, the majestic white tiger and other wild cats (reminded me of NITIE campus) are only to name a few. birds of variety of kinds (to kindle manish's n my old hobby of ornithology) and reptiles simply added to the fun.

by now it was 3 in the afternoon. gam and manish had lunch at pizza corner (i skipped it due to a heavy brunch) and then we repaired to gam's chummery for a siesta. by 5.30 pm, we looked set to take in another splendid sight, the brindavan gardens, built right next to the krishnasagar dam on the cauvery! we reached there by city bus just in time, at 7.00 pm and spent about 1.5hours taking in its colourful and wet glory!! unfortunately, the road to the top of the dam closes for tourists at 7.00 and we cudn't be up there. a variety of fountains, waterfalls, and a muscial fountain made our evening complete.

dinner at a quiet hotel and then a much wanted sleep on gam's bed (he was kind enough to sleep on the floor) made up for all the hard work. 13th march, morning 10 am we thanked gam for his hospitality (breakfast that morning consisted of maggi and bread at home) and moved to my MREC pal's place. joydeep works for infy at the mysore campus. an hour well spent regaling old college days, we set off on our return journey.

but with a halt at tipu sultan's srirangapatna...which included the old ranganathaswamy temple (where tipu, a muslim ruler used to worship!!), couple of dungeons, a jumma masjid, an obelisk marking the triumph of the british forces over tipu's fort, tipu's place of death, as well as the gol gumbaz and the sangam of the cauvery and lokpavani rivers completed this halt.

by afternoon 4pm we were back home, resting our hurt bodies (travelling on bike is a little taxing on the backsides!!) and glad that the weekend was rather well spent. javed was home, and the only comment he passed was that both of us were looking like "khaapris" (thats negro in konkani). that night we had dinner to celebrate prasanna's and namita's b'days....

thats it for now folks....
tell u some other story some other time!!

winter projects @ WeP

hey public!!

had a hectic week at work from the 7th to 11th March, 2005. Had to conduct my survey for the website project in 2 segments, the employed class and the student community. Employed class was relatively easier to do, with friends in a variety of companies. Contact Rishi, Pandey, Milind Patil, Ankit Jain, Gam, Dicks, Sai, Pras & Bafna and his school chum Gurmeet Kaur for IBM, SAP ICG, Siemens, Intel, Nestle, Infosys, Mico Bosch, Philips & Oracle and ING Vysya Bank respectively!! Quite a sample, i mussay!!

student survey went a little wobbly, and added to my frustration at work!! manish has a cousin here who is in the 1st year of her engg. gave 50 forms to her and asked her to help me filling these out. but for my sample to be spread statistically, i need students from different streams. visited st. joseph's college of arts & science, here on residency road. one thing i must admit is the 'beauty' of college going crowd in bangalore :D:D

spent about 2 hours in the canteen of this college, trying to pursuade the public there to help me get a few forms filled out. managed about 21 forms eventually! what made the work distasteful was the manner in which "I" was being treated by these souls. being an engineer, then a mba, and still being looked down upon like dirt isn't something i was prepared to handle. in retrospect, doing a market survey surely teaches a buddying manager a few things about the tough life his subordinates face out in the field. am sure there's more to come on the learning curve in my career!!

still in search of "contacts" in commerce, medical, dental, pharmacy, law streams. am not sure how i will go about doing this...the cooperation i get (rather do not get) on a cold visit isn't something i would want to experience in colleges pertaining to each of these streams.

but yesterday, sitting with my guide/boss...a marathi speaking goan (like me), a mr. anurag borkar, i realized that i have almost done 70% of the work this survey entails. and the sweetest part was when i felt that i'd done things correctly too!!

a final plan for the project (now in its finishing stages) has been chalked out now. i will be combining my initial benchmarking with other e-commerce websites, the pilot survey with registered users, as well as this survey for non-users to deliver the cliched 4P's of marketing for promoting the website's online printing services...

project no.2 entails NPD (new product development) evaluation. finished working (long time back) on ThinPrint GmbH's offering of a variety of printing technology softwares. Have made my suggestions and recommendations for possible harnessing of some modules in my report. am now onto a solution being provided by a Fortune Informatics Ltd. from hyderabad. they are into providing software for formatting and managing printing for business documents like bills, invoices, etc. these are generated from raw data that companies generate by the tons each month!!

project no.3 entails a hardware comparison of lasers in the market. the final deliverable is a "quick reference guide" for the sales force. the opponents in the field are ofcourse, HP and Epson!!

project no.4, which will take off come april, is about impact assessment or effectiveness study of the ad campaign that WeP Print & Save are currently pursuing. finer details are still to be worked out.

but unfortunately, none of these projects require my being outside b'lore. even the last one, much to my chagrin, is to be done within bangalore city limits, so says my boss!! not that i detest bangalore, but doing marketing projects in the corporate usually involves a lot of touring (which i was really looking forward to!!)

thats about what i've been doing, and will continue to be doing @ WeP for my post placement project period till the last week of May.

The Mark Knopfler Show

hi folks,

am back coz i have something interesting to tell you. Mark Knopfler, the lead singer of Dire Straits, one of the best guitarists in the world of music was here to perform at the Parade Grounds, Bangalore.

tickets were rather dear at 1000 and 2500. we (prasanna and me) got 2 of the former and decided to attend the show.

having left office at 6.30 pm yesterday, we managed to make it past the heavy traffic of bangalore, as well as the wrong directions pras (that's what we call him) gave me on the way, by 7.40 pm. the show had begun rather punctually at 7.30 pm and we probably missed the first song.

frisking and ticket checking completed, we were amongst the crowd that rocked, rolled and chanted along with Mark as he sang number after famous number from his old band days of Dire Straits. He did include many new songs from his solo album Shangri-La which weren't known to the public in general. but the music, the lyrics as they came by, and Mark's fingers on his numerous guitars (am not into instruments at all, but this guy had brought 36 different guitars along with him!!) all combined to produce an enthralling evening.

giant screens on either side of the stage and huge speakers to help reach the beats out to our hearts more than made for the experience of a rock show! the crowd was surely enjoying with dudes propping their dudettes on their shoulders so that the fairer (and generally shorter) sex gets a gud look at the proceedings.

i for one, surely missed my own group of nitie pals, who had earlier accompanied me to the Shaggy show in mumbai. more than once did i experience a certain deja vu about the whole thing!!

but something else also was happening parallel to the event. i had mentioned in my mail home, that i had bought this expensive a ticket for the show and was going to attend it with pras. manish wasn't coming along, probably coz of his not having a job right now, and therefore, not wanting to pour cash down the drain.....

my dad didn't take this lightly and sent a curt reply yesterday itself saying "Waste of money (of course it is yours. so no comments beyond this)." since i had already gone ahead and bought the tickets, i didn't bother much about this. but lo!! matters didn't end there....and i've just received a long mail from dad, telling me i was being wrong to manish (who as a matter of fact has been my friend since kindergarten) and that i should atleast stop telling dad about all such activities that i indulge in hereforth!! else, in his own words, "I will start hating you for that".....

am not sure where i went wrong....
1. did i go wrong in "ditching" manish (who isn't earning)?
2. how bad did manish actually feel? or was it just my dad (and mom who he must have talked to) who felt bad?
3. wouldn't i have done wrong with pras who felt bad when i initially backed off after hearing the ticket price?
4. did i go wrong in telling about the rock show to my dad (not telling him would have helped end the whole thing on a sweet note)? .... (past 5.5 years of hostel life i have lived precisely without bothering to tell anything at home; anything that will cause exactly similar reactions from my folks......and both they and i have been living in peace thus....is that the right way?)
5. is this generation gap?
6. will i go wrong if i continue using my money the way i want (while keeping in mind that this use don't cause physical or mental scars to others around me)?
7. in the end, do i live entirely for others and not for myself? upto what limits do you share somebody's sorrow/misfortune? aren't u supposed to have come to this world alone and to be going away also alone?

these questions may remain unanswered forever....but the answers are for me to seek, from life, that i have lived, am living, and will continue to live (unto death ofcourse!)

NITIEans, Goans & MRECians...

namaskar mandali,

quite a weekend that just went by....here in bangalore. saturday was spent giving myself a well deserved rest ;-).....and the evening meeting with newcomers to bangalore, i.e, the IBMers who joined us last week for their projects made it all the more comfortable.

7 of these 'workex' guys have all settled into their roles as consultants and have been alloted various verticals to work under. 'twas definitely interesting and knowledgeful (?) getting to know what they were expected to be doing for their project tenure....

we'd all ganged up at a place called "the forum" here in kormangla, bangalore. one of the latest hangouts for the young and kicking crowd of the city, this place is really awesome. i've been here once before, but it was only this time that i had a good look at it. gr8 place with landmark, mcdonalds, and other big names setting up shop here....makes for a gud mall!!

and its got its own multiplex (the first one for bangalore city, i hear) started by delhi's famous PVR cinemas. haven't been to the screens yet....but plan to do so more sooner than later.

dinner at a continental cuisine chain called "casa picolas" with rishi and his engg. mate filled my belly to the brim, and as if that splurge wasn't enough, dessert at another famous chain called "corner house icecreams" surely had me gasping for breath! but i guess god don't like gluttony one bit....much to my doom, my bike rear tyre gave up on me....and i had to wheel my hero honda passion home at around 10.30 on saturday night!!

next day was full of even more surprises...with me discovering that bangalore city bus service is active even at 5 in the morning!! seeta bodke (my classmate + colony mate) was on her way home to goa from chennai. sunday morning was then well spent having breakfast at home from a leftover b'day party last night (that my roomie attended somewhere in bangalore) and adventuring to make tea for 6 people at home!! 4 goan dudes and 1 dudette were 'busy' catching up on each other's lives.....all at the leela palace barista over a cuppa coffee (i dislike coffee, and had to do with iced tea).

spent yesterday evening with my old MREC chums here in a place called btm layout where they stay. rahul kalla, a computer engg. colleague gave me the gud news that he's made it to MDI, gurgaon and will be joining by june end!! gr8 to hear that people have moved on from wipro, to oracle and now to pursue their own MBAs....

today morning the office is having a rather deserted look, with only me sitting here on the 4th floor, once again facing a road block at work and waiting for a reply on the data i requested. the rest of the folks have gone for some sales people's meeting.....

might write another blog today itself, if this sorry state continues....

signing off for now....