When life doubles up

This blog is dedicated to one of my dear friends who tied the nuptial thread last weekend, and I was there to witness their relationship culminate in the ultimate bonding. This bonding between the two has got some special meaning to me. Their pre-marriage relationship has been a long one. It started in class eight - Yeah!! you heard it right - and has just taken off :). It is sweet to say the least. As another friend puts it: " Nowadays when people fail to stick to a marriage for twelve years....These two have been in love with each other for that long a time ". I certainly don't know about the little 'sparks' that keep their relationship intact but I have my own views on it.
I treat childhood love special. When two kids fall in love with each other they are not aware of the myriads of other things that accompany the package called love. Infatuation you call it right. Well how many of us do carry those little doses of infatuation and store them in some special corners. And those who can preserve them for such a long time are certainly the lucky ones. And my friend is lucky to do so from a stage when it would have been hard to spell the word commitment. A stage when their love did not come in package. "Wish you two a great life ahead".

Note: All views are personal.

The Highs And Lows of __________ ???

Dear readers
What does this picture remind you of? Think a little beyond the obvious

Pursuit of Happiness

A few days back I was having a conversation with one of my friends:
Me: "Can you remember the last time you were really happy?"
Friend (Irritated) : "Yeah!! I do.."
Me: "When was it?"
Friend: Remembers some particular instance ... A party
Me: "But weren't you that particular day brooding about the current placement scenario?"
Friend gets confused and then remembers another occasion: The day he converted a day 0 summers
Me: "Common I remember you abusing the interviewer who did not give you an offer. He ruined your chances of joining your dream company and instead join this one"
He gets further confused. Each time he tried to find an instance when he thought he was happy, he actually found that he was not happy.
I have often tried to ask myself the same question. And I know the moments I am really happy. Today once again when I felt happy I thought of blogging it down, giving it a shot before the London diary.
I do derive happiness out of very small things. I would write about them all sometimes later. But the one that always makes me happy is when I play some sport. Be it volley, football, cricket, give me anything...I have realized that when I am inside the courts I completely forget about the entire world outside. In fact I change as a person. The usual cool me becomes extremely aggressive. The usual extremely careful person completely loses balance. During my days in IIT I was known as extremely injury prone. The reason behind is when I play I don't care. Nowadays when I have started getting a little conscious about my ankle (which is a constant source of injury) I know I am less happy than when I would not. A little philosophical way of saying would be "Sports is my salvation". Perhaps Me inside the court is the real me and the usual me that people know might actually be masked. And as long as I am fit enough to play I know I would be happy in my life albeit in patches.
Actually right now I feel quite happy after penning down my source of happiness. And frankly I always want to know the instances when people feel happy. The few people who read my blogs a sincere request/question "When did/do you feel happy". Please leave a comment. The answer might be a past event or something that I have instanced.

Suddenly Something

The last comment made on my previous post suddenly made me realize that my blogs are actually not defunct. Looking back I had not made a single post in 2008, which has been such an eventful year. And frankly the series called "Summers Journey" that I had started has not got any more importance in my life, and hence find no urge to continue with it. But stories should have an end. Hence I thought that in this blog I should sum that up without going to the intricacies, the little emotions, which I am so fond of expressing in writing. You know you love cherishing your successes and not something which culminates in failure. The point of time when I last wrote, the world to me was a success. Perhaps you should compare everything with the sensex. Remember the sensex was somewhere around 20K at that point!!!! Then drastic things started happening. For the not so technical people: The Subprime crisis started, leading to credit crunch, economic recession in US which has already spread to India, Banks started going bust.Lehman Brothers!!! (( And I was actually aspiring for it though I tanked their interview giving wrong answers to known questions )) and finally the sensex is at the half of 20K.
My story during this period has been something similar. Chronologically:

1) Got an offer from HSBC London for summer internship
2) Had an wonderful time of two months in London. Nice vacation I should say.
3) Worked hard to get a final offer.
4) Finally was not given an offer for apparently no logical reason.
5) Everyday is turning out to be worse than the day before now with the economies slowing down.
6) Becoming an I-banker (Does the term exists in the dictionaries any more) looks like a distance dream.
7) And now the the summers journey for our junior batch is at the climax.

This is everything in a nutshell. Perhaps someday soon I should write about the London trip. I also feel like writing on the current affairs in the economy. But seriously I think that would make the blogs boring. Of course everything depends on my mood. And right now the mood is all too somber and gloomy. So one can assume that my next set of blogs might be extremely dark (:P). Once again thanks to those few people who read my blogs, commented on them that gave me the motivation to do something which I love to do: expressing myself to the abstract world.

The "Summers' Journey" : Getting Listed

Right from my childhood I have this bad omen of not being able to find my name in lists displayed on notice board. Lists containing the names of successful candidates. Whatever 'list' on which I got listed were not the paper driven ones, what I mean is: I have had success finding my name in e-lists of successful candidates but not the physical lists. In fact I dread searching for my name in them.
The reason for starting this blog with this piece of crap is because most of the shortlist of companies for the summers process are provided in the physical lists.
McKinsey was the first to come up with its list, BCG followed soon. And I had luck with neither. Though I never had much of hope with them, but the sight of people congratulating each other for being listed did bother me. ( JEALOUS??? Is it inhuman to be jealous ).
Let me put it over here, throughout this period of "short lists" - the run-up to the final day, I had my luck following a peculiar sinusoidal pattern. It started from a trough and whenever it was at the pick I had a plethora of calls and then again trough.
My Luck started favoring soon as the first call that I got was from A.T.Kearney and HSBC on the same day. Macquarie ditched me. It was hard to understand their shortlisting criteria. Bain followed suit giving me a call and suddenly I had three calls inside my kitty. No mean achievement considering that it was just the beginning of the season.
I soon got to wake up from my slumber as I started down the downward slope of my Luck Curve. Looking back I found I have two consulting shortlist which I never believed I would be able to convert and just one i-Bank shortlist. In the meantime I had lost out on JP Morgan, Barclays Capital and A D Little. Oho and Rothschild had not shortlisted me in their first list (Which was a strange piece).
The first derivative of my luck curve once again showed positive signs when the next day I got a shortlist from ABN AMRO, I was really happy with this one for I was among just 12 shortlisted for the same. One thing worth mentioning over this list is, it had a strong "Bong-Connection" associated with it. About 8 of the 12 were either Bengali or were from Calcutta.
The next day was the peak for me as I had three more short lists. Rothschild had modified its', and the other two were biggies!! Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers.
HUMMM!!! I was restricting myself with the dream of getting about 3-4 calls and at this moment I had 7 and still about a quarter of the day-0 shortlist yet to come.
I remember making a comment at this point "I don't need any more short list ,for If I am not able to convert one out of 7 I cannot convert 1 out of 20". Though The statement was true to my heart it became true to my destiny as I did not get a single more shortlist. Temasek, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Deutsche all gave me good kicks on my ass. The "Kicks" which charged me up to prepare even harder.

The "Summers' Journey" : An Autobiography in One Page

I had always believed that I have enough credentials and accomplishments, for a lot many people to envy. Never I had fallen harder flat on my face. The shortcomings got evident when I could fill my multi page master bio-data by hardly two and a half pages. I was shocked to say the least the amount of work almost everyone else had done in the form of organizing events, publishing papers, watching live Black Panthers - No Offense Meant, Just a Summary of all the other points that lit up a CV - I had done practically nothing in my life, apart from being way too technical, and playing a few games at the institute level. In the meantime I came to know that my manager at Fluent (My previous workplace) had just left the company putting me into further trouble. He was the only person who knew the exact nature of work that I had done in the company and now I knew a certificate of that would be hard to get.
Never the less I got to extract some solidity through some of the work that I had done in my teens as my mentor could find some light in them and used that to lit up my lackluster autobiography.
While writing the final one page CV I did not face the kind of dilemma others felt. I had a few points in my master version and did not have any doubt on which one should get into the exclusive list and which one should not. Again thanx to my mentor the initial drafts were prepared and they looked good to me. However this satisfaction was short lived. I made the mistake of taking multiple opinions regarding my CV. Some people were of the opinion that my CV lacked SPIKE, some would ask me to remove certain items which I felt were my strongest points and instead add some crap. With each passing day I felt more and more depressed as I did not get a single positive opinion regarding the quality of my CV. In the meantime I was constantly trying to bring out that SPIKE which I practically could not.
Finally I decided to get back to those people who would understand me and they were the IIT KGPians. One of them is an I-Banker himself. Got some tips from him and the much elusive solace that my CV is good from one of seniors from KGP and IIM-C. By this time I had reverted back to the CV that my mentor helped me prepare. I was sure that I will get at least one or two short lists from the SLOT 0 companies and if luck favors I could get 3.
One thing was clear at that point and that was I would need to fight it out. So the preparations began !!!!

The "Summers' Journey"

When does one stop worrying about himself, about everyone else, about everything else. Instead enjoys every bit of the stage called life. Let me put some milestones which everybody believes would end a man's woes.
"Get through IIT and life would be smooth"......"What is SMOOTH????"
"Get a good job, and voila!!!!"......"No way this bloody job is for the thick heads"
"Crack CAT (Go through my previous blogs and you can understand how much it meant to me)...and MONEY --> HONEY"......"Cracked it to find 280 people spanking their own a****, having group meetings, presenting cases, and "AND WHAT"..no one knows the answer to these WHYs, WHATs, etc"

Comes Summer Placements (Or was it always there???)

And here comes my post on the Summer Placements in the IIMs through my eyes. A process which finally is supposed to open the gates to stardom (martyrdom??) for some of the people. The answer to the question "Who wants to be a millionaire". For the last four months the advice that I am constantly getting is "crack a good Summer and you would have nothing to worry about" DejaVu..So the story begins.
Since this is going to be a relatively long story, I thought of breaking it down into a few episodes. The episodes are coming next.