Sunday, November 30, 2008

Where The Mind is Without Fear..

170 odd people dead..entire city & the nation traumatized..
who's responsible for it: ISI? Deccan Mujahideen? or our "nothing can be done" government??
Will our representatives stop expressing shock & giving condolences remarks & take some decisive action atleast now?
I don't understand why this is a continuing issue. Successive governments be it Congress or BJP, forget that they have head on their shoulders when this issue comes up. Is it the complacency of the leaders or that of the RAW/police babus?

I hope its the defining moment for India. We have only 2 choices: continue to kneel down in front of those irritants or stand up brave & do something about this.

Hope our leaders haven't forgotten the aspirations of our forefathers, beautifully elaborated in this following poem by Rabindranath Tagore:
WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore

Thursday, November 20, 2008

As winter sets in..

Things are changing so fast & so much out of your control, not just the weather...even your own life.


Yesterday when I came out of school I was delighted to see a white blanket of snow all over. I was witness to withering of leaves from the past one month, but today's sudden transformation of green to white was unexpected. Seeing snow for the first time was an experience in itself. I had to consciously restrain myself from not touching the snow so that I my health doesn't get screwed at this crucial time.


This weather change is in sense a mirror to the way my life is getting transformed here. These three months have done so much polishing to me that I never expected before I came here.
At school, each day we are bombarded with so many bewildering choices and challenges. You can schedule each minute of your time to atleast two tasks. You could either work on you project or the weekend's case competition or you can study for tomorrow's Statistics quiz or do Business Finance assignment. What do you choose? All are are of equal priority.

Here are some of the cool things I've learnt in past few weeks. This is just to show you how much intersting learning in a B-School is. Mind you these are just few of the plethora of things that are currently on top of my head:
1) New technology doesn't always mean big money. Ex1. InVitro Maturation Artificial Reproductive Technology (IVM-ART) - Medi-cult, a pharma company had a real bad time selling it. Ex2: Very Light Jet (VLJ)- Linear Air, an air-taxi service started by an HBS grad is facing a tough challenge making profits out of this cutting edge technology due to the already overcrowded airline industry.
2) Lets say there are two stocks with risks r1 and r2 such that share2 is riskier than share1. If you create a portfolio having these two stocks, the effective risk r(1,2) of the portfolio can adjusted to be lesser than r1. In other words, your portfolio risk is lesser than the lowest risk of individual shares in the portfolio.
3) There are quite a number of ways for a company to borrow money from a bank but not show it on its balance sheet !! This one is really intersting isn't it? :)


I had almost forgotten what a festival celebration is till I got a lucky chance to watch a Santa Claus parade on Bloor street this Sunday. There were tiny tots with their parents waving their hands and singing "jingle bells". I could actually feel the joy in those small kids by remembering the jovial mood I used to be in during "pallakki" festival in my home town.



This picture is from the parade passing near the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) near my school.

We've got two more weeks for Q2 exams to commence and before that submissions of various assignments and projects are due. I've joined as a PM for an UofT student project, I'll discuss more about it in a later blog. It's been a very good experience with lot of learning till now.

So these are some of my updates from past few weeks..