About all things unimportant

Checked my Blog statistics tool and figured out that i get visitors from following countries

USA, India , UK , Czech republic ,  Denmark , Canada

Interesting - I guess i know a few people who would be counting towards hits in US, India and UK .. but Czech republic and Denmark.

My hypothesis is that the hits coming in from Czech republic , Denmark and Canada are probably from prospective applicants ( most probably India born software engineers ) who are reading up  information that they can get about ISB. 

I dont have a way of validating this hypothesis till people actually came back and tell me that this hypothesis is correct.

We have two teams from ISB in the Top 10 teams in the Innovation Challenge ( Finals being conducted from Nov 16-18 in Virginia, US). Wishing them all the best .. Would have loved them to see more teams from ISB ( I must be a jerk .. Only one other college has two teams in the TOP 10) . We had two teams last year also but couldnt convert that into a podium finish. Hope that Class of 2007 converts this position into podium finishes.

ISB has come of age ..

An ISB student has won the First place in the Wharton Business Plan competition held in Mumbai .. way to go ISB(ians). Last year i noticed a pattern that one person’s achievement then became a big catalyst for people winning all sorts of competitions later in the year. I think this is first big win and i am looking forward to at least half a dozen more wins of this standard in the coming months. In case any Class of 2007 folks are reading this, please convey my congratulations to Subramanian Viswanathan. Way to go folks ..

Meanwhile Raju posted some interesting comments and will try to put forth my views on his views in next post.

Because we participated in the Innovation challenge last year .. i get reminder mails telling us that we should participate this year also .. deep down in the mail was a link - List of enrolled teams. I was kind of estimating that i would see about 15 teams from ISB .. To my pleasant shock .. i saw 41 teams that have registered from ISB (The deadline is still a week away). Last year we had a joke on campus that the sponsoring school ( Thunderbird last year and Darden this year ) might be subsidizing its students to ensure that they enroll the maximum number of teams.

My best wishes to all the teams from ISB. We need to have at least one team on the podium this year.

http://www.innovationchallenge.com/EnrolledTeams.jsp 

As for us .. we didnt get too far .. but we had a good time "getting creative".  

I had kind of anticipated that relocating from Pune to Bangalore would be a major pain and that this pain would get accentuated when i go house hunting.

I was forced to see 22 houses (by the Real estate broker  - They are a real pain and "un"ncessary evil ) and i thought not one of those houses had rents that were fairly priced ( I tried my level best to avoid having the bias of a person searching for acco). Finally i settled on a flat that is about 5 km from office.

On the issue of relocation, Bangalore is an extremely costly place as far as flat rentals go and people wanting to relocate to Bangalore need to keep in mind that a large part of the increased compensation that they might be getting, would be offset by the high rental costs.

Now moving to part 2 of my relocation plan, I need to move my stuff from Pune to Bangalore and get broadband. A few years back i had heard the slogan - "Roti, Kapda, Makaan aur Bandwidth". It sounded like a very "cheesy" line (especially when you consider that so many people in India dont have access to acceptable quality primary education. But in this case, i do agree that this line held true in my case. I instinctively dial Airtel to check if they provide broand band in the place where i have taken up my house. This , before i have nailed down the vendor who will provide cooking gas.

Work has picked up and after the hectic 2 weeks, i have settled into a nice rythym. It feels good that i can start contributing to the Y! bottomline and possibly the top line in such a short time.

Wanted to come down to ISB for  Tie-ISB connect, but couldnt do so because of the work load. Drats .. from what i read in the Class of 2007 blogs .. you have the "consults" doing an encore of last year. You have the consults coming in batches ( one after the other ) and these consults will pick up probably 10 % of the batch and consume 60 % of the mindshare of the student body .. Result this batch will do the same stupid things that we did .. Drats .. Drats .. Folks .. Consult jobs are the not best jobs on campus .. Go figure ..