Two posts in one

Today I am going to merge 2 separate posts here. So if you thought the earlier posts were maggied up, wait till you read this one! :-)

Post 1: We all have different ways of handling a problem. There is this approach that I have been using recently and it has been working well in the areas that I tested it in. Some of my friends have already heard about this one from me…

Post 2: Many of my friends have already heard from me about what I am about to write. Today I think I’ll write about my favorite movie scene. I always find it nice to think about this scene when I face a problem…

Post 1 (contd): …When I am in a problem, what I do nowadays is that I take myself out of myself, and then look at myself as an observer with a movable time frame and I see someone who will have solved the problem at hand a little time later. It is just like trying to watch the happy ending to feel good by forwarding a movie…

Post 2 (contd): …My favorite movie scene of all time is from the movie Patch Adams. There is this scene where Robin Williams (Patch Adams) enters a mental hospital voluntarily. There he sees an old famous scientist (who also had entered voluntarily) showing 4 fingers to everyone and asking them “How many do you see?”…

Post 1 (contd): …Seeing things like this helps you feel good about the current situation and makes you more proactive, I think, because it makes you believe that you’ll get through. But it works when you are facing a problem similar to ones you have solved before. What happens when a problem appears which you haven’t solved before or have been defeated by before? What would be the answer to it then?...

Post 2 (contd): …Whenever anybody answered “four”, this old man would start cursing everyone in sight. One day Patch answered similarly and the old man called him an idiot and left. But Patch wanted to know what the answer was so he returned later that night…

Post 1 (contd): …Last night, I was facing one of those problems. Something during the day had ticked me off and since I had never solved this problem before, I was looking for a different approach, a different answer maybe…

Post 2 (contd): …“You are another one of those bright young fellows who always know the right answer.. well, welcome to real life!” said the old scientist sarcastically when patch asked for the right answer. Patch noticed that the old man’s cup was leaking, took a sticker off the table and put it on the leak of the cup and fixed it. The old man, with a little shade of gratefulness in his eyes, showed patch 4 fingers again and asked him “How many do you see?” Patch again answered “Four”. He said “NO, you are focusing on the problem. If you focus on the problem, you’ll never see the solution.”…

Post 1 (contd): …I tried to focus on this problem, zoom in on it and get to the core of it. The way I saw it, there were 2 answer options and both of them sucked so I ended up calling a friend of mine…

Post 2 (contd): …“There’s never a right answer, but when you see beyond the problem, you’ll see different solutions; solutions which others cannot see. Look beyond the fingers” When Patch looked beyond the fingers (while still looking in the direction of the fingers) he saw a blur effect which made every finger appear as if there were two of them. He started seeing 8 fingers this time. So he answered “Eight”. Finally, he had looked beyond the fingers…

Post 1 (contd): …In an effort to take my mind off the problem at hand, we started discussing other things. And then my friend repeated something I had said to him some 6 months back…

Post 2 (contd): …“That’s a good answer… yes… Eight is a good answer!”…

Post 1 (contd): And it was the answer I was looking for. Although it may not be the right answer and there still may be apprehension in my mind about it, it is one of the infinite possible solutions but it is a nice solution I saw and when the usual approach doesn’t work, maybe what needs to be done is to ….. “Look beyond the fingers”

An interesting thought

This came as an "appropriate summary" question in one of the CL assignments. I forgot which assignment it was, so i have been looking for this on the internet. Found it today... Some people think like this too......

“If God is all powerful, then nothing a human being does should affect him. For, if a human act could please or displease God, then human beings would have the power over God. So, either God is not all powerful, or God does not give a hoot what you or I do. But, if God isn’t all powerful, then he isn’t really god and he couldn’t send us to hell even if he wanted to. So, sin at will; for either God doesn’t care what we do or he cares but can’t do anything about it”

Not special until proved otherwise!

Every child is special. This was the message of the movie Taare Zameen Par. It got me wondering if this was true for every adult too. Is every adult special? Thought about it for 5 seconds and immediately I found myself thinking of my gym caretaker I call motu (behind his back) and for me the question was all taken care of then and there. Every adult was not special. I shared this thought process with a friend of mine from gym and he said that on the contrary, motu is very special… he is so unique… there has never been a bigger idiot. So I thought “is being unique equal to being special?” I checked dictionary.com and found that a couple of meanings for the word special are “distinguished or different from what is ordinary or usual” and “being such in an exceptional degree”. I hate to admit it…. Going by these definitions, Motu is special….

Hence, the question still remains unanswered. Is every adult special? They say every person is unique. By the above definitions, that would make every person/adult special. But aren’t there people that you wouldn’t want to call or think of as special no matter what? I want to attack this argument but I don’t know how to. Maybe I should attack the premise that every person is unique… There are so many people in this world. Is every person really unique? I know that even similar people have different traits, howsoever minute they are… but that way even two handsets of the same model must be different. They all must be having different speeds of processing when it comes down to nanoseconds and we don’t call every handset of nokia special…

I am not convinced with the explanation though. So if anyone has a different approach or anything different to say or even if you agree with the “every adult is special” thought, please leave a comment.

paanch taare for TZP!!!

After being speechless for a day now, I think it is time I wrote something about my experience yesterday. And that experience was watching “taare zameen par”. I won’t say “Aamir Khan has done it again” because this kind of work cannot be “done” again or cannot be compared to what has been done by him before. It was a sheer magnum opus and before going for that movie, I expected a lot of things but I did not expect what I got because I don’t think I’d expect that from anyone.

I know some people still haven’t watched the movie so I won’t ruin it for them by posting specific details of the movie here. All those who haven’t seen it yet must go watch it on the big screen. This is a 5 star plus 2 thumbs up movie for me. But people should not take their kids for this movie cause I think this movie is pretty much useless for anyone below 15. The music deserves a special mention. Amol, Shankar, Ehsaan, Loy and Prasoon have done a super job. Many of the best moments of the movie were an effect of the music or were moments where the music and lyrics played a major role. The climax song was amazing and the song “ma” was one which made every single person in the audience sob. Also, there was this kick in the music and tempo of the climax song and this intensity in music was followed by intensity on screen which was just awesome.

The kid acted well. And what can one say about Aamir Khan... Even calling him a genius is an understatement. Will hoot in support of the movie at the Academy Awards then... Good luck to the TZP team!

the process... could be better

While preparing to get into a good B-school, every now and then I find things that I don’t like in the entrance procedure of some of the B-schools in India. So I thought I’d write all of them down today and see how long the list is:

1. Going in order, the entrance test comes first. And here, I’ll just spare the obvious assualt on the english section of CAT in the last two years. The JMET which is the entrance for the IITs questions students on higher maths which I think I quite pointless but again quite typical of an IIT. Also, XAT has an essay at the end. I really thought GD and PI were more than enough for them to gauge what kind of a person you are. I think the essay section introduces a little luck factor too cause the topic might be to the strength of some people and this might not be case for others. Also, some institutes need to check on the relevance of some of the questions they are asking in the GK section.
2. I think most people know that if a GD of say 14 people turns out to be a fish market because of let say 6 of those people and everybody starts shouting and no one can hear the other, the panel throws the whole group out. Now that is insane. The 8 people who were not to blame were punished without reason in this case and this happens every year. Wouldn’t it be easier to just ask those 6 candidates to leave and let the others continue?
3. Also, if GD is a tool to measure team-skills, it is not an efficient tool at all because it is just a 20 min GD and anyone can fake it for 20 min (Yes, people can fake it and they do) and once this goes undetected, even the interview will not be able to detect this aspect of a person.
4. Now, onto the interview. The worst thing is the question about why you did BSc if you wanted to do MBA eventually or why you did engineering or why bio or whatever. People keep cooking convincing stories about this one or stories they feel they can defend once asked about. A person from BSc says I wanted to know more about this or that subject so I could open up my company in this or that field after some work-ex. Engineers too would come up with some story to avoid the comment that “you just go towards whatever career option that appears more lucrative to you at that time”. So someone will want to open up a chain of restaurants, some would like to challenge pepsico in some way…. All bullshit!!! I think B-schools should stop taking this question so seriously and forget the past to a little extent atleast. The candidate is before you… he may have made a couple of mistakes here and there but don’t kill him for that!.... just see what he can do in the future. We don’t have great schools for BBA in this country anyway so don’t blame a person for doing something else for graduation.
5. I think on the whole there are a few things about the interview that make a person lie without reason. I mean, you sometimes cant even mention your true hobbies there. People who say reading is their hobby are always greeted with gruelling questions like asking them to compare philosophies of their favorite author with some other author. If some book is your favorite book, then you have to have read other books from the same author or you have committed the biggest crime of the century. You say watching friends is your hobby? What was the salary of each one of them? You say you watch football, huh? Name 5 clubs of Brazil. Collecting coins, is it? What is the currency of Bolivia? Like electronic gadgets? Aint that cuuuute!!! Forget everything…. You like breathing? What is the composition of the air that goes in? Are you sure it’s 100% oxygen!!! It’s a hobby for god’s sake!!.. It is WATCHING friends and WATCHING football… not finding freakish facts about them… and if I like breathing, I just like doing it, that’s it!

I guess if some B-schools could straighten some of these issues out, they really would make their selection procedure better and ultimately the people coming out of great B-schools would do greater things. I think, to some extent, the GD should be replaced by something else. This is just one of the ideas. I suggest that students should be divided in groups where they have to perform some actual business task assigned to them in a simulated environment in a couple of hours maybe…. Something similar to what they do on the apprentice but on a small scale ofcourse. There should be a panel of 2 with each group and the true group dynamics would come into play in this case. And if it costs them… simple… just ask for Rs. 2000 or so from each candidate appearing for the process. All those not selected would be returned the money and for those who get selected, they can just think of the fees to be Rs. 1.52 lacs instead of 1.5. The process seems complicated? Well, you expect your students to do the greatest things in the world.. time for you to hold up your own end!

Looking for trouble?

There are a few universal quotes that every person has heard of and some of these always go unquestioned or uncontested. One of them is one you hear from a friend when you are down and it goes something like "God gives trouble to those people who he feels can handle it". I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who mentioned this quote to me and I've heard this one a million times and I've never argued it but that day a thought just struck me. I thought that maybe it's not god who is dishing out the trouble to those who can handle it... But those who can handle trouble know this quality of their's to some extent and they take up tasks or do things in a way which increases the probability of them falling into the kind of trouble they can handle. The motive, of course, is that by increasing the probability of trouble, you do increase the returns you'll get out of an endeavor or a situation. On the contrary, those who feel that they can't handle trouble never take chances and in this way lead a trouble-free life but they give up on some things they want in the process. Just give it a thought...
Meanwhile, I'll think about how I have reduced God's role in another way by alleging that maybe he's not doing something that everyone is claiming that he's doing... I am not happy about this though. I wish he took more interest in our lives!

Title???...Not in the mood

I am a very moody person. Is this the first time you're hearing this? Of course not... I think 99% of the people who would think about this would think of themselves as moody people. Do we all like being moody? I don't think so. Everyone would rather have one constant mood all the time and what's that mood type?.... It's "good".
Now when I begin to think about why we end up in a bad mood or an "off" mood sometimes, all I feel like saying is that it's part of life; there are highs and lows in everything and mood is no different... Topic closed! But the topic can't be closed unless there's a logical explanation to why there still are people who do not have mood swings.. And who are these people?... Children of course! Now I know some people will say that children too have mood swings but even if they do, they are less frequent than those of adults. And if someone was to say that mood swings in both operate with the same frequency then, well, they are wrong in saying this.
I wonder why this happens.... kuch hormone wagerah ka lafda hoga, kyu? But is that it? Every single person in the age group of 20-70+ is having mood swings because of some uncontrollable mechanism?... Hmm... Maybe. But could it be something else?
There is this one characteristic of people in good mood: They exude energy. Now it seems obvious why children are generally in a better mood. It's because they are full of energy; their energy reservoir is vast or maybe it's just that their energy reservoir is different from ours. Children generally look inside for energy. Their own thoughts tend to excite them more than a cup of coffee. They don't think about whether the thoughts are realistic or not; they think freely and this makes their energy reservoir vast.
On the other hand, adults are generally lacking energy because most look elsewhere for energy. Adults need coffee or tea to get their day started; they need appreciation from close ones (read as "anyone") to give them energy; they need to feed off their colleagues too for some energy; they (read as "I") need television to give them more energy when nothing else during the day did so.
So what do all these thoughts leave me with?..... Hmm.... They leave me with something I am sure... par baaki kisi aur din sochunga, abhi mood nahi hai!

A word about CAT

I always thought that my first post after exams would be about CAT. Here, by CAT, I mean the question paper and not my experience. This has been stopping me from posting anything else on the blog. So I had to get it out of the way. All i want to say about CAT is that a wise man once said that if you can't say anything good about something, you shouldn't say anything at all. So basically, I am just writing this post to say that I don't wish to say anything :-)