Life after ISB

The more things change, the more they remain the same.  Or so they say.

Not true for life after ISB.

My priorities in ISB? Getting a job, a hot chick and the next meal at Sarovar.

Five years, two jobs and one marriage on… My priorities today? 

My wife's next idea of a meal, traffic and of course…. what to do with the loads of dosh sloshing around in my bank account.

Seriously speaking though, I must say life's been very good post ISB, and from what I see around me, true of most people in the batch.

On the job front, you learn very quickly that the things that make you stand out in college have only a weak correlation to how you do at work.

You see that it takes a couple of years to figure out the delta between your dream job and your dream.Most do find an amicable balance between the two or if not, have the resources to reach that balance.

You learn that it's not the company you work for, it's the people you work with that makes a difference to how you feel about life.

You find money on its own has a short half-life, and you find yourself making choices where money isn't among your top priorities.

You also find out that fancy designations don't really mean fancy work – lots of money doesn't mean lots of work and that the big roles are in the small places.

People puzzle you with weird choices but you know it's a different game for everyone and the happiest people are the ones that know this.

Finally, there's a whole lot more to life than ISB and its aftereffects – you move on from being a hotshot MBA to being many different things – a wife, a  father, a son (better late than never), a student -  all of them equally important.

Good luck to all of you. Breathe easy. It's all good – whether you ace the next term or not.

The Great Indian Novel

I don’t know about you but I don’t like Shashi Tharoor. Blame it on shady alliances for IPL teams or the very non intellectual head of hair that he wears – I’ve pretty much placed him in a category of authors who aren’t ..well..authors.

Then I read the Great Indian Novel.

It’s a quiet, unassuming book with no grand declarations of timelessness on its blurb-zone, neither does it start with a bang going into whirlwind chapters or breathless action.

It starts with a conversation between a quirky old man and an assuming young man. Its only as you read on that the characters unfold merging multiple times into people you have heard of and people you think you have heard of. You worry a bit about whether you are placing the characters right, and you move uneasily on, peeling back pages ever so often, but you end up moving on.

And then you get caught up in the events that pages unfold for you, and you realize that you have got the characters right and that its all beginning to make sense. Often you are caught unawares by the clever turn of phrase and often by the rhyme. The pages make you smile and make you frown but it never fails to touch you.

The book is about India, the creation of it, the fragility of the events that led to it. It surprises you to see the very human and very mundane conversations and emotions that could have led to its creation, and how it could all have ended up very differently. The fight for independence, you realize, was about greatness and sacrifice but also about petty matters like ego and pride, willfulness and sloth.

Shashi Tharoor ( I am tempted to knight him on the fly, never mind the hair) is a giant intellect who has brought an immense amount of knowledge about world history and affairs to bear very lightly on a subject that touches most Indians in the most parochial of ways.

He uses the Mahabharatha’s familiar contours to take us into the lives of eminent personae of the independence struggle, and brilliantly uses the it’s remarkably tolerant view of human strengths and frailty to bring us close to these leaders, to make them more human without judging them.

In Tharoor’s book, the characters of the Hindu epic stand for people - Bhishma becomes Gangaji Datta  (Gandhiji), Dhritarashtra is Nehru while sometimes he uses the characters to stand for institutions and values – democracy, then Indian Army and so on. It’s great fun to decode the characters so I won’t spoil it all for you here – the wikipedia has a list if you are still tempted, but I would suggest you read the book. Its in the various characters you will try on each character that the book holds its truest joy.

In the end, the book will leave you a little closer to the idea of India – and also to the leaders who helped create her, you will feel more intimately connected but also more than a little sad for the streak of mortality that you will see. Enjoy this book slowly – am sure you will find a number of flaws – but you will come away richer, none the less.

A DSLR or a digital camera In India?

Spewnotes will take a slight detour from its avowed goal of purposeless rambling and meandering tales to delve into a supposedly useful topic (instigated by the blog's collective readership of one and half souls). My apologies if the post below is solemn and takes itself too seriously - a heinous crime in my view.
Should I buy a digital camera or a DSLR?
Well, assuming good pictures is the goal, one has to start of saying that buying a good camera is no guarantee of a great picture. (as author has found out with recurring regualrity - Editor). So, choose a camera with care. For a DSLR, I think a Canon is a fair choice. Simple to use and takes good pictures. Also, very popular in India and the US.
Deals: Best to get from the US or Singapore -cheapest there. You will get a basic DSLR for about 20-25K.
Canon 1000D is probably what we could call a basic DSLR (also known as Rebel XS in the US) - 550-650 US$. In India, retail prices have dropped quite a bit but should still be about 20% higher than the US. If you are adventurous, you can go to Palika bazaar and get the DSLR for an in-between price(I know a guy here I buy from ). Chandni Chowk is the place in Delhi where you get the camera cheapest, but its a wholesale market and may not be great for service. Its a "buy-it, forget-us" price.
For a nation-wide view, cameras generally get imported into Chennai from South East Asia and hence, the grey market prices are lowest there, followed by Bangalore. Of course, this is about DSLRs.


But honestly, I think the rush for DSLR's is a little misplaced and not necessarily for everyone. I'll put it like this:
Low-end digitial cameras >>> Low end DSLR >>>High end digital camera >>> High end DSLR


This is a simplistic view and to be taken as such.
Point I am making so laboriously is that a DSLR is not a necessarily a better camera - its just more accurate in terms of positioning and detail.

For someone not into fine detail photography, a high end digital camera is probably a lot better and a lot cheaper than a DSLR, simply because it has got outstanding flexibility in terms of zoom in and out, Liveview etc. Do check out Nikon or Canon digital cameras and image quality - they cost about INR 20K in India. (Price info applies here as well).
DSLRs, for every new zoom range, you need an extra lens costing INR 5-10 K upwards. The Nikon ones now come with a projector capability - you can project pics directly onto a wall from the camera! For INR30 K you will get an outstanding digital camera or basic DSLR.

The great thing about DSLRs of course is that you can dive deep into the world of photography, learn a lot about it and experiment with different quality lenses (an expensive hobby - my spend on lenses since I started shooting about six months ago is upwards of 20k INR now :))
All in all, buying a camera is a labor of love - else you could find yourself with yet another cool gadget (read all cellphones other than the iphone, thigh massagers, feet scratchers, etc) that you don't use all that much.


http://www.digital-photography-school.com/should-you-buy-a-dslr-or-point-and-shoot-digital-camera