It's been over a year since my last post. Wow! It's customary to say things like "How time flies". In my case..not quite. It seems like Fuqua was a million years ago. But maybe that's because I had pretty much tuned out school life by the 2nd half of the 2nd year anyway. Things have definitely changed since my last post. I am now the proud owner of another Masters degree. I live in a great city, not the sorry excuse for a city that was....D. Okay, so it wasn't that bad, but it sure as hell can't stack up against SF. I have a job that has actually turned out to be everything it promised to be (so far). And life on the personal front is great.

So with that short, innocuous blurb to bring my blog up to speed, I will go back to blogging about random things that strike a chord with me....and will hopefully be back here before another year goes by!

8 days

Your muscles tighten up. You're tense, yet exhilerated. You can feel the blood pounding through your head. The adrenalene rush is unlike anything you've experienced in a very long time. All your senses have reached a level of alertness where you are aware of and can respond instantaneously to the most subtle movement or noise on any side. You can not lose. You will not lose. This what you do. This is what you are. This is where you belong. You will not give an inch!.......as you approach the "red light crossing" and the auto wallah, the cycle rikshah walla, the cabbie in the hideous yellow fiat and the 5 spoilt delhi brats in their new Hondas and Toyotas all move in to gain that extra inch on the road which will give them that instantaneous high, as they do the intricate dance of avoiding pedestrians, potholes, dogs and cows!

Welcome back to driving on the mean streets of Delhi!

I'm back from the motherland after a whirlwind 8 day trip and everyone I meet tells me that I look really "fresh", whatever that means. I must confess, this ranks right up there as one of my best trips back home. It was all about sitting back and relaxing with the folks and catching up with the the bazzillion relatives I have in Delhi. There was no drama with women, no pressure to meet up with friends, no self induced need to go out partying, no stressful meetings with immigration officers and such. All I focused on was reconnecting with the extended family that I grew up visiting every Diwali and on my never ending efforts to stay connected with the ever morphing culture in India.

The country is obviously nothing like what I remember from approximately eight years ago when I decided to leave. The surprising thing is that it seems to have gone through about 20 new incarnations even when I visit after a span of 1 year. I often feel like the old "aunties" and "uncles" I meet who have been in the US the last 30 years and are so seperated from reality that they make my grandparents look emancipated. But then I turn on the TV, and see the 40 news channels all reporting the same thing.....cricket! and everything seems just the same.

Fall 2

Sitting here in the balcony of my apartment on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon after talking to my friends in Chicago and New York, I finally find myself at peace with my decision. 3 days of conflict, soul searching and excruciatingly painful analysis seems to have been worth it. The line from my friend that stays with me is..."Dude, it's f'ing 35 degrees here". Ah, not for me, that kind of nonsense. So for the weather and about 27 other well thought out (I would like to think) reasons, I chose DC as the city where I will start my consulting career. A fun weekend exploring the museums by day and getting wasted by night (the patrons and bouncers of a certain club on F and 9th, can probably attest to that) further convinced me that I had made the right choice.

The new school term started on Thursday but I'm still in vacation mode. It was a minor shock to my system when I heard people setting up team meetings for the weekend. Um...didn't we just finish that crap?! The joys of a 6 week term.... The good news is that I'm finally taking a course that I'm thoroughly excited about. It's taught by a guy from MIT and one of the official text books is Freakonomics. Need I say more?

Adding to the joys of Fall 2 is the fact that I will have the benefit of having 2 fully functional hands (easy boy, lets not jinx it), which will make me a lot more efficient. The downside of course is that with the cast coming off, I've lost a great conversation piece and ice breaker....but it's worth it. Now I need to make sure I stay in one piece for my Barcelona trip next term. About a week ago, I informed the good people at ESCADE, that MJ shall soon be leaving the comforts of Durham to grace the shores of Barcelona for 6 weeks starting Jan. I'm pretty excited about that but just learned about some annoying immigration issues that have popped up. Hopefully I'll figure that out before end of term.

So I think I've procrastinated long enough. Time to go figure out how I want to embarrass myself at the Halloween party tonight (how do I always get myself into this shit?!)

The Fun Continues

"Ah, I'm back in sleepy ol' Durham. Herniated discs, lost luggage, missed flights etc are things of the past...Back to a fairly predictable existence" .... so thought I. HA! Not so much.

On Tuesday night I proved all the naysayers right. "It's a deathtrap" they said. "It's not a question of whether you'll put it down, it's a question of when and how bad it'll be" they said... None of it fazed me. But after 10 years of an impeccable record, it finally happened. I laid down my bike (I had a motorcycle accident for those uninitiated in biker lingo).

After spending 10 hours in the ER, I finally walked out with a broken arm, a separated shoulder and some nasty wounds. The only saving grace was that it wasn't worse than this and more importantly, my friend who was riding with me didn't get seriously injured.

So for all you riders out there, drive safely! There are a lot of idiots on the road who don't follow even basic traffic rules.

ps: It's amazing how you don't realize that you rely on both hands for practically everything in day to day life!
pps: This post was written with one hand..

I am now employed...

...sort of.

Finally done with my consulting internship! Feels good. I can't believe I have to be back in class in 2 days! But I can't really complain at this point. The summer turned out just fine... a bad back, minor personal drama and a tough project assignment notwithstanding. And I ended up with a full time job offer which is pretty sweet! I can now concentrate solely on being a bum all year and passing on words of wisdom to the naive first years as they look up to me with worshipping eyes.... I kid of course..
It's going to be a crazy year. I've already signed up for way more than I can handle and it'll only get worse. The good news is that I can choose not to deal with the stress of interviewing and such, if I don't want to. Still undecided on that.
Time to get back to the rigmarole of B school life. Bring it on!

Catching up

Ahh...my much neglected blog...
So much to talk about, so little time..oh who am I kidding, it's just 2:30 AM...and I have the rest of the night..so ramble on!

So continuing where I left off, the trip to Asia was "awesome"! Between drunken sake induced renditions of "Beat it" (complete with inappropriate hand gestures and air guitaring), crazy hotel room parties and endless rounds of being "buffaloed", I actually did manage to learn something about Japanese and Chinese culture. And I'm not just talking about the fact that the women in Hong Kong *really* like to party or that you can't walk 2 minutes in an upscale hotel in China without being accousted by women trying to get you to let them give you a "massage" or "play games" (yeah, you read that right)!! No, no. I'm talking about actual, honest to God stuff like learning about how they live, how they think, their behaviour, their perception of americans...all the good stuff that I find way more fascniating than company visits and such.

And since I've gotten this question a zillion times, I'll just throw it out there... the best part of the trip for me was the Great Wall. It is truly one of the most awe-inspiring things I have ever seen. The other hot favorite for folks on the trip was the Japanese Hot Spring. Not so much for me...primarily because I refused to get co-erced into walking around nude with my buddies! Fuqua would never have been the same if I had seen Francis in his b'day suit....
aside: One of the funniest things on the trip was when we were "disrobing" in our lockers... one of the guys who worked there, kept pacing outside shouting out "guys, keep your underwears on!". priceless!!!

So after 15 days of a "rollicking good time" (see S, you can totally use that in a sentence!), I finally headed off to Bangkok to see the folks. And that's where it started. The most incident filled period of my life in the last 7 years. I swear, I have not gone 1 day without something crazy happening. It could be me being detained by immigration authorities in a foreign country, it could be me getting my license suspended (and then getting pulled over twice in the same month!), it could be me suffering my first veritgo attack, it could be me herniating my back, could be me losing my brand new suit without wearing it even once...the list is endless and keep in mind I'm keeping out the really embarrassing stuff since this blog is only semi-anonymous! It's been interesting to say the least.

And in the middle of all that was the job.
"It's been great! The team's been great. I've learned so much. It's been interesting working directly with the client, trying to balance their needs and demands with our own priorities and schedule"
I can rattle out some variation of the above snippet in my sleep now. You've always gotta be "on" in case someone high up in the firm asks you how your summer has been. Of course you're always doing a JD in your mind... "Oh, it's been great! My back hurts like a B. I gotta sleep in hotel rooms every day with no friends around and with the pressure that I'm constantly being judged. Some of the stuff I'm doing is stuff you could get a trained monkey to do in it's sleep. The rest of the time I have no clue what people are talking about and am just trying to not look like the dumbest person in the room. So yeah, it's been great."
But seriously...it actually has been great. I've learned more than I could in a couple of classes combined and surprisingly I do like the travel and the above mentioned challenge of trying to build credibility and gain the trust of the client under less than perfect conditions.

3 more weeks to go and then I go back to the high school environment, also known as Business school. I still haven't decided whether I'm dreading that or looking forward to it.

Half way there ...

... and yet I don't quite feel that smart! Wasn't I supposed to have figured out quite a bit about how I could take a floundering business and turn it into this money making machine, by now? Wasn't I supposed to have had these life altering experiences that would stay with me for the rest of my life? ....

So tomorrow marks the official end of my 1st year as a Duke MBA and as I sit here taking stock of the situation, the first thing that strikes me is..... why the F am I still up and writing this inane blog when I have a Market Intel final at 9 AM tomorrow.... and the answer is... I just feel like rambling about what lies ahead over the next month or so.

I need to decide whether I want to move from my current apartment. Then I need to find someone to sublease my place to for the summer. And then there's the minor point of finding a place to stay for myself in DC over ther summer. All of which needs to be done over the next 3 days before I leave on another one of my marathon trips. Ah, that should be fun. Everything seems to be in place and some unforseen visa glitch notwithstanding (P.B., I'm talking to you), I should be in Japan 5 days from now! Note to self, talk to D about things to do in Kyoto/Tokyo, talk to C about Beijing and Hong Kong. I still have to figure out whether I want to fly directly to Mumbai from Beijing and then go to Bangkok or whether I should go to Bangkok and then go to Mumbai.... decisions..decisions.

With all the stuff going on, I haven't even had a chance to get excited about the impending India trip!! Don't know whether I'll get a chance to visit Ahmedabad and Delhi, but Mumbai should be fun. Hopefully A will be in town to show me around.

I'm not entirely sure whether it was such a good idea to plan on getting back to the US just 3 days before my internship starts. Don't think passing out in front of a client would be such a good idea. Which brings me to the other issue nagging away at the back of my head. I really want to create a good impression over my internship and convert it into a full time offer. The one thing worrying me is not the number of hours I'll have to put in or whether I'll understand whatever industry I end up working in, or whether I'll be able to apply all the princles I have "learned" in business school, ...no.. all that I got covered, the thing worrying me is my Excel skills or lack thereof! How did I not ever use Excel when the whole world and their mama seems to have lived on it all their lives!

Anyway, on that note, time to go to bed and dream happy dreams about conjoint analysis and backward market research.