Time@INSEAD

Time flies here.

This short preamble must have suggested that THIS IS GOING TO BE THE QUICKEST BLOG EVER. Reason: My schedule is busier than what I was ever prepared for. But that does not mean that I will leave without posting a YouTube clip. In fact, I will post 2 videos this time. Though I know that even this will of course not come close to compensating for the lack of my beautiful prose.

First, the updates:

Academics: Did NOT do well at all in P1…tried to catch up in P2

Social: Sadly, the bad P1 results did not keep me from making a drunken fool of myself at every INSEAD party

Personal: Girlfriend almost dumped me. More on that later.

Misc.: Got elected as a member of the Student Council!

Career: Got interviewed by Google, a bank and some consulting firms. I don’t care about others but Google decided not to take our relationship further. Funny how I was so pally with the coordinator from Google and then suddenly she wont even write what went wrong.

I found this one when I was searching for “Israel, Arab, war.” (Hahaa, of course). This woman is not only an INSEAD MBA, she is not only beautiful, but she is also really cool to listen to. Please don’t leave any comment regd what she actually talked about because I was too busy noticing her features:

Bollywood 101 for westerners:

For you, my readers, I am putting my integrity at stake and giving you another video.

For all fans of Steve Irvin: I am a fan too. It was a treat to see his enthusiasm. In fact, when people sometimes ask me (sometimes=once per year, but isn’t this the most important question of your lives?) “H.G., what is the all important criteria to choose a profession?”, I say “do what you are most passionate about.” May Steve R.I.P.

For all budding consultants, this video might prove useful:

Senses and Actions

I had a difficult time deciding between having “Exams are Over” or “Senses and Actions” as the title to this post. While I was slacking about it, I came across this video in youtube and if you want to know why I selected “Senses and Actions”, then see the video:

Anyways, lets start from the beginning. P1 exams got over today. The past 2 weeks were stressful enough for me to start reconsidering my notion of INSEAD being a “party place”. We basically covered enough material taught in 4-5 months in other business schools. P1 has been, in general, 2 months of exceptional learning for me. I learnt about the importance of time and setting priorities. I understood the meaning of Spiderman’s philosophy “With great power comes great responsibility”. Most importantly, I came to know a lot about myself and my alignment with the world I want to be in. Ah! genius is boring you with futile generalities. Alright then me hearties, let me wear my pirate suit…

My P1 from a pirate’s eye (the uncovered one) was housing problems – conveyance problems – study group conflicts – social scene mess-up – more housing problems – academic nightmare. With P1, most of these problems seem to have vanished. Today after the exam, the bar area actually looked like it was hosting the mardi gras in France. Beer and nick knacks all over the place. A couple of hugs – people leaving for their ski trips or to see their girlfriends and boyfriends in London. I just went home and slept a couple of hours then I was back at INSEAD replying to emails and talking to my folks back home. I think I will not go to the party at “Bakardi” tonite just to spend some time with myself. Ah! And now genius is so vain. Well, maybe genius just needs some more sleep! 

Its all about fun and work here

…and the twain do meet at INSEAD, its just a matter of employing the concept of “tradeoff” (we learn that a little too early here, much before our first class of “prices and markets”).

Anyways, my consistently ignorant punjabi brethen in California posted this video last year which basically made fun of a certain sect of people:

Though I condemn it, I have been told that it was made in good humor. And one of the casts is actually applying to INSEAD to refine his temperament and to hone the faculty to appreciate a different culture.

Why are Stupid People Talkative?

About 20% of you will believe in the title. Other 80% of you reading this post are talkative.

As 50% of you reading this already know (Jose I bet you dint know), I am a small town guy who found himself in a big town school one day. And before I could say “Wha…Where…?”, I landed in one of the biggest cities in the world, NY. I needed things to slow down so I took a step back and got my boss to transfer me to Chicago.

Now I know I am not ambitious, but I like to think of myself as very driven and motivated. So I googled these keywords:

harvard admitted students class of 2006

And one of the links that showed up on the first page was “A Day in the Life” I was re-directed to this site by an involuntary action of my fist or my hand or my finger (I dont remember, which):

http://www.hbs.edu/mba/studentlife/lwilliamsditl.html

Okay, so I see Les singing “Hallelujah!” to his life in Harvard:

7:00 a.m. The alarm blares. I hit the snooze button.
7:07 a.m. The alarm blares. I hit the snooze button.
7:14 a.m. The alarm blares. I hit the snooze button.

As you can clearly see, the 3 very things that he does even before he wakes up in the morning are done with precision one after another, I wonder if he mentions this as one of his strengths in his app?

Lets skim right to 8:30

8:30 a.m. I high-five the cafeteria workers as I navigate through the fresh fruit bar and the English muffin station, grabbing a cup of water and a to-go bag as I dance out of the cafeteria in a frenzy. I was so wrapped up in e-mail this morning that I forgot about my study group review, which began at 8:10 a.m. No worries, I’ll catch them tomorrow.

Like Les says above, why worry about studies at Harvard; I am sure he based his decision on the fact that an alumni of Harvard is the President of our country, and “he is talkative, just like me!”

Okay, readers, lets go to 10:20 a.m. now where Les draws a parallel between a corporate high performer and a professional sportsman! Here, I have no words of praise for Les because his reasoning is flawed. He overlooks the basic fact that the first example talks of Employer-Employee relationship and the parallel he drew (very proudly) was of a Colleague-Colleague relationship. I guess the whole class was laughing at him but he took that as a gesture of appreciation…another strength that brought him to Harvard – “Don’t get bothered by Negatives.”

I was devouring the “Day in the Life” of Les at Harvard when at around 12:00 p.m. my ADD took over and I impulsively closed his blog. Before doing that, I couldn’t help going through the word “grab” in the post. If you do a word search, you will see Les has “grabbed” food articles and weights about 5 times in his “Day in the Life” at Harvard. And my skewed mind is thinking – “That meeting he had with the female student about some BBQ in which he agreed to run the idea with administration” – if we add the aftermaths of that appointment, the number of total grabs go up to 7.

Not bad. A Day in the Life at Harvard is not bad at all.