Rahul

The annual convocation-- the first one of the now "deemed university" PEC.


Got my bachelor's degree.

Thought: 4 years of vacation over....

hang on there is more to come soon.. off to varanasi for a sabbatical.. be back soon!

The fun of doing things knowing you are doing them for one last time is quite joyous.. I am about to write my last semester exams for engineering in 24 hrs from now. So there are just some things that i am doing for one last time..

Getting all notes together ...trying to complete with my preparation ..one last time.

Visiting friend's house to catch up with wat could come in paper ...one last time.

Having the gut feeling that i will not be able to complete with my preparation (which invariably has been last minute in these four years of graduation).... one last time.

Still managing time to ask a dear one to come for an ice-cream....one of my fav breaks during exams ......one last time.

its really fun ..i am gonna miss this so much.

One of the great habits that i have developed recently is getting up early in the morning. Grab an old and favorite book of mine "Who will cry when you die" by the revolutionist author Robin S. Sharma. The book is a compilation of leadership lessons from the famous "The monk who sold his ferrari"-the book which presents an excellent insights into leadership and personal transformations. The author draws some really interesting examples from his own life to conclude each chapter which makes the book a very practical read.

At 7 in morning, i went through an interesting exercise in one of the chapters in the book today. The exercise calls upon the readers to write down names of the ideal neighbor (past/present) that they would always want to have in their lives. The central idea of the exercise was to help the reader to recall qualities in people or achievements by people whom they looked up to.

So i started with my introspection...amidst some deep thoughts,i came up with this dream ideal list .

a) Steve Waugh-- The legendry australian cricket captain. I remember during my formative years in cricket i used to finish my practice under reeling sun and rush back home,get fresh and get glued to the bood tube to watch Ashes (England vs Australia) and get inspired every time this individual used to play a cameo. At so many occasion, this individual has single handedly led his team to achieve breakthrough performances. The person has an awesome passion for simple things in life. His courage and leadership skills had a awesome knack of bringing out the best in his players. So i wish i can watch the famous south africa vs australia 1999 world cup quarter finals in which he scored a century and pulled his team out of disgrace at the hands of south africans. Would love to just chat with him on how did he drive this culture of great competitiveness in his team that saw aussies register 18 consecutive one day victories under his captaincy.

b) Pt.Jawahar Lal Nehru-- The thought was how would it have been to reform an independent India. I read an article which was an excerpt from his autobiography last november in ToI where some of the grave challenges that he faced as the first PM were mentioned and i recalled them during the exercise. A graceful PM who had drawn great appreciation from the international community to initiate the reform movements in independent India. Plenty to hear definitely.

c) Manmohan Singh-- The person who built the modern India. The economist,who by his great intellect, has reformed India from a dead economy to emerge as one of the growth centers in global economy. Foreign investments, that India rides high on at present, was a result of the abolishment of the license raj- a policy introduced by the man himself. The person is respected immensely in the international community.

d) Neil Armstrong-- How would have been the feeling of watching earth from Space? How would it have been to walk on the moon---some thing that as a small kid i grew upto listening about during lullabys ---feel zero gravity and experience weightlessness?

e) Sachin Tendulkar-- How natural talent combined with hard work, determination and a great ability to be simple can work wonders in your professional life is quite remarkable to see in this individual. I still can recall that match where Sachin scored a ton when he returned after attending the untimely demise of his father in India. The occassion was match between India and Kenya in world cup 1999.

thinking about more people in the list

Cricket World cup 2011 will be hosted jointly by India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri-Lanka. I was very happy to hear the news while enjoying a long weekend off from college in Delhi.

It came as a little surprise to me after hearing that Australia and New Zealand board were bidding jointly for same. But as the news mentioned that Indian bid got 10 votes out of 13 voting members was quite interesting.

Reasons could be many, but i think that popularity of cricket in the region should be a major factor in pulling the world cup towards us.

The Indian sub-continent faces a daunting task of arranging for a tournament that will see 13 nations waging one of the most coveted battles in sports. Recently, there has been a series of articles in the news paper (such as ToI) which mentions that inspite of Indian cricket board being one of the richest in the world, the infrastructural health of Indian cricket grounds is in an appaling condition. There are very few grounds that matches upto international standards. However even some of them are lacking in basic spectator expectations such as catering, rest room services etc.

The other important and perhaps the most crucial thing would be the quality of cricket pitches. Barring very few cricket pitches, almost all of them offer batsman an edge over bowlers. We saw a good example of this when Indian team was touring Pakistan earlier this year.

There surely is a lot of to do. I think the current management backed by some good administrators such as I.S. Bindra, Raj Singh Dungarpur etc. and the man himself,the chief, Sharad Pawar are quite capable of utilizing their administrative expertise and network and host a great show.

Other interesting thing is that the Asian powers are on a roll. While Indian tiger will play host to world cup in 2011, the Chinese dragon will see Olympics in its huge play ground in 2008.

Way to go

I got the official GMAT guide today. its a question bank of over 2500 GMAT questions asked in previous years GMAT exams. I heard that since the questions are merely an official compilation straigth from GMAC so the explanation of answers in it is exactly how the test takers questions are evaluated in exams. this will be cool.

Guess wat next... I am turning to serious preparations from today onwards.

The exam is scheduled for 1st june.

thanks twinkie & sahil for the book.

Summers are picking up faster than we can imagine. It was 36 degree today and sun was out in full fury. Its about time we set things rollin..

Lets head up hill for sometime with some beer been quite a while !

wat say!

"Opera works like a community ,a close knit family not a company"

These are the words that,i very clearly remember, were said by Jon S. von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera Software during my interaction with him while he was in Chandigarh recently. He was in the city to launch the operations of Opera Software, the world's fastest web browser in Chandigarh.

The statement itself is quite interesting in depicting how CEOs of big corporations such as Opera think of their company. This thought came up during my talks with Piyush today. Well the subject of our talk was again how our venture in future be like. Off lately we have doing it quite often and few really interesting thoughts have come.

Cameo piyush. Was an interesting discussion