and there was lite

well..friday nite... its past midnite and here i am working on some assignment that has to be delivered tomorrow. i was just wondering that if i keep on working here the same way i have worked all through my life..i'll end up with the same set of skills that i have always had. well thats not what i am paying sixty grands for. so immediately after this lightening struck, I did shoot an apology letter to kwesi for being myself today and i have promised him(hehee), well even if nobody else at the least i'll sit with him every evening under those constraints, discussing his deep concerns regarding the strategy, which at least i till date thought were completely out of context..lets see if it works .. if nothing else it will improve my negotiating skills..

moreover, i have met this guy who is doing phd in English(south african literature...coooll). he shares the kitchen with me. so we hav planned spending an hour every week discussing the south african literature with him...well i am excited...

so much for the morality...

btw who decides the morals anyway...i am kind of confused the way the human society decides the morals.. whats right and whats wrong, a black and white scenario with a large chunk of grey, which is basically the individaul discretion regarding how to interpret these morals..

well ... in countries like india, and especially Islamic countries, for instance its a complete black no no to drink alcohol,but in many parts of the world its perfectly normal part of everyday meal .. no dinner is complete without red wine.. and on the other hand bribery is a way of life for we indians ..imagine the hassles of getting even a simple driving license if you want to do it the right way.. but ask a simple American and the person would be scandalized to hear that...

well sometimes i feel that when we make this whole Drinking is Evil kind of scenario, we are actually giving it much more importance than it should be given ... believe me i am not saying that alcohol should be made accessible to everybody .. what i mean is that excess of everything is bad .. definitely coming home drunk every night is evil, not spending quality time with ur loved ones is worse but i am just pointing out the differences in the way different societies interpret different behavior . in india its cosidered bad coz most of the people who drink chose to do it at the expense of not spending quality time with ur loved ones but here in America a relaxed conversation over a glass of wine is amongst one of the ways of spending quality time ..
so who will decide whats right here and whats wrong ... i know there are some conservatives who will choose to castigate the whole western culture for their drinking habits..and there are westerners who think that indian society is based on dishonesty ..... so is it that we like to think that whatever our social norms are , they are correct and others are wrong coz it feeds our super inflated ego

if anybody chooses to waste time to read this messed up thought process, ur comments are the most welcome

United Colors of Business

module 1 is over. i can't believe that . thats all for strategy and leadership !!! there are 8 more to go.well this one was the smallest module. others would be more relevant for the study of business administration. got to work hard or make urself productive while working in a team where the oldest team member is 14 years elder to me.so much for the diversity. we hav finally selected a team name for our fantastic 424 team "United Colors of Business". next week shyam has invited us for a dinner at his place. lets see we should get flowers for his wife, with sincere apologies for keeping him in the school for 15-16 hours

though...now that the initial enthusiasm has waned off..each day has become kind of predictable, i mean classes, assignments, peer pressure, presentations, group discussions, and the readings above all that..topped in with dinners, informal gatherings, 'point 4s'. ok.. .4 is the name of official informal gathering of queens mba students at any local ghetto on every thursday evening. & it is called point 4 coz some stats prof at qsb did a research and came up with a conclusion that people who choose to keep an active social life, while pursuing an mba only lose 0.4% marks in the end. so its important to make work life balance . well thats something!!! though the prof never chose to disclose his identity.

synergy...what a relief!!

as i am writing this post, i have my mind on two very important things, one the dal biryani that i am making for dinner and much more important kwesi is sitting in our team room compiling our individual notes to draft our memo that we have to submit by midnite today. after the heated discussion of yeaterday, today we all admitted in our team huddle that it was sad for all of us. may be thats why we all behaved ourselves today and the team working meeting was a breezer, no sidebar talking, no cutting each other. we manged to finish the overall discussion of the case study and finalised strategy in record time. i can see the light!
btw i had a meeting with my personal trainer yesterday, who is going to draft a personal fitness program comprising of aerobics and cardio for me by next weekend. hope it helps !!!!

enough i need to go back and study my notes for the final presentation on strategy case study that we are doing tomorrow & unfortunately or fortunately i am lead on that one. i hope i don't let my team down. amen..

the indo-canadian chamber of commerce

in the evening i went to this indo canadian chamber of commerce meeting. met this guy from previous batch, an indian. whatever anyone may say, in the end , i think its only the indians, who have been there, done that, can give u the real perspective, tell the things that matter especially the placement stuff, the real stuff, at least what we indians want to hear. well that was encouraging, though the placement scenario here is drastically different, its more of self initiating, persevering, networking, stuff rather than ready to eat meals that you get back in the country. well thats good in one sense that you learn in real terms, how to market yourself!!
placing a price on myself..what a crap ...well i know i am priceless ;)

teamwork...will it work???

i don't want to sound skeptical on my working first day so lets start with the positive thing first. i managed to make enough food for the next whole week on sunday and right now i am happy wid myself and quite proud of my culinary skills. enough of these paeans, coming back to real world of mba; today we were given a case study and in different sessions, we had to identify different aspects( strategy, leadership and business develpment) of the same, discuss them in the team, come to a conclusion ( well thats not as easy as it sounds) and give 3 ten minute presentations to the class.
well we didn't do quite a good job of working in the team. six strong headed individuals, everyone from diverse background culturally as well as professionally; with different age groups coming to strategic conclusion within the constrained time frame of 15 or 30 minutes, well thats what we are here to learn. in the evening the meeting with the team facilitator, we decided some team norms and in the last assignment we picked david as our leader. he did the excellent job of splitting us, me and kwassi working together, kwassi reminds me of my last boss with whom i shared quite a ** professional relationship . but we did a good job of completing our assignment within fixed time frame. though we need to learn a lot but i hope somehow i will survive and it was just the first working day!!!!!!

pushing ur self to the limit!..thats queen's mba

in our transition nite ..aka fresher's party , i was talking to a senior and she commented that now looking back she can say that their is a human potential and their is queen's mba potential.ie way above the former one. pushing urself to the limit is what queen's does to u. we had a scavanger hunt activity. i alongwith my team was running across the streets of kingston for 3 hours, trying to meet checkpoints, completing questionnaires. luckily we had kingston locals in our team that made it a lot easier. but nevertheless i can't imagine how we did all though after couple of shots nerves were soothened. the good part was our team the goran team won second prize "a 5 dollar gift voucher from tim hortans" in the game.yipeee!!

i am just putting these random thoughts in words so that afterwards i can concentrate better on the 6-7 readings that i have to do to prepare for our assignments on monday

life is a golf course!

played golf for the first time in my life.it was a good experience though i don' know whether i am too ambitious or extremely self-critical; i felt bad when i could not match up to my expectations in the game.
but life is the biggest teacher, if you are trying too hard but not matching your expectations its better to broaden your view and think out of the box. when i wasn't doing really good there i thought that i should try something different . i went to mini golf section . for those who don't know what is a mini golf,it is basically the same thing but here rather than hitting too far you aim at shorter distances. i played excellently in it. it reminded me of the anecdote which tells the story of a bee who keeps on hitting the glass pane of window ,trying to enter the room through the pane rather than moving a little farther, changing its direction whereby it can find the big door opened and can enter the room through it.
hence i believe that though working hard matters, its equally important to aim at the right things, one should hit at the spot where it would matter the most. just random thoughts, nothing serious about.

u always hav a choice

Make Choices
Seek Change
Inspire Challenges
This is the motto of the "fit to lead" sessions that we shall be attending. I agree to the fact that whatever you do, wherever you are; its because of the choices that you made while on your road to Ithaka. So be happy with wherever u are coz at some point in the past this was the place where you had chosen yourself to be.
I am pretty much happy with the way the course is progressing though everybody has his or her fears. I am going to some fit to lead session activity in the afternoon today, where there would be some sports activities, golf, beach volleyball...

the first week at queen's school of business: feels like a tsunami

can't believe its not even a week at the qsb and it just feels like a tsunami. we hav been given a 10 day week schedule when we are almost busy from 8:30 in the morning to 10 in the evening everyday. we hav been put in our teams; they have ensured that the diversity in the team is taken care of. we are six people in our team, coming from all parts of the world US, Canada, Philippines, Trinidad, India with different work backgrounds. Not to mention I am the youngest one, sometimes i feel so stupid that what am I doing here ??? but may be I am adding a fresh perspective to the team..( just keeping myself happy with these feel good thoughts)

ok..we had to take 4 assignments that tell us how everybody among us is unique, what are our strengths, how can we leverage upon them to build a successful career in some kind of work that we enjoy. though i am quite a self obsessed, self analytical and self critical person but even i have had enough of it now!!@! but in the end i am loving this program. every morning new writeups are there waiting for me at my desk when i reach my classroom. though its busy and will become much more busier but may be this is what i wanted

weirdo??

I always knew there was something wrong wid me.the way i think, this conflicting combination of logical and emotional intelligence wid pathetic methodical skills. I took the HM assignment test , some weird method to analyze how different components of your brain work, measured my excellence in all the 4 quadrants of brain & my result depicted an internal conflict between high emotional energy and logical skills. I am the one of only two people in our class of typical number crunchers to have this kind of weird profile.

queen's first day...

the day started early with a decent breakfast. i was excited coz i was wearing the business clothes for the first time in my life. met lori garnier, bill and scott in person;the guys whom i had talked to a number of times on phone. they were excited, and bubbling with enthusiasm and intelligent sense of humor. our indian profs are nowhere near them at least when it comes to making each individual student feel special. i am glad that i made this decision and chose queen's rather than doing an mba at India or any other college in canada; at least for now. their speech was passionate and gave me chills. spent the whole day meeting and greeting professors, support staff, updating my laptop. tomorrow we shall be put in our teams. lets see how it goes. we are busy from 8:30 in the morning to 10 in the night for next 10 days. life has finally shifted to fifth gear.

the canada trip

Partap had chalked out a nice little three day plan for both of us. Well at 5 'o clock in the morning Bhuaji wake me up . By now I was sick and tired of traveling in and around Calgary, Cochraine and Banff for a week. Canada is beautiful but I had seen too much of it in too short a time span. Well a hour later I found myself in the plane going to Ontario, thousands of miles away. In the four hour flight I was awake for only fifteen minutes. I felt sorry for partap who was kind of bored and wanted to talk but couldn't help it.

Well at toronto airport we rented a car then commenced our canada trip. I was really excited now and moving at 120 Km/hour, may be talking at 30 words/minute. We went to the downtown, walked around for a couple of hours had a couple of hot chocolates, ate salads( i have never had so much salad in my whole life as I have eaten in this last week) went to CN tower, with the height of 558 meters it is probably the highest towers of world. then drove around 250 Km to kinston . The highway is one of the most beautiful highways in the world and I was at my philosophical best. By the time we reached kinston it was 10 in the night, so had a vegetarian pizzza and dozed off. Next day I went to Queen's. Its exactly the same as I had expected. The old castle type bulidings, a hostel that looks like a mini citadel, with all those creepy vines twining on the walls, it resembles Hogwarts of Harry Potter and I am truly madly deeply in love with it atleast for now.
We dropped off all the stuff and partap acting like a responsible cousin, may be after realizing how careless I am, ran off all the errands. It rained the whole day. but I love kinston, it has so many beautiful buildings , lake ontario -one of the five great lakes and it is much more greener than toronto or calgary. Well an ideal place to study. At night to put and end to this hectic day, we decided to walk around and find a nice place to eat. One of the clubs refused me an entry because I didn't have PhotoID proof. I was in case going to show them my passport, the only proof I had. Its kind of crazy living in a foreign country without an identity. Well finally we found a very nice Mediterranean food corner to eat and had a long, nice dinner. We deserved that after all the day's hard work.

Next day we went to an island through a free ferry. Well this Wolfe island is the place I loved the most in Canada. Green Fields, peaceful, serene and calm. then I realized that that the reason I like this place so much is because it looks so much like Punjab. Even the air smelt of fields in Punjab. Met an old couple, sat beside the lake and did some wild life photography. Afterwards went to Fort Henry.its a part of world heritage site, kind of boring in the day. But they say the place is haunted and they give guided tours in night. I am booked for one. In the evening said goodbye to partap and within an hour got ready to attend a meet and greet party and met many of the future classmates. Ironically it was the same place where I was refused an entry a day before.

Journey to the west

Its always hard to say goodbye, but after days of sleepless nights, tiresome packing, my senses had finally given up. Chandu's visit surprised me. I hadn't expected anything like that but she's a true sweet heart. Well in the plane i made the most of the time and slept for almost 12 hours in an 18 hour flight. Met a rich Indian businessman and a nice Canadian lady. She was more than excited to listen to all my ramblings and future plans. She gave me her contact number and told me that she was really willing to help me financially and otherwise also whenever I 'll care to implement them. It came off as nice surprise.

Well finally I reached the airport and volunteered to act as a translator for some confused old punjabi ladies who were trying to explain their purpose of visit to Canada, to the Canadian authorities in Hindi. Around a dozen of my relatives were there to come and welcome me. That was nice, but they were kind of amused when the same Canadian lady again came to me and said that she's serious about funding my plans. Canada is definitely a rich country.

The Road To Ithaka

Its an amazing poem I read, would like to share with everybody who would ever care to vivsit this blog.

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.


Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.


Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.


And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.