Pertinent Observations

It’s not too often that i write a serious story. I can’t recall having written too many of them. They take too much time to write, you need to go through multiple iterations, and you need a good storyline. I have been working on one such for the last six months. The first draft came [...]

During an ego-surfing binge yesterday, I found that searching for “pertinent observations” turns up this blog as the first result. And googling for “skthewimp” also yields similar results. Of course, having a common name such as Karthik or having an english word such as “SKimpy” as a nickname does complicate matters – my blog shows [...]

It’s happened twice in two weeks so it’s not funny. Two sundays back, I bump into Vyshnavi and Kavya at the Deep Purple concert. Last monday, I see Kuku (as in arvind, not ) and Ranjani at a Barista. And each time there are three of us simultaneously asking one another “how do you guys [...]

I hear that Turkmenbashi Sapurmurat Niyazov’s successor as president (or king or whatever) of Turkmenistan is the one who looks closest to Turkmenbashi! Though the logic may seem weird, i’m not surprised at all. One thing turkmenbashi did during his rule was to erect thousands of statues of himself all over the country! and given [...]

When Satyendra Kumar Dubey was shot last year the papers were full of “IITian killed”. He got loads of footage in the TV media, and a lot was made of the fact that he was an IITian! Now, three days back when Adeep lahiri gets killed in bangalore, he has been downgraded to a “techie”. [...]

had my year-end performance review late last week. surprisingly for me, it turned out to be pretty good. my bosses seem to be happy with whatever I’ve been doing and have asked me to “keep up the good work”. given the A T Kearney fiasco, which had (among other things) totally shattered my confidence and [...]

Yes, it’s official now. Sabre Holdings has been bought by two Private Equity firms – Texas Pacific Group and Silver Lake partners. The deal has been valued at over USD 5 billion and as a consequence of it, Sabre (ticker symbol TSG) will be taken off the New York Stock Exchange coming quarter 2 of [...]

So i did go to IIT Madras last week to recruit. Turned out pretty good in the end. We found around six really good candidates and it was a tough decision whittling it down to the final three to whom we have made offers. We are very happy with the entire process and also with [...]

I’m amazed at the number of my cousins who have “started production” immediately after their wedding – many of them have become parents within ten months of getting married! Interestingly all these cousins aer the types that I would classify as “conservative”. Wonder why the hurry. //

Arsenal’s goalless draw with Porto reminded me of chess. In chess, you have this concept of “grandmaster draws”, where players agree to a draw after just a couple of moves, or in some cases after just one move. This usually happens during the end stages of the tournament. For example, white might need only a [...]