Back in 2004 Shamanth, Bofi, Anshumani and I started the IIT Madras Open Quiz. In some ways it was a response to critics of IITM quizzing, who blamed our quizzes for being too long, too esoteric, too disorganized and the likes. It was also an effort to take IITM quizzing to a wider audience, for [...]
I miss liquor advertisements. I really do. There might be some noble intention in preventing liquor companies from advertising openly through television and print (many of them have resorted to surrogate ads, though), but the quality of liquor advertising that I remember from the late 90s (when I was too young to drink) was pretty [...]
Since investment bank bashing seems to be in fashion nowadays, let me add my two naya paise to the fire. I exited a large investment bank in September 2011, after having worked for a little over two years there. I used to work as a quant, spending most of my time building pricing and execution [...]
Last night, the wife sent me to the grocer with a rather long shopping list. The grocer in question is Bhuvaneshwari Traders, a rather efficient “traditional retail” store close to home. There are lots of shop-boys there to service your requests, billing happens in a jiffy (yes, you get a printed bill) and they usually [...]
B-schools based in the US use a unique self-selecting mechanism to filter out applicants who might be a bad fit for a management job. This they achieve by making the application process more complicated, but in a way that the kind of people they hope to attract find it simple. Let me explain. Like most [...]
Sometime last week, the wife wanted to know more about management consulting, and I was trying to explain to her the kind of work that consulting firms do. I told her that the two most important skills to have in order to be a successful consultant are structured thinking and people skills, and in order [...]
We Indians have a “home food” culture. Most people consider it immoral and “bad” to eat out, and more so to eat out on a regular basis. People who don’t cook food at home are termed as being lazy. I remember this story I’d read in Tinkle back when I was a kid. It was [...]
Half an hour back, I moved from my room/office to the hall to catch what I thought will be five minutes of Big Bash (Australia’s version of the IPL). I ended up staying there for half an hour. I don’t know if the quality of cricket was decidedly superior to that of the IPL, a [...]
Two of the four full-time jobs that I’ve done have been “offshored”. They’ve both involved working for the Bangalore office of American firms, with both jobs having been described as being “front end” and “high quality”, while in both cases it became clear in the course of time that it was anything but front end, [...]
I have been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember. Maybe I started drinking at the age of three. Maybe even earlier, maybe later. But I clearly remember that back when I still had half-day school (i.e. kindergarten), after my afternoon siesta, I would sit down with my grandmother (another major coffee drinker) [...]
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