The beauty of incomprehension

The task of searching for the right word for "how a train journey makes me feel", turned out to quite difficult. As I embarked on my homebound journey at term break, I mused over how I have always been happy whenever I've travelled in a train. One reason of course is the journey itself. Any journey promises a change- from the city, the people and the current way of life. And it offers hope- of a new place, new people and a new way of life. Change and hope are together a potent recipe for happiness. But this source of happiness is common to all modes of travel; my search was for a word that makes a train journey unique.
In planes and ships the surroundings are far too homogeneous to make you feel you've moved very far. In trains however, the limitless expanse of distance gets registered through the way life changes across the journey. The landscape changes, the language on the signboards changes, people's appearance changes, and even their "busy"ness changes. You cross a lush green field where the only thing that moves is the scarecrow swaying, cows grazing and a farmer walking across the field. It appears as if the time is standing still. After half an hour you cross a busy and a noisy railway crossing where scooter riders would be honking their horns, eager to resume their lives on the other side of the railway line.
You'd cross rivers brimming with water- tributaries and distributaries that you cannot name. And you'll cross gorges where unknown rivers once used to flow, that now lay still with the parched soil cracking under the sun. I felt I wanted to know the names of these tributaries, the story behind these dried up rivers, the history of the distant mountain ranges, recognize the species of beautiful trees and pinpoint the location of the passing village. That is when it hit me. The beauty of a train journey is that it showcases a world you don't understand. A world that due to its distance has become distant from yours. My desire to know the name is my desire to place it within my existing models of things I know, but it will kill its magic. It is the incomprehension that makes it wonderful. In a world that is fast running out of mysteries, every element outside the rectangular window frame is mysterious and unknown. You cross broken pathways to invisible destinations, cutting across carpeted fields and disappearing into the horizon. You cross buildings and huts and yet more buildings, each one a passing reminder of the thousands of lives, beyond those mysterious walls that you'd never know. Each dweller is a complete and unique human being and also a complete stranger. You cross platforms that appear to be forgotten, where a few people wait but the train never stops. It is as if the platform has been wiped off the railways map, and when you look beyond the platform and peer into the dimlit huts, you wonder if the town itself has been forgotten. And at last it is the incomprehension of the engineering behind all this . As you cross bridges and rivers, overpasses and underpasses, canals and tunnels, you can't help but wonder at the marvelous human effort that went into stamping a path across the landscape.
Having said all this I have still not figured out the word to describe the feeling. I've narrowed it down to two strong contenders though. I think the word maybe "overawe"- the train journey overawes me with the realization that there is so much I do not know about people, places and the vastness of my country and so much I will never know. On the other hand, the word maybe "promise"- the train journey promises millions of hidden treasures that await the one who cares to search. But then again, perhaps I should not try naming the word. It may kill the magic. I hope you get the point.

How to kill a tree

A poem i had read in school. Just found it on the web. I love the way he describes "killing" a tree and the way life tries to hold on...

How to kill a tree
-by Gieve Patel

It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it. It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out of it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.

So hack and chop
But this alone won't do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.

No,
The root is to be pulled out-
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out-snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.

Then the matter 
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,

And then it is done.

With love to all CAT lovers

I honestly think the following article got more attention than it deserved. I am reproducing the article as I had sent it to the media relations committee here on the campus. You can then contrast it to the published articles in TOI and Telegraph. The Telegraph article was still okay, but as a dear friend pointed out, the TOI article wasn't "ashishy" enough!

One must love a cat on its own terms. ~Paul Gray

This year again, on the third Sunday of the month of November, the nation would indulge in a fierce battle of wits. The fighters would change, the battle ground would change and the intensity would differ, but the prize will remain a coveted seat in one of the best management institutes in the country. I was fortunate enough to bell the CAT in 2007, in my second attempt at it. In this article, I’d like to share my two cents worth of learning I had picked up during preparation. Having played the game and failed at it, I feel I have some insights that will help you in planning your preparation.
CAT aspirants are of two types, those who’ve recognized that CAT is a different type of an exam, and those who will not succeed this year. It is a harsh way of putting it, but this is what I realized for myself once I reflected upon my reasons for failure. All of us have been taking exams since kindergarten, and all of us have developed a tool kit for dealing with them. The problem with CAT is that the same toolkit will not work unless modified. The difference comes from the reason that CAT is an exam that requires you to optimize and not maximize returns. I can’t be sure that after reading the above line you’ll treat the exam differently, but I can promise that unless you start thinking of it as a fundamentally different exam, it would be hard to crack CAT.
Having understood that the exam is different, there are three steps I’d like to advice in setting up your preparation:
Know Thyself: Throughout your preparation keep it in mind that you are different. You’ll hear a lot of advice from teachers, seniors and friends about test taking strategy. Listen to all of that, but do what works the best for you. The only universal advice I can think of is, join a test series with some preparation institute. That not only brings a structure and discipline to the whole preparation but keeps you abreast of what your competitors are learning. Other than this it is just you vs. yourself. Think of your training like perfecting a cycle:
Perform
Compare this with a traditional exam preparation that goes like:
Perform
Most of us end up paying a lot less attention to the analyzing and reflecting phase. Do not do that. After every test you take (and take at least one in a week starting today) analyze the mistakes you made, the section that didn’t go well and most importantly the concepts you muddled up in. In the next week just do a concentrated preparation on these subject areas through textbook and practice exercises. Try to catch hold of the root cause of the problem and not the symptom. It is easy to think your problem in RC is slow reading speed when actually you are missing out because you don’t answer the question being asked. You’ll see that if you single out the root cause of the issue it would be really easy to plug the hole.
Know Thy Enemy: There is no official course material for CAT, no fixed format and no syllabus. The test tries to test you in a new environment each time. So an important learning is to stay adaptable and let the format of the test decide how you perform at it. Which section to attempt first and how much time to give to it, is the most difficult problem of optimization in CAT. Another problem is when to leave the question you think you know. I’d say practice all possible strategies for you during preparation. Change the order of sections, time per section and choice of questions. Of course, when you change strategy make sure it is required to perfect the learning cycle discussed above, not because you have been advised to. And throughout the exam, remember, you have to maximize your score in minimum time. This is the only objective. So whether you solve the question from the choices, from a formula you know or from sheer hunch makes absolutely no difference. Make sure you have this maximization intent running through your blood stream when you sit down to take the test.
Know thy battleground: The day of the exam will be a lot different from other tests you’d take during preparation. I myself was never a consistent performer in the test series I joined. I would always perform poorly in either quant or verbal. In fact, of the 12 odd test series exams I undertook during preparation, I crossed 99%ile only once. So did I get lucky on the day of the exam? I of course like to think otherwise. On the day everything would come down to a test of nerves. As you might realize if you do the last year’s paper sitting at home, the exam is not really that tough. Yet, every serious aspirant will underperform in it just because of nerves. I cannot emphasize the importance of a positive frame of mind that day. Do anything that works for you but feel confident about yourself that day and think of it like another test you are about to take. Past performance, uncompleted syllabus, the fear of a section - all should be replaced by one encompassing belief – today is my day. It will make a lot of difference.
I hope the above strategies help. Just keep the faith and you’ll do great. All the best

Life at Hel(L): The first impressions

Having completed a term at IIM Lucknow I like to believe I now have the necessary knowledge to give a shot to this ambitious topic. 
Hel(L) is an often (over)used adjective used to describe this campus. Here L is used to convey the geographic location to a person visiting this place while Hell conveys the essence of the location, meant for some-one who intends to spend a part of his life here. I would not like to judge the life at hel(L) right now. It would be too rash to do that only after the first term. I am sure with time my idea of the life at hel(L) will more closely resemble the life here. Regardless of the facts, one definite thing about the first impression is that there is only one such impression and that is the one I intend to convey in this post- the facts and the impression they had on a typical fresher.

The beginning
I had very little idea about the campus and my batchmates when I stepped onto the Lucknow railway platform on the fateful day of 20th june. I believe I am the eternal optimist. A lot of things in my life haven't gone as expected and yet every bad thing makes me more confident of a good thing coming up next. I guess this faith is based on the belief that life in its attempt to be fair, can't be bad to me on a trot. What this assumption doesn't account for is that life doesn't need to be fair. So you may have toiled hard in your engineering college, a college that was deprived of females, and away from any eventful places in the city. And again, you might have ended up in a job far away from home, in a company deprived of females. The eternal optimist still believes this time things would be different. And so did I.
Punjab National Bank(PNB) likes to believe they are a part of the IIM-L family. They were there to pick me up at the Lucknow station. A gesture that was obviously followed by a process of providing details about the education loan offers from them. But I think it was fair deal, and just because of this gesture of paternal concern, I chose PNB to be my pocket-money providers for the coming two years. The ride from the station was too long for my liking. The city of Lucknow is quite modern in its design, though just like Delhi, it has come up on need basis. But as we left the city behind i got worried, the inevitable was becoming obvious. We took a left from the Sitapur higway and 3.4 km (significance elaborated later) down we came to the place that has been unimaginatively christened "Prabandh Nagar". At the heart of this place, surrounded by forest like vegetation and far from any human civilization, I saw the gates of "Bhartiya Prabandh Sansathan". At that moment, I knew life had pulled another one on me.

The first impressions
The first impressions of a place are based significantly on where you are coming from. Since I was coming from Microsoft, my expectations from the campus were needlessly high. So even though the campus is actually very pretty, I remember my inital impression was just the opposite. There are lush green lawns, beautful fountains and nicely designed academic blocks and hostels. There is a draw of lots to decide which hostel you get and I was lucky to get room in hostel 11, a city hostel. (City(hostels 9-14) is a term used to distinguish these hostels from Slums (hostels 1-8) which are, regardless of what their residents will try to reason out, just slums!)
The first two days were quite boring. I just spent them lazing around, delibrating on my decision to join L. On Monday, 22nd June, the games began. The induction process is part-prof part-senior driven programme intended to give a preview of the life that will follow. Life becomes a distant blur in this three day whirlwind tour, but it is worth it. It sets the pace for the challenging time that will follow.

The Professors
I am now quite certain that eccentricity is a qualifying criterion for recruiting faculty. Nothing else explains the large proportions these people occupy the faculty rooms. In my perception, Lucknow, like other good institutes has the following types of faculty.
The Gods: These are the people who know their subject inside out. They mean what they say, and it is left to the student to be able to match up to their standards. I was fortunate to have two such profs in my first term.
The Eccentrics: These are by far the most famous profs on campus characterized by their area of specialization in their eccentricity. So there is a prof who gives marks only to groups that has females. Prof who would mark you absent if you forget to bring your name plate to the class. Prof who is so fond of socialism he'll deduct marks from students who does too well in the course. Prof who would tell you to write the chapter by hand in case you forgot to read it for the class. I think it is fair to say that when it comes to eccentrics, at IIM Lucknow, we have the works.
The Dociles: They are mild-natured, generally good hearted professors who teach not so known courses and teach them well. They are mostly generous in their evaluation, so no-one really flunks in their subjects. By a prof standard, these are too normal and therefore earn the distinction of being the most easily forgettable faces on the campus.
The pain-in-the-ass: This are the ones who will give you the worst time on the campus. They don't know anything about what they are teaching and yet they earn some sadistic pleasure in giving tough exams, ambiguous projects and flunking students by the dozen. They are in the holistic sense a pain-in-the-ass. 

The language
Every close knit community develops a language of its own. This is because it soon finds the existing language seriously inefficient at conveying the essence of what is felt. Lucknow is no different and the following is the compilation of some of the lingo used on the campus.
Globe: Sometimes when you encounter a new word, you can't help but wonder, how you got about without knowing this word before. Globe is one such word. In its particular usage here, it is defined as both a noun and a verb. As a noun it means a tactless/factless and meaningless peace of information. An examination answer that converts a one line information to a two page note is a typical case in point. As a verb it is the act of writing, speaking or otherwise communicating globe.
CP: Class Participation carries marks in classes. Thought it is not taken as seriously as, say IIM Ahmedabad, where each prof brings along his teaching assistant specifically to evaluate class participation. Still, the questions, the answers and overall conduct in classes earns marks. And therefore for many students it unleashes the dangerously curious child who was hitherto latent. Such intellectual degradation of the environment in pursuit of earning marks is termed CP. 
RG-giri: RG stands for relative grading, a system of rewarding marks on a relative, rather than an absolute scale. So even if you get 80 while the class on an average gets 80.5, you are screwed. This concept gives rise to an increasingly selfish behavior often known as doing "RG-giri"


The Life
The life inside the campus is designed to make you forget any life outside it. The sooner you accept that life will not be the same for the two years on the campus, the easier it would be to cope up with the transition. Again, the quality of life you experience at IIM lucknow is inversely proportional to the quality of life you expected. But there are a few generalizations. If you intend to remain even mildly competitive then the sleep goes for a toss, subsitituted with assignments, project work and group meetings. I felt there was an air of too much competition around and atleast in the first term I felt egos getting involved too soon in group decision making. Though most courses are well structured, there are a few that are very random in nature. So sometimes the assignments and projects will make you wonder about the purpose of it all. Such "why am I doing this" and "how will this make me better" will crop up time and again in the first term and will mostly remain unanswered. The people here are quite versatile and most of them have atleast some skills you can learn from. Also there is a feeling of fraternity that develops within the students, just like any other group that shares the same pain. Despite the presence of insti-party (where our on-campus rock band 3.4 often performs) and other "social" events I think there is a lot of solitary time you spend.This solitary time is not to be confused with personal time as most of it will be taken up by some curricular/non-curricular activity. In the lack of this personal time I felt life often went ahead of me. But having said that, for an avid learner, there is a lot to learn from each bit and piece that constitutes the first term on the campus. I feel that I have had none other 3 month period in my life of denser learning. I write this line returning back to the campus after a 5 day break at the end of first term. Lets see how the games unfold in the 2nd term starting tomorrow. Cheers!

The Uncertainty

I couldn't write much in the past month. The fact that my laptop arrived only yesterday is one important reason, but mostly it is because life at IIM is simply to fast paced.
The haziness about management as a career has only increased in the past month. The ambiguity and uncertainty involved in management sometimes feels too much for me to like. But then I convince myself that uncertainty is the truth. How many of the things plan we plan actually work along the lines we thought they would? How many things can we control? From choosing a job, a life partner or a simple birthday present, we are trying to make the decisions with the limited information we have. The data in its entirety would simply be too much to handle. So we just model the world in a simplistic model inside our minds. Add to that the limitations of human perceptions and voila, it appears most of the decisions we have taken are close to random.
I like to imagine a world of that sort. If we took decisions at random. If we really wore the first cloth that came out of the closet. Chose the 3th girl friend to be a life partner. Had the number of kids same as the first digit of our roll number. I have a feeling such a world would not end up being very different from us. Just the illusion of control would be gone.
I respect people who take decisions based on long career goals and end up getting where they wanted, despite the uncertainty. But, I've a feeling that the decisions taken are still as blurred and random as any decision each of us take. Just that the conviction that they have about those decisions are more. The fact that we trust our decisions, persevere and persist seem to be the reasons for achieving the objective not the choice of objectives. Another way of saying this is, had these people been told to do something instead of giving choice, I feel they'd have ended up done that something as well.
Sadly, I am not one of those people and I also like to believe that my decisions do matter. This brings me back to the decision - Was MBA the right career choice for me? Whether I am the yellow helmet or the black suit in the picture above? The answers still remain - let us wait and watch

Of things that do not change.

The status messages are flowing in my mind, uncertainities about myself are looming again, stories about eccentric profs are in the air, today is not like yesterday, tomorrow is not like anything I know of, the penny pinching is back, the rumours are traveling far and wide, the batch girls are being courted, the who's whos are being picked, the who's thats are being teased, and sleep is back to the glory it had in pre-exam days.

The books, the bags, the lawns, the library, the i-card, the classes, the mess and the local pan-walla. All these fixtures from memory have re-appeared in their modified avatars. Perhaps they are not modified at all. Perhaps I have changed since the time I met them first. I guess they have always remained permanent fixtures, greeting the students that arrive and bidding farewell the ones that leave. The constants in the flow.

It is comforting that somethings do not change with time and it really is nice to be a student again!

Reached Lucknow

The latest update is that I've reached IIM-Lucknow. The scedules are busy and I don't have a laptop :(

Since i do not want that my blogging suffers over the next 2 years, as would be the case if I take too long to dwell on a thought, I've thought to keep it more fluid. So I guess the quantity will go up and the quality will fall atleast initially.

Just another choice one has to make :|

The apologetic truth

I've seen ambition and I've seen it turn ugly

a fire that burns nothing but self.

I've known passion, it is true I have,

of love of sin of desire of self.

I've been burned in envy

I've been blinded in pride.

But passion is not the fuel that burns

the fuel is what remains when everything else is burnt

I've looked for answers, I've looked for more

I've searched the world to explore

but will I ever find the answers out-side.

when everyday I meet a new stranger inside.

I'd never be as rich as i could've

never have the fame i could've

I never lose and I never win.

but no one sees that I don't play

I just want the day I say good bye

People stop by and say "he was a good guy"

Here I am, on the road again...

So I've resigned again. This time I've left Microsoft for the lure of a management course at IIM. It was a very tough decision for me to take. Since the time I can remember I've been fascinated by technology. I still have disturbed nights, when I feel as if I've lost a loved one close to me. The kind of happiness I got in digging deeper and deeper into logic would probably never be found again. But the learning must go on. If you plan to live a life of learning, it becomes important to not get caught in a niche, to see the big picture, no matter how hazy it appears. Never again would I get the chance to learn about disciplines like finance, marketing and human resources. Never again would my family be so supportive. Never again would I have the kind of financial freedom I have today. Never again would I be this courageous and just let go.
Serving the notice period in Microsoft was tough, because I could see people with much lesser love for computers who've made Microsoft their home. And there was also the lure of a very comfortable present and a bright future. Another realization was that the people who I thought were different, and who had made it to IIMs painted a very sad (or maybe just a practical) picture - "The purpose of coming to IIMs is to get a better job", "I would recommend management to people who are not sure about what they want in life". These kinds of thoughts unnerved me a little. I've often painted a very rosy picture of how things would be in the future, only to see them getting distorted amidst the practicalities like these. But then I thought, though the reality hasn't the way I've pictured, it has been good enough to keep me dreaming and hoping, and that ain't that bad!
In the software industry we always take decisions. This algorithm, this hardware, this technology. Thinking about these made me realize that these are not really decisions you take. These are the decisions you arrive at. Mostly you have enough facts to know which is the better technology, you just call the act of interpreting those facts as decision making. The real decisions one needs to take are the ones in which you don't have the facts, at-least not as many as you'd like. I realized I am quite in-adept at taking such decisions. Something I intend to learn, through trial and error, in the coming two years.
These days I've been reading about Steve Jobs. He is becoming a sort of a hero for me in my adult life. What I like the most about him is that he has had to fight at every step to reach where he has reached today. And he has. You can hear a very fascinating speech delivered by him at the Stanford convocation here. I would just like to re-iterate about what he talks about dots and how you have got to keep making those. And these dots always join in the past, they will never join looking forward. So in order to make a few dots and hoping to connect a few..Here I go, TURN THE PAGE!

In search of beauty

It is astounding if you stop and consider the interdisciplinary nature of all good answers. I mean if you really stop and consider, you'd realise there is no reason for the truth to be that spectacular. But it is. Let me tell you the example that triggered my "stopping and considering" this proposition. Imagine you have two cubes Red and Blue, placed on two separate squares marked x and y on the floor. Now suppose you have to move Red cube to the y square and Blue cube to the x square. Here are two of the many ways you might do that:

1. Remove the Red square from x and keep it somewhere "else" on the floor. Move the Blue square to the x square and then keep the Red one on the y square.

2. Keep the Red square on top of the blue cube. Move this cube stack from y square to x square. Remove the red square from top of the blue one and keep it on y square.

If you are with me so far and if you happen to be a software engineer, you'd see the above is nothing but algorithms to swap two variables. The first one uses a third variable, the second one manages without this extra variable. But no one designed the two systems to behave similarly. The way good answers pervade disciplines is really overwhelming. It is as if God didn't want to reinvent beautiful answers so he chose to use the same ones in different places.

But for a someone who has made procuring knowledge as the purpose of his existence, this is great news. This means that he can stop at a beautiful answer knowing that this answer would solve more questions than he has himself dared to ask. This is a great assumption for someone diving in an infinite pool, knowing that all his searches would terminate at beauty.

And the search for beauty is a fulfilling experience because it brings you closer to the being that put it there. But the search is not easy, you need to spot it whenever it crosses your path. Beauty is there in the way words knock up against each other and flip through their alternates as I construct this sentence in my mind. Beauty is hidden in the irony of this sentence when it gets over. Beauty really is all around.

Let me end this thought with a couple of lines from the thoughts of an eminent mathematician, Paul Dirac:

"God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world."

"It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress."

Few pictures of my new abode

Home@Hyderabad

Apologies to the technical geek

They aren't hard to spot and in my current work-place there are many of them. I had a chance encounter with one of them yesterday, when he was asked to give us a presentation on the system architecture. Before the presentation I was told that he was a veteran of this product and knows things inside out.
He entered in the familiar geek attire. A formal shirt left hanging out over a pair of lose black trousers and a pair of slippers. He was confident during the presentation, though it was obvious he wasn't excited about it. The presentation was by all means okay, but it was when we started asking questions that things went haywire. He stuttered and stammered and left long pauses between his words. The answers were complicated and some how didn't appear to answer the questions that were put up. To say that the question and answer session wasn't fruitful, would be putting it mildly.
He sat with me again today, and I asked him almost the same questions as yesterday. But this time the answers came and I found it hard to hang on to his words. Every answer had so many questions to it and he had answers to them all. It was then I realised the stammering had nothing to do with not knowing answers. It was because he knew so much about everything, he couldn't decide how much to let us know. It is astounding to think that knowledge can be so overwhelming that it becomes a handicap.
My apologies to all technical geeks for our indifferent attitudes. I am fortunate to rub shoulders with each one of you and I know I am not even half as technologically gifted as you are. I share your workplace, I get paid the same salaries and even end up getting noticed by managers, just because I know the right things to say. Eventually I get noticed for being street-smart, the managers get promoted for the work you accomplished, our team becomes successful because you designed a flawless architecture, and the company is happy because it makes money. The truth is me, the manager, the team or the company are nothing without you. You are the reason we exist and have the opportunity of disillusioning ourselves into believing we are instrumental for success. My heartfelt apologies for our callousness and thanks for sticking up with us.

You're playing with the big boys now

It is hard to describe the Microsoft campus; you have to visit it to feel what it feels to be here. The first thing you notice is how far the colassal beast has gone to convey its identity as an IT giant. Everything about the campus is huge, and mostly extravagant. For the thousands of "intelligent" people brought under the same roof, this humbling experience is imperative.

Second thing you notice is the emphasis on individual freedom. Not only are you accepted for being yourself you are respected for that. And your growth as an individual in the organisation is entirely in your hands. Their psyche is pretty straight forward. They're providing you the infrastructure. It is upto you to decide how high you can go. Whether you carve a niche for yourself, outshine the others, or get lost in the crowd - it is for you to decide. And to be honest - I as an individual, am scared :)

DISNEY lyrics

A year of growing up.

So I am 24 now. The best thing about my birthday is that, due some weird kindergarten rule about admissions, I always end up being the youngest in the class. So by the time I turn a certain age, most my friends are already there. And since they don't explode, or suddenly start complaining of graying hair and muscle pains, it gives me enough courage to accept that life, for better or for worse, would continue being the same.

I wonder who came up with the idea of birthdays in the first place. If you think of it, besides your age, nothing really changes on your birthday. Obviously, the person who invented birthdays understood the human need to celebrate and also their need to be unique. So amidst the Holis and Diwalis and the new year's eve, this guy thought, how about giving each person a special day for celebration for himself. A day that becomes a part of his identity just like his name or his face. And the idea has been a success. Regardless of what I do on my birthday, I have a certain spring in my steps, a certain warmth in my smiles; because no matter how it turns out - it remains my day.

The past year has been a good year of growing up. I have seen a lot of highs and lows. I have been proud of my actions and ashamed of them. I have surpassed my expectations and disappointed myself. All in all, it was a year like a hindi masala movie that ended up having a generally happy ending. It is funny how my inner self feels so unchanged but has somehow evolved to give better advice over the year. In an attempt to enumerate the "learn" posts ,as I like to call them in life's journey (in no particular order), are:

• Lost my passport in a foreign land.
  
• My first break-up
  
• Relapsing into another relation and hurting a person.
  
• The biggest exam I failed after preparing for it.
  
• The biggest exam I cleared w/o preparing for it.
  
• Pattaya - night life.
  
• Working with (so-called) intelligent people
  
• Atrenta - ownership and accountability
  
• The dilemma of choice - and why success doesn't equate to happiness.
  
• Defeating an old enemy (CAT) and how perseverance pays (by buying you more time to fight it out!)
  
• Filling up unfavorable times with music and work
  

There are many more, but the above have been instrumental in evolving my psychology and shall play an important role in deciding my actions. Probably, working with "intelligent" people, has been the most important lesson this year. It has made me more confident about my abilities and as a result I feel more comfortable in asking for what I deserve - a major paradigm shift for me. I hope I have a longer list for the next year. Thank you God, for this life, for being consciously aware of how I am living it, and for being able to learn from it.

Finally, blessing that is not in disguise !

Today has been a day of unconditional happiness for me. In fact, the past one month has been very good. I have been granted happiness in the manner I had wanted. No questioning, no bargaining but exactly the way I wanted it.
It is hard to get happiness in the way you want. This is because each time a person becomes selective about the kind of happiness he wants, he breaks the infinite sample space of happiness that God had created and targets a finite subset that matches his selection. This subset, obviously being smaller than the sample space, dramatically reduces the probability of getting happiness in your own way.
Well I have been lucky enough to have this sort of happiness come my way this month. First, I got through Microsoft, Hyderabad. Then, I managed to crack CAT, arguably the most difficult test in India. And although the significance of these outcomes would be judged with time, I am happy and content with them. My faith in my abilities, that had been taking a pounding for a while, now stands restored. My faith in my fate also stands reassured. 
I know everyone gets his due share in this lifetime. It is a part of God's algorithm to be fair to everyone. But it is nice to find out I got a chunk of that share, sooner than later. God's algorithm is working with clockwork precision :)