iEarn, iSell

Its been a while I have written and I've had enough experiences that I could term as 'memorable', but sometimes the laptop and blogspot just seem too far away. Sometimes I wonder who do I give the customary explanation of not writing to, but then I tell myself that being courteous is a virtue most people lack today. Its been more than a month and a half that I have been working. Well, I'd rather mention that its been that much time since I've started to get paid. Because, work hasn't really started - which my other friends who've joined earlier keep saying is a good thing, but I am a tough person to be convinced. For now its just been talking to people and getting a sense of how things run here and maybe visiting the market with the sales guys to get a trailer of what 3 months from october will be like. And its been enjoyable mostly. But there have been instances where I have been bored. Very bored.

However, there have been two particular moments that I think I will never forget. First was when I checked the ATM slip of my salary account on 30th July. I'm sure anyone who works will agree without any doubt that the feeling of getting the first salary is quite overwhelming. Also, it surprises even more to think that one hardly did anything to be actually paid. In fact, I was so delirious with joy that I forgot to punch out my attendance and simply walked out of the gate! I had to send a mail and get my attendance approved by my reporting manager later. I called my family, some friends and the enthusiasm they said could be felt in my voice. Lovely evening it was. It rained and for the first time I didn't have time to think if the pink umbrella looked too gay. Okay, I didn't choose to buy a pink umbrella myself! It was the only spare one at home and it did keep me dry for 2 weeks. Yes, it was floral too. Enough, I won't poke fun at myself anymore - at least not on this post.

The second memorable moment was when I actually sold something. I had a session scheduled with the person who looks after the Auto Care products and he said I should go out in the field and actually sell something than sitting in office. I was both excited as well as scared. Till now, all the marketing I have done is on ppt. XYZ is the target group, such and such should be the imagery that conveys this and that. Rs.X is the optimal price point and so much is the expected revenue. With good flair, a little research and some work with friends, professors didn't seem very displeased with me. In fact, some seemed quite impressed. However, this was the real deal. Take a product, go to a supermarket, approach walking customers and SELL! And my instructions were to call as soon as I sell my first product. He even said the guy would be there till 8pm. So it meant 'stand there as long as you have to'!

I flagged an auto. The first one agreed to go. Good signs. I prayed on the way. Found my way to the small corner where the product in question 'Magic Eraser' was being sold by someone from the company. I was instructed to approach him initially as a customer and see the demo. To my surprise, the counter was located in a very odd place. Right in between the toys section and the undergarments section. It should have been placed in the Household cleaning sections along with Harpic, Scotch Brite, Kitchen Wipes, Dusters, etc. So, I took a demo kit and two samples and stood where I felt it was more relevant. First target. Housewife. Upper middleclass to affluent. Correction, affluent. Its Hiranandani gardens! Posh locality in mumbai. Has a kid. Boy. Looks like he could be spoiling the walls. Ideal customer for my product. Showed demo and she says 'I'll have one'! Those words were music! First time successful. Felt a great deal of confidence. Called my boss. Told him I did it. He asked me to hang around for some more time and I sold another one in 15 minutes. First time I felt I gave the company something back. However miniscule the amount might be. But Rs.200 was my contribution to the company sales. Though the company will pay me more than that just to reimburse my auto fare, it was great fun.

Its been pouring heavily since morning and I can't wait to look at the lovely rains from my window. I don't mind them today as I have nowhere to go. I find them a pain otherwise. Oh, and the 'i' in the title is meant to show that I am really looking forward to the launch of the iphone5.

Sayonara,

Anand

Starting Afresh, Once Again...

Having so much of free time, I would have thought that I would post more often. But as it turned out, I didn’t. I couldn’t think of priceless pearls of wisdom, nor was something extraordinarily exciting going on and even if there were traces of gloom, they weren’t worth investing my time in documenting them. Yes, my time is precious even if I chose to do nothing with it. Or so I would like to believe. The name of the post is a tribute to my earlier blog ‘Starting Afresh’, which I started during engineering more as a way to discover myself. That process can of course never be complete. But lets just say I don’t find myself amusing anymore. Before starting off with corporate life, I thought it made sense for the naïve, innocent and enthusiastic fresher to express something. Naïve and innocent? Really? Well I, as the author, certainly enjoy the liberty to choose adjectives to describe myself, all of which might not necessarily be true anymore ;)

What are my expectations? Simple. I shouldn’t get bored. Or on the other hand shouldn’t have so much on my plate that it takes up my precious weekends. Intellectually challenging, impactful, meaningful and sustained value creation – All this funda is meant to impress the interviewers and unsuspecting B-School aspirants who might still get awed by these phrases. Sigh. Poor kids. I am certainly eager to start working, being independent and see what this phase of life has to offer, but I certainly am not anymore wearing rose-tinted glasses like I was before my internship last year. It was an eye-opener and a very unattractive teaser into the corporate world. Though I try my best not to generalize too soon with a small sample, but thanks to my internship I think I at least will not have unrealistic expectations anymore.

The thing that seems good at the moment is that I am the only candidate they hired for the profile. So, hopefully I will have something meaningful to do. On the other hand, being the first sample of their experiment to hire from a top-rung school, I have a massive reputation to protect and possibly mammoth expectations to satisfy. However, the higher challenge for me more often than not has been to justify me to my biggest critic, myself. It is rather easy to fool someone else, but not yourself. I don’t want to be in a position where I would want to do that. Ok, I realize its getting on the heavy and serious side. Not really a moment to be gloomy. So, cheers to a new tomorrow, I look forward to earning, saving, then blowing it all up on the things I love!

Adios Amigos, Anand

Grow Up

One must surely have heard these words yelled at him or her by different people at various stages of one's life – Be it the teacher in school who always thought her class is worse than a fish market, or your parents who want you to be more responsible and mend your careless ways, or be it the girl who once fell for that very mischievous childish you she can't seem to tolerate any more of. Everyone seems frustrated at the carelessness, at your incapacity or denial to understand certain things and behave in an expected manner. What is really the cause of their frustration? Why grow up when growing up means one is grumpy most of the time and wants everyone else to grow up, be grumpy and give you company? Most grown-ups don't set a good example themselves. They seem to be more desperate than ever to get back to being a child, but they just aren't able to do that. Responsibility is the big excuse. What does the phrase 'being a child at heart' really mean? Its about knowing and doing simple little things that give you joy and happiness. When having a paper in a few days that you don't have a damn clue about didn't stop you from going to the movie in college, why should the thought of some pending chore later in the day stop you from enjoying that long morning drive on the beach? It does, because you've supposedly grown up.

Many of us have led lives of procrastination in some sense or the other. Do well in 10^th, after that you'll enjoy. Do well in 12^th, you have the entrances to clear. Then you can enjoy. Do well in college; this is what will get you a job after all. Then you can enjoy. This job isn't going to pay you enough to enjoy, so do a PG and life will never be the same again. Yes, you earn enough now. But what when you think about starting a family? Start saving. Only then you can enjoy. Earlier you thought you needed money, now you think you need time. Not to underestimate any of the stages in life mentioned above that we are expected to do exceedingly well in, I fully agree about them being important and the necessity to do well in each of them. But 'Joy' shouldn't be procrastinated. It isn't like money that grows with time and compound interest. Different things give us joy at different stages of our lives and they cannot really be procrastinated. They come with their expiry dates after which they become meaningless and one can only 'sigh' about what he should have done. I guess being a child at heart doesn't mean to be careless and not accept responsibility, but rather knowing what gives you joy and appreciating its importance over a quest for the uncertain future. Find something that makes you happy today, that makes you forget the world and more importantly, find time for it. Find time for yourself. You are worth it.

Going on exchange was one decision that I'm so glad to have taken. Seeing the world as a student, acting miserly and stingy, going to fabulous places with friends was all part of an experience that I would have missed out forever had I thought about the marks I could score, the competitions I could have won and the money that I could have saved had I stayed back. But, I am glad I didn't. Money will come. Student and college life will never come back. The joy associated with this stage of life is never going to come back. I might go to the same places again, but doing the same things wouldn't give me the joy as they did this time. So I would say, Grow Up, most certainly do. But don't procrastinate joy!

Idiota

How wonderful would it be if we could channel our rage, rant and rambling into something creative. That is a time when the mind speaks without constraints, rattles without any holds barred and gives a bloody damn about the consequences. This is a time I show my boring, pragmatic and rational self the middle finger and become an entirely different and probably even interesting character. But as the title suggests, I ain't really feeling an aura of awesomeness around me like Barney Stinson, but rather feeling like someone whom I would usually laugh at, a complete idiot! Though Aamir Khan has made it incredibly cool to be one, I must say it ain't really so cool.

What really happened that has brought on this antagonistic tone? What are the events that led to the realization of my momentous stupidity? I know readers would revel in the gorier details, but I am not inclined to go any further. Well, isn't it modest enough of me to admit I am feeling stupid. Yes, it most certainly is. Is there someone to blame? Yes, of course. We all love scapegoats, don't we? But where was my head when I needed it the most? Oh, it says it has an excuse - the four letter word. No, not the one which begins with an 'f'. The more mushier one. How lame. Yes, I know you are thinking exactly that, but you don't need to say it out aloud.

So, have I become a sceptic now? Maybe I have. What happened to the eternal optimist? Oh, that naive kid? Consider this his obituary. May his soul rest in peace. He was a nice guy. I knew him well. Diabetically sweet. Died of heart failure. Can't believe I actually found the last line funny. Well, before any of you probe queries or want to say things like 'shit happens', I would issue a disclaimer saying that descriptions are often over-exaggerated to make them sound more vivid. So, I am completely fine. Moreover, the idiota who needed sympathy is dead. Isn't he?

It's Not Really That Simple

A recent conversation made me wonder that there is a strong tendency to perceive ‘simplicity’ as a personality attribute in a very stereotypic manner. When a girl is said to be ‘simple’, there is often an implicit assumption that she is the ‘holier-than-thou, god-fearing, take home to mommy’ type or a ‘behenji’. Being simple is not being naïve, foolish or anachronistically conservative. Simplicity and sophistication aren’t mutually exclusive at all. I am of the opinion that it is much more about having simplicity of thought and not having countless different insatiable pursuits in life, but rather having just a few variables that you derive happiness and joy from. Even if she is materialistic, few other gifts would give as much joy as that very affordable clichéd red rose.

Thanks to the abuse of ‘simplicity’ as a personal attribute by the pathetic modern day mass media, being ‘complicated’ or ‘sophisticated’ seems to be the next coolest thing to do if you can’t be a rockstar. Its not just the case with the ‘people’ side of simplicity being abused. Lengthy reports, unnecessary graphs, forceful appendices to drive home the most simple and intuitive of points? We are at the heart of complicating things. Maybe it becomes necessary to justify our apparently fat paychecks. In that aspect, I totally concur with what one of my favorite marketing professors had to say, “If you can’t explain it in one line, Chief, you simply haven’t understood it well enough!”.

Doing justice to the topic at hand, I wouldn’t really drag on for the sake of dragging on just because I have an ‘ideal’ post length that I subconsciously feel that I should try and adhere to even if I don’t have any value to add. Ha, look at the sentence I have just written. In short, I could have just said, "I am signing off now as I don't have anything else to write'. But again, its not that easy being simple and ‘to-the-point’. Worst of all, it might not even be appreciated. So good luck being sophisticated and complicated :P

Gracias,

Anand

Selective Perception : Beware

This is a post where I acknowledge to have begun writing with no idea in mind about what I want to write about. Usually, I begin with a title in mind and then build on the idea, but its going to be the reverse this time. For quite sometime I have been telling myself that I need to post something, but I guess I just get too worked up thinking that I need 'something' to write about. Two years of this place should actually have equipped me to carry off 'nothing substantial' as 'something substantial'. The regular crib of being busy and a hectic life keeping me from posting is still valid. I still have to finish reading a case for the meeting at 2, do some independent research, clean my room, work on my resume and of course in the background attend classes and all sorts of group meetings. Now that I have spoken about all the things that are supposed to keep me away from blogging, another one might be that I am unsure about whether some of my thoughts should go on the public domain, compounded by the fact that I am not at my imaginative best.

It is interesting how we often tend to see things the way we would like them to be rather than the way they really are. I am all up for eternal optimism and its positive fallouts, but times when naive optimism gets really disconnected with reality is when one should start worrying. But of course, one is just too naive or just is too illusioned with what he or she wants to see to start worrying at the right time. People who consider themselves as realists, rational and pragmatic in reality do not completely know themselves but think they do. Rationality is a farce. We are not rational most of the times. Its a super simplified assumption economists make so that they can devise theories, feel great about themselves and win Nobel Prizes. Not to say it doesn't have its benefits, but its limitations are far more understated.

At the end of it all, there is often a feeling of 'How stupid could I have been', 'Shouldn't I have known', 'The signs were so obvious all the time', "I was such an idiot' and to think that one considered himself mature just makes you laugh at yourself. However, from such realization comes a learning experience that has few or no parallels. How vulnerable we really are or rather how much of a tendency we have to make ourselves extremely vulnerable is a surprising revelation indeed. Unsure of whether what I have written would make sense to anyone, I would usually make an attempt to make things clearer, but not this time. I would rather leave a disclaimer on the lines of 'Everyone is free to make their own assumptions which might or might not be verified by the author depending upon his mood' :D

Cheers,

Anand