If you dropped by on my blog sometime last week, you might have noticed some funny shit happening with the design and layout of the site. I was in the process of a major site redesign. All my earlier blogs were either on wordpress.com or blogspot. This is my first self hosted blog and I am really having a great time customizing every little square inch of it. I got so obsessed with getting everything to my liking, I almost forgot to write a new post. I now know more CSS and PHP than I want to and my wrists are stiff with carpal tunnel.

I am almost done with the site’s redesign, but there are a few more things I will be adding in the next few days:
1. A big-ass footer stuffed with handy navigation links.
2. A feedback form (in the footer maybe).
3. An about page that actually does what it says – tell everything about me and this blog.
4. A spiffy archives page.

Please let me know what you think about the new design.

It’s been two years since I graduated from IIT Madras. I don’t remember much of what was taught in the classroom. I do remember fragments of concepts and names of theories that I still throw around to impress people. I was good at the workshops. At the lathe machine, I fashioned a cylindrical lump of iron into a work of art. In the physics department I learned the mathematics of the motions of planets and molecules. I wrote a computer program to predict tsunamis; it’s still somewhere on my hard-drive. At the humanities department, I learned French and took to watching foreign films. I learned about industry and commerce and how to optimize everything from portfolios to the weight of a ship’s girder. All this i learned and forgot. Read more »

I gave you a list of some of my favorite TV shows earlier. Today, I’m writing about why I love a good TV show. Good TV shows are like good movies, only longer, with the story unfolding over several episodes. Great TV shows, like great movies are seldom about the story and more often about unforgettable events and memorable characters. The miniseries format is my favorite kind of television. A great TV series can possess you and occupy your thoughts all day for several weeks. A movie does not deliver this lingering excitement, simply because it is too short, even when it is really good. Don’t you sometimes wish that your favorite film would just keep running, especially when it is about to end? A significant part of the charm of reading a novel is this very feeling of having it take over your life and sweep you into its own world. Somehow, that feeling is often short lived or completely lost at the movies. So, we watch TV. Read more »

Mad Men
One word comes to my mind when I think of Mad Men – style. Mad Men is so stylish that you almost forget that all of its substance doesn’t really add up to a conventional story arc.

The show, in its second season seems to be going nowhere, and you couldn’t care less.
The show painstakingly recreates the American workplace of the 60′s, with all the political incorrectness and the sexual innuendos and the reckless smoking. The show’s central character is Don Draper, an advertising executive in Madison Avenue (mad men?), New York – a mysterious man with a dark past. The acting on the show is superlative and you could keep drooling at the beautifully recreated period details such as the interiors, the clothing and the mannerisms. The show’s atmosphere is almost film noir despite the color and everybody smokes like there is no tomorrow. Don Draper would say “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.” Read more »

I am throwing in the towel. After two failed attempts at the CAT I won’t be writing the test this year. On my second attempt I had embarked on the battle with renewed strength and vigor, only to fail even more miserably. Is this someone’s idea of a joke?  It is beyond me how you can get worse at something with more practice and experience. The CAT simply defies conventional wisdom, and while that is often a good thing, such a high element of unpredictability is frustrating to say the least. Your CAT score is by no means a fair estimate of your potential to succeed in a business environment or even at a B School. As far as I’m aware, the test makers have never undertaken a research to measure the relevance or the effectiveness of the test. It is assumed that the test works simply because it assigns a range of scores and those who pass receive handsome pay packets after graduation. You may say I’m whining here only because I failed the test and its a case of sour grapes. I won’t argue with that, but I will argue that the grapes are wrapped in plastic. Read more »