CHAMELEONS

You see them chameleons, walking on the street,

Matching feet to feet, holding hands to greet.

You know their faces when their mask unfazes,

Spineless creatures, damn immune to disgraces.

Alliteration, no man, this is much more

People, they change, our eyes get sore.

You stick to them thru thick n thin,

Theyre out of ur life, by fancy of a whim.

You sacrifice urself,

and let them have whats left

in testing times, you hear them whine

You rush to help, no dearth of time

But when Its YOU, that feels hurt and sad,

N u think in a while, ull probably go mad

U weep to urself , no hand on ur shoulder,

No one comes along, to move the boulder

Its so hard to try when so openly they lie

You just cry and pray that time would fly.

Its one thing that most dont understand

It plain and simple and easy and bland

The people you think would always stick,

Are the ones that don’t, n u feel the prick

Friends , understand that friends will see u thru

Not that not pretty chick sitting out there in blue

Get back on track, pick ur self up

We know ull miss a jolly good ****

Long life ahead, people come and go

Just let it go, go with the flow

Camouflage, I must tell u they do,

Colours they change, in tint n hue,

Hide themselves in in guilt n shame

Wrap their tongue around the next frog again.

The man named Phillip Kotler

B-schools students across India, barring few hate one name in their first term. No prizes for guessing Phillip Kotler. An economist right from birth, he haunts the marketing minds of the nation with his “Ctrl+C – Ctrl+V” therapy. “Ctrl+C – Ctrl+V”, a patented technology by the engineers of the SWITCH companies (Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, CTS & HCL), has risen to the issue and has filed an IPR breach suit against His Excellency Mr. Kotler in Bombay High Court. Last week when Aal-Baal news interviewed an anonymous student from SJMSOM, IIT Bombay he said that “I didn’t find any difference between the chapters ‘Creating Brand Equity’ and ‘Setting Product Strategy’. All His Excellency has done is, use the “Ctrl+C – Ctrl+V”. He has also gone on to use “Ctrl+H” for replacing the word “Brand” with “Product”.”

With more analyses coming in from all over India, an independent report that is on a viral on Facebook states that, His Excellency didn’t get shortlisted in one of the leading FMCG company G&P for a Marketing profile. A probe into the issue revealed that they rejected him because he carried an Economics profile and had applied to a marketing role. On conditions of anonymity, another student from SJMSOM, IIT Bombay exposed that “All the chapters of his book states only one thing – Customer. When he preaches the concept that “Customer is the king”, which is widely known and is nothing but common sense, why doesn’t he deliver a right product to his own customers, that is us? He writes a book that is read by everyone, but none understand the content.”

A pass-out from the same School of Management said that he didn’t know how he coped up with the book which haunted him in his dreams. “I used to see His Excellency in my dreams and always got confused if I was the customer or the marketer. Give me one chapter; I can roll out 25 chapters from that.” With such high-yielding challenges, will His Excellency Phillip Kotler understand the strategic repositioning that his book needs to undergo? Will he advertise or promote the book after incorporating the cutting edge strategic changes and improve the brand name, ensuring that the brand equity doesn’t falter? Only time will tell, until then enjoy Marketing – one of the best subjects of Management.

Out of the Blue(s) of the last night!

The night before was...wait for it....Legendary! (I know, it ain't this way u buggers!)and the day before Dua Kartik Chandermohan's birthday wasn't a day in the normal life of a SOM 13'ite. People were hungover, the alcohol was still in Chotu's system doing all kind of weird stuff to him, there was hush-hush talk of drunk controversies and then there was the bloody assignment and mid-term examination coming up. But we being we and life being awesome, had to plan a big birthday bash for our closely knit Hangout Group( Yes, the one which flaunts revolving chaabi's in their hands for a photo op!Desperate?Yes!Do we care?No!). So it was upto me n Kartik to decide the venue for our first birthday treat at SOM. After a lot of pondering and Burrping and a million looks inside our wallets, we finally decide that Out of the Blue, Bandra was THE place for us. All decked up in swanky shirts, awesome tops and non-starry jeans, we ventured out to Bandra!

And the smart asses that we are, upon reaching there we found out that we had made a reservation in the newly opened Out of the Blue in Powai. The wait was all worth it because I somehow met an old friend of mine who hugged me tightly( to the envy of Kaashi). Luckily enough, we got a great seat and an expensive menu! Over the course of the next few hours, alcohol was poured inside our bodies( Kaashi being Kaashi poured 4x inside himself),stories were made up, pseudo-relationships made and broken, non-veg jokes cracked(some laughed at and some frowned at!) and memories captured. The veggies' luck ran out this time too and the non-veggies were looked at by evil eyes for having way more delicious food than them. Before the clock struck twelve, we were joined by our buddies Suhal and Dhroov who came all the from Powai to wish DK. The clock struck twelve and the super expensive cake from Deliciae was smashed on his face to celebrate 24 years of awesomeness!!!

Should I post this is as a memoir of mine and Kartik's birthday treat or a hangover spillover of the last night is something I'm pondering over right now. But what the hell, who cares, we had fun any which way!!

Are we ready for another Uncle Sam?

Introduction

For those of you who missed yesterday’s session on “US crisis and India”, you need to have a MasterCard to experience it again. For long now, one always expects Uncle Sam  getting called a bad relative and those who go there; study and settle down will eventually feel the pinch. But, to hear it from an experienced person like Dr. Vinayak Govilkar on this was mesmerizing.

I think I have done enough to build up the case; I have surely done my part in making those who missed the session, feel guilty. These were things that we all knew. Before getting to the genesis of this whole USA business, let us get our facts right. USA’s current deficit is $14.398 trillion and it has to pay $500 million as interest every day. This debt sharing works out to $121957 per family. No one knows how USA has benchmarked the meaning for a family. 

Hail Uncle Sam

USA has a Debt Ceiling Act through which it can increase its debt cap by passing it in the Congress. Earlier the debt cap was raised to $14 trillion. Since, it has been breached, US is in a mood to increase it by another $3 trillion. The justification of this rise is given by the fact that they can pay back $2.4 trillion of that money, if they raise $3 trillion. It’s like, 6 pegs of Vodka have already gone in and one is on the brink of passing out. Yet, one still wants to drink more. Thus he borrows money and drinks some more and forgets about returning the money when he comes back to his normal sober-self. Guys, get out of the Hangover2 soon!

Before stacking up all blame on USA, let us get back to history on how USA became such a powerful country. Founded in 1776, a group of docile people pushed out the aborigine Indians and made it a Centre of Excellence. Years passed. After the First World War, a standard for money exchange became the need of the hour. Many companies came up with Gold as an answer, while USA went a step further and fixated a value for Gold in terms of dollars - $35 per ounce of Gold. Things spread slowly and international trade began to be done in Dollars. No one questioned the reason on why it had to be done so, because they equated gold to dollars. And no one questioned them the rationale behind the quantification. Why didn’t anyone question, was simple enough.

Games they play

Every World Bank President till date has been an American and USA has 17% quota in its Senate. And the minimum vote share required is 85% for any loan to be approved. Why would anyone go against the US, questioning their rationale? Dollars out of US (World Bank, IMF) flow into other countries, while other countries buy U.S Treasury Bonds (US’s euphemism for loans), US dollar starts to fall, while other countries try to protect the dollar. What is US doing?

In 1971, our Watergate hero Richard Nixon came out with a brilliant idea that the dollar will divorce gold. What he meant was that, the dollar was just a currency from thereon with no value to back it up - Simple paper, worse than a Zimbabwean Rand. One incident after another, USA started feeling the pinch. S&P downgraded it from AAA to AA+ (Let us not laugh, we are a bloody BBB-). And the reasons for their rational behavior are as follows:

1.   1. Unemployment rate was at 9.2%. Approximately 14 million people were unemployed which meant that the government had to spend on Social Security, a concept unheard of in India.

2.  2. Long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which meant that they had to spend on military expenditure. Is this the reason why their presence in Libya is very limited?

3.   3. Expenditure on medicare.

4.  4. With an IQ of 125 (91 is a false news), George W Bush came up with beneficial tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The years being specific because, in those respective years they went on wars with Afghanistan and Iraq.

5.     Because of all these expenditures, USA is not able to invest in its physical and intellectual infrastructure which is hurting them a lot.

The current US deficit is around $1.3 trillion and everyone is watching on how the situation could improve. The dollar cycle will go on until the world perceives that the dollar has no value and a day will come when someone can take advantage of it. Who would it be?

How is India in a position to take advantage?

We are at 14^th position in terms of exposure to US debt – $41 billion, while our close friend China tops the chart with $1.5 trillion. But the Indian culture of consumption for satisfying needs than for luxury has insulated us very well. We are very protected by our economic culture of spending today’s income for tomorrow’s expense. There are a few countries like PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) who are caught in the deficit spiral of spending tomorrow’s money, today. Greece actually pledged their “Toll revenue” to get financial aid and the rest became history.

India has some positives to look for, such as the decline in oil prices once the dollar depreciates, which will decrease the interest rates; increase in FIIs, etc. While there are a few negatives which include, slowdown in FDI, pressure on Rupee to appreciate in turn affecting domestic markets as imports become cheaper, exports taking a blow due to dollar depreciation, we are, still, there to take advantage of the situation. But how? With fasts and incapable governments?

We are here to see a promising future when things outside are in a turmoil. There are few countries in the world which can actually turn things around. India being one among them can seize the situation and turn it around completely, if she wishes to!!

(With inputs from Anoop Sherlekar)

Gullu ke Bachche!!

The night was looming hard on us. Stats was taking a toll on everyone including the professor. I personally felt that the professor was having a nightmare in making us understand the subject, than the other way around. The mid-sem on 19^th August, 2011 seemed more of an acid test for her than it was for us. Wait for a second. Are we missing out something? Yeah, it was Gullu-ke-bachche ka birthday.

A dude from the city of Good-gaon with Beckham-spiky hairstyle and a Spanish beard, you have Vaibhav Gulati (The same guy who was pursued and persuaded by “gay” strangers in Kanjur Marg railway station). This son-of-a-g**n didn’t turn up for his birthday celebrations until 0100 hours. Waiting for him in Kartik Dua’s room, we thought we will give the Stats assignment a shot until Gullu returns from Bandra, where he was partying with another set of friends. We did give it a shot, solved Stats problems in quires of papers, until we ran out of pen refills and solution approaches. Every complex thing can be solved with an Excel sheet and still we need to use SAS. What the B!!!

Gullu came back to Kartik’s room and the first GPL (Ga**d Pe Laath) he received, shook the hell out of him. Part of the reason was that that his cellphone was dismantled with a thud on the ground and the other reason was sheer pain. The next plan was to go to Hostel-5 ice-cream parlour and have a bash. Just when you think that you can party hard, the rain Gods started to pee on us. Cancelled the plan, yet these Har*mkhors (Kartik, Kashyap, Rajat Sharma) didn’t allow me to go and sleep.  They had me in their room till 0230 hours listening to South Indian songs and as usual bakar. And as expected, inorder to sleep, I bunked the next day’s classes.

18^th August, 2011 at around 1300 hours the cake bashing began. With myself, Kartik, Kashyap, Dhruv, Suhail, Prashant Arora, Nikhil, Amit, Reshu, Raina, Debashree, Pinky and of course Gullu, the suffocating chocolate cake made its full presence on his face. Forgot to carry a knife along to cut the cake, we borrowed the knife from Blueberrys, (The coffee shop), Hostel-8. A sheepish smile from Raina to the counter-guy is all it took to get a knife without buying a thing from the shop as well as using their space. Junta had Stats to study and classes to attend, except for us. Not that we studied everything else, but, What the B, who cares. An idea stuck us - that we will pen down such rich experiences, so that when we read these, 10 years down the lane, we shall cherish the memory! Thus started the genesis of this blog!!!

Aim of the Experiment

The objective of this blog is to nurture the crappy-ness in each of us. Although dubbed as the AweSOM’13, we go through the grill day-in-day-out, just like anyone else. Everyone needs space and we all are comfortable with our virtual spaces. We all have ideas, experiences, informal greetings, nicknames, pranks, joyous celebrations and more to share. But, when it comes to express them, we seldom do. In this space, all that we are going to do is to read carefree articles written on serious matters, write commentaries and publish photos that we will cherish, a few years down the lane. Enter this site on the pretext that you are ready to e-smile.

P.S: Your logical brain is an unimportant commodity here. Different Schools of Thoughts’ thoughts are accepted. :P