88th Week@XIMB

88th Week@XIMB - 10th February to 16th February, 2013

10th February - A person's essential fair-mindedness is perhaps its most striking and skillful feature that can won him over adversaries. That was my assumption until I came at XIMB. Here, the bias decision will win you more friends and build a reputation of caretaker. I hoped that such scenario changes in coming times in vain. The lobbies, peer pressure and affiliation became stronger with each passing day. I read a quote by Warren Buffett that cleared the fog in the mind : "If they don't have integrity, they never will. The chains of habit are sometimes too heavy to be broken."

11th February - George Orwell had said long time back: "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." This holds so true for each batch of engineering or management that I have been part of.

12th February - I read a wonderful statement on Economic inequality in a Journal : (Economic) Inequality materializes the upper class, vulgarizes the middle class and brutalizes the lower class.

13th February - Not in campus.

14th February - Not in campus.

15th February - Not in campus.

16th February - Not in campus.

87th Week@XIMB

87th Week@XIMB - 3rd February to 9th February, 2013

3rd February - Not in campus.

4th February - Not in campus.

5th February - Not in campus.

6th February - I returned to the campus and attended GID lecture. I became aware of the term Green GDP for first time. The green gross domestic product (green GDP) is an index of economic growth with the environmental consequences of that growth factored in. Due to lack of training in economics, I was also unaware of the term Shadow Pricing. While discussing more about economics, I came to know about Ithaca Hours, Joan Robinson, Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) . There was a general consensus that our society with market economy has transformed into market society in the age of neo liberalization.

7th February - There was discussion on audit process of an organization in GD class. That led our informal discussion in the class to Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India.

8th February - “When in Rome, be a Roman” is an often quoted idiom, but I never believed in the the practicality of this phrase. Moreover, it's everybody desire to be like, looked at and responded for walking on an offbeat path. This routine statement became more important in the context of state versus individual. No one can deny moral courage, of a person who stands in the face of public and governmental pressure and to do what is right rather balancing the views. It is necessary to be different and unique in its own sense. That individual walking a different line can only became a though leader and can be taken as an asset for social structure even when society is not conducive to adapt the contradictory form of truth. It is important not only for all of us to understand importance of such person. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult.

9th February - In the absence of Prof Kajri Mishra, our lecture was taken by Prof. Debi Prasad Mishra, who handles the general management strategy and policy department as a senior faculty member at IRMA. The complete lecture was around public system management. There was brief discussion on externality and Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003 (FRBMA). In context of Indian state, post independence state has taken responsibility to provide fair value to producers, reasonable price to consumers and employment to the work force. That was a nearly impossible for any state to attend multiple objectives of the contradictory nature. And generations have to bear the good and bad consequences of such experiment.

It is a common complain that bureaucracy is not of customer friendly nature. It's wrong because there definition of customer is quite different. Citizen who pays for services is not a customer but who is in power hierarchy is a customer for them. This was a deja-vu moment of my learning about government. There are various methods like Citizen's Charter, RTI, Social Audit and e-governance has been taken to make state more citizen friendly. Let me end this week with an old, if cynical, saying about government : “Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”

86th Week@XIMB

86th Week@XIMB - 27th January to 2nd February, 2013

I am away from the laptop, internet and XIMB for a complete week on a trip to home. I was becoming stoic calm proof against vicissitude of academic pressure.

The power of "rural": A special on rural marketing

85th Week@XIMB

85th Week@XIMB - 20th January to 26th January, 2013

20th January - I got a great Facebook status over sales job : In Sales -someday you are the P*mp and someday you are the Whore. I am not much of a sales or finance person but what I realized that it only matters to do our work with integrity, excellence and discipline irrespective of where one is working in future.

21st January - Small clusters of graduation friends is a creating frog in the well attitude of the entire RM community. Author himself has not dwelled much beyond 100 people but has not hard lined himself with any lobby or Legacy system.

22nd January - We have started to speak the language of B schools and consultancies like ‘products’, ‘customers’ or 'stakeholders' even in our normal talks. This education is showing its toxic side effects.

23rd January - No updates for today.

24th January - I was packing for the upcoming home trip.

25th January - Our mid term exam of CMD got postponed to March 2013.

26th January - I left for home. Farewell.

84th Week@XIMB

84th Week@XIMB - 13th January to 19th January, 2013

There was no record written for this whole week. Procrastination and laziness has completely captured me. The jargons like - Knowledge, Networking, Soft-skills, Development, Corporate, High asymmetry of information, Dichotomy, Business and government, Market, Customers and Growth, Value creation, Stakeholders, Institutions, Relationship Management, Structures, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: rampantly used in GD & PI's were put on rest. I am leaving readers with a brilliant convocation address and will be away from all social networking websites like Blogs, Vlogs, Blogs, wikis and even micro blogging site Twitter for a week.

Salman Khan gives commencement address at MIT (2012)