Yesterday, I watched “I, Robot” fully anxious with excitement of
watching a sci-fi movie. Having written read many sci-fi short stoies
and written one or two odd sci-fis myself, I was really looking forward
to see a creation of none other than Issac Asimov himself. I’m pleased
to say it was the best movie I’d seen this season. I have grown to
dislike what I’d call “franchised movies”, like Spiderman, which is made
to satisfy a different audience than movie goers. Hence a typical movie
goer would never get the same sort of satisfaction as a regular movie. I
subscribe to my good friend Karthik’s taste of having a complete story
in those 2 hours. That’s the beauty of “I, Robot”. The screenplay and
the cast seemed to gel perfectly. The “Minority Report” style art
direction didn’t fail to enthrall yet again.

Yesterday, Dinky brought his camera along and considering the beautiful
campus of Infosys, the shutters went chanting ‘Click’, ‘Click’,
‘Click’…all the time. Apparently, Abeer who was supposed to be in Pune
(Peoplesoft financials) is now here in Finacle for the past 10 days! The
other surprises of the day were Aby’s call for his laptop buy and
Shine’s messenger buzz.

Today’s meat for discussion would be the typical ‘Herd Brain’ of most
MBAs. Yes, the so-called poised and enterprising tribe that emerges out
of premier B-schools every year. Almost every one of them are hung up on
getting tasks higher up in the value chain. The motto is to get there
and get there faster. The operational part is usually “uncool” for this
band of ego-driven megalomaniacs. Sadly this is a mentality that is
implanted in their heads at a much early stage; at the stage of being
“aspirants”. It could may well have been their only sane reason to do
MBA too! The implication is that this vast majority of “aspirants” serve
as a very effective myth propaganda machine and it gets to….you know,
a vicious circle. The problem is so crucial that he next Scot Adam’s
strip might be focused on a “Herd Brain” type of character.

I believe that the media also has a lot to do with this. Every single
business magazine that the MBAs or “aspirants” lap up so fondly brings
out many success stories with a sharp stereotype. There is no past for
that stereotype and he is the best in breed for that functional area and
his present job is anything but operational. He might be still doing
operational but that isn’t sexy enough for lack of precious column
space. And of course he would be covered in the riches of Arabia, curvy
pouting bombshells and would hop the globe as matter of routine. Nobody
mentions how obsessed he was (and still is) about the details of the
companies operations and how hard he worked till he was familiar with
every aspect of it. He was not always the “finance” guy or “marketing”
guy till now. He was the “everything” guy.

I feel today’s MBAs are not obsessed with the area of a company’s
operation well enough. They are too impatient to let the natural
evolution to happen. It’s this preconceived mindset that characterizes
the Herd Brain and ultimately dooms it to oblivion.

Next time I’ll write about Sodipodi and Gimp, the tools of a Linux
Artist.

Yesterday in a continuing series to a string of surprise appearances Himanshu Arora, who is another ACON from my previous batch, appeared talking to my PL (Nitin). It seems he is moving in to our project. He came down from Hyderabad and he himself got the news two days back. Now it seems he will join Piyush onsite.

The day before one of my junies needed help in their CRM assignment. I made his day by spewing a couple of pages of some of the best CRM stuff I’ve written, perhaps ever Again, when you get in the flow, there is now stopping, right? Dinky is coming to the DC today and I’m gonna make sure I get some IDs of junies. They seem to be so lazy to mail. Geez, how ironical!

Well, another good news is that, finally, my site appears right at the top if you type Arun Ravindran in google. Try http://www.google.com/custom?q=Arun+Ravindran this is really cool! Though there is another Dr. Arun Ravindran and an M.Sc Arun. V. Ravindran (My full name in Infosys!), I actually made it. The Google IPO is out and had a terrible start with the cutting down of the share price. Google is one of my favourite companies and this really broke my heart. I saw ‘Kill Bill Vol 1’ yesterday. The blood fountains and ‘wriggle the big toe’ sequences were typical Tarantino.

Today is the earliest I made to Blore office so far, excluding the first day of course, which is 8:45 pm. I finally shelled out the damn room rent which the receptionist (who BTW is a Kannadiga named Bintage!) was bugging me about. As expected it was too early for office. But anyway, at least, now I know.

These days I’m back to the MBA mode of thought. More business and money minded in every thought, all thanks to Shiv who gave me a reality shock the other day. It was actually not just because of that, we went down to IIMB in Bannergatta Road and got quite disappointed with the infrastructure. It wasn’t a big deal after all. The library had about 0.18 million books and in quite a disarray. I would love to be in my library anyday. But I must say there were some rare books which could have helped for my summer at least. Coincidentally, my “MBA timings” are also back, namely, 5 ½ hours sleep. God! What’s happening to me?

Oops! Time to get back to work. I just finished mastering XML Schemas and Nant, I’ve no idea what’s in store for me today.

I finally figured out what “foley” stands for in the list of film credits. It is simply recreating sounds in creative ways that production mikes miss in the actual shooting. It is one of the most interesting aspects of movie making according to me. Steven Spielberg ones remarked that sound tells more than half of the story in a movie. But foley artists look at the world of sound effects in totally unique way. Rather than recreate the sound by recreating the action what caused it, they look for other similarly sounding events. For eg: in the oscar winning movie Terminator 2, the methods used were:

Bullets hitting T-1000
For the sound of the bullets hitting T-1000 Gary Rydstrom(foley artist) slammed an inverted glass into a bucket of yoghurt, getting a hard edge to accompany the goop

The sound of the crushed skull
The sound of the crushed skull is actually a pistachio beeing crunched by a metal plate.

Read the full interview here for more details. I’m sure this is an area in Bollywood which is catching up as seen in some movies. Imagine sholay being reshot which realistic sounding gunfire and trains! I would definitely like to work in this area
_____________________
On my personal front, Archie (Archana) surprised me yesterday by “appearing” in the Bangalore DC. I was dumbstruck according to eye witnesses :). Well, later I met her friends Vidya and Hema. The former is her best friend in every sense of the word. We had lunch and seems, finally, I’ll have a contact in Bangalore who is quite aware of what’s hot and what’s not over here.

The guest house folks though always friendly and nice, have started pestering me with the strange half monthly payment thing. Their legendary averseness to cheques (they sent someone along with my roommate to convert his SBI cheque to cash!) is another headache. Well, looks like I’ve made lot of friends out here in the guest house. The most important of them are Anmol, Alok, Dhiraj and Ram (who are Samarth’s friends) and of course my roommate, Shiv. Would you believe that we talk for hours till 1 am most of the days? Well, we talk about a lot of stuff including his 7 year stint in US, films and of course game programming. That sums up the last couple of days, I guess.

It has been a while, isn’t it? Well it seems this blog has been receiving greater eyeballs than ever before, thanks to its reference in my signature line. Also I’m slowing redesigning the main site to make it similar to the design of the blog.

A quick update on me before I dive into my topic. I’m in the typical disarray mode right now. Work takes about 12 hours in a day. Traveling is approximately 2 hours and reading/T.V takes up 2 hours. I sleep for around 6-7 hours. The remaining 1 hour is all I’ve got for doing something creative. It is simply not enough!

Back to my topic, there is a certain part of me, which secretively tries to implement a mini-language in every project I do. I’m passionate about reading about new computer languages and their compiler/interpreter techniques. The inexplicable passion has driven me to learn at least 20 odd computer languages and still counting.

Though it is one of my interests, I wonder does it serve any purpose. The common reason most academia cites is the advantage of knowing various paradigms that will enrich your programming style in any language. But my take is that in reality it helps you in at least two ways: adaptability and judging suitability. Many times, I have been able to help people coding in language XYZ which I would be seeing for the first time. They would exclaim “Hey, but I didn’t find that in the manuals or even in Google”! What helps most of the time is that a language designer is one, like me ;), who studies all the existing languages before he makes a new one. Hence a many, many features are intentionally or unintentionally copied. Another advantage is suitability, if somebody is doing an AI program in javascript, I definitely know something is wrong. Most language are theoretically capable of doing everything what another language can, but the expressibility of each language makes it suitable for certain kinds of problem domains for eg: Perl for string processing. Only a person who has savored most of the offerings (i.e. languages) can save hours of programming effort and maintenance but choosing the right one for the job.

In the long run learning different languages or even applications always helps. No matter how difficult it may seem :)

Disclaimer: The following text is a semi-review of a book. Such posts will be marked with [“BOOKS”] prefixed at their headings until Blogger.com comes up with such a feature (which BTW will not take long)

The possibilities opened up by books are sometimes so immense that it can prove to be turning points. I stumbled upon ‘Opening the Xbox’ in a second hand book fair in Bangalore. For 200 rupees it gave me a fairly up to date recount of the extraordinary rise of Microsoft in the gaming industry. Written by a journalist, the fast paced narrative laced with references to gaming stalwarts gave a clear picture of the strategies required to survive in this cut throat business.

I’ve noticed that while Indian bookstores are inundated with books regarding learning new packages (from beginner to advanced “guru” levels), there seems to be a certain dearth of books offering an industry focus. For all you know this might have been an American edition (judging from the flap) left behind by someone. Well suffice to say, just my luck. Interestingly, the side effect of having read an influential book (influential? at least from my perspective, yes) is that you tend to completely agree with the book’s logic. I have often seen this with books by Ayn Ryand. For me, at least, my perspective of consoles changed so much that I was all for the go-for-laptop-and-Xbox idea. But much later it dawned on me (finally!) that for a serious game developer, Xbox offers no value unless he buys the Xbox SDK as well! Back to the PC with GPU-based card idea again.

Surprisingly, this is the logic of many serious non-game-developing gamers as well. This is perhaps they have other multimedia intensive uses like video editing/encoding as well. Anyway, from preliminary reports GPU is going to be an integral part of our PCs. Despite this, over here, only a handful, including your local hardware guru, knows even what it is.

I guess you can say the honeymoon period is over. In a wild goose chase that spanned over 3 DCs and many, many overnight bus journeys; I could have sensed something was happening. After nearly 6 weeks of ES University and many man-days later, when the wait seemed despairingly long, it finally came. Yes, the project I had been waiting for. About which I knew only three simple letters: U-B-S. But those three letters stood for the Trinity or the Thrimoorthis or the rather the undying quest for truth itself.

If you think I’m hyping you up, consider the facts. Among all the four projects considered for me. This is the only one that has:

1. Any connection to finance whatsoever. And boy, the connection is real solid. UBS is a Swiss bank and the second largest bank in the world
2. Only project which is starting from scratch. I get benefit of seeing the whole picture
3. No maintenance/support stuff here. It is a true consulting assignment with technical architecture designing. I get to see what I designed as a living, breathing system in UBS!
4. Opportunity for client interaction in my very first project
5. The only architecture I’m familiar with inside out is Microsoft platform. This project uses Microsoft BizTalk
6. The other thing I have risked to learn in TAPMI other than finance is German. I couldn’t ever convince myself for paying for German classes. But guess what, I’ll be in Switzerland, where German is very crucial to interact with clients.

The deal was not even inked when I was identified for it, but it came though. But, the excitement is really chilling for at least two reasons. Firstly, I’m might be too optimistic about the whole thing and I’m in for major disappointment later. Secondly, the responsibility is huge, it is a make-or-break situation. I have to really, really prove myself in this using a combination of my skills.

But I still prefer to see the bright side. In my brief tenure in the company, I’ve been surprising myself at my own agility. The agonizing decisions I’ve taken purely based on my gut feel, proved that I’m different from the bandwagon and rightfully so. The gift of serendipity to meet true and inspiring friends who just by a few interactions could enhance a facet of my life. Their rewarding companionship and support will take me I’m sure to where I belong.

Everywhere I traveled I felt every place will be your home; in fact, you need to just feel it. The structures, the roads, the streets names, the people are mere multiple facades to very same abode - Home. This is the religion of the global traveler, that - this is my global village. And guess what the religion just got a new believer :-)

Today while walking towards the office, I saw this huge hoarding professing that their “councelors” were unique in that they “listened”. Incidently that was a quality of a good consultant as well (or a good leader, husband, etc etc). But what really intruiged me was that I couldn’t clearly differentate between a counselor and a consultant. Time to Google I thought.

The outcome of the searches were very interesting. Firstly, there were some overlap in meaning for eg:

counselor One whose profession is to give advice in law, and manage causes for clients in court; a barrister

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998

con·sul·tant A physician or surgeon who does not take actual charge of a patient, but acts in an advisory capacity to the patient’s primary physician

Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc

After cursory research, I will pretend to have understood and try to explain. A counselor is one who applies his domain expertise (eg: law) into the client situation, whereas a consultant tries to redefine the problem itself and attempt for, perhaps radically, different solutions to enable you reach your goals.

Thus the goals of a counselor and consultant are different. The counselor seeks to give you the best out of a situation. The consultant tries to alter the situation itself keeping in mind your goals and objectives. The latter is clearly more painful and time consuming, but ultimately more rewarding.

It was a really exciting day today. It couldn’t have been at a better place than Bangalore Infosys, the very birthplace of this famous company! I met my delivery manager Abhishek and had a nice conversation with him. If his idea was to drive me, it worked!!! He also kind of liked my suggestions. I also met a senior consultant Rakesh who was so crystal in his concepts that the session was an eye-opener in EAI! He said I could pursue my research in EAI Patterns if I wished. Sounded good to me :). Tday for the first time at work I got a lot of action items, including applying for my visa to UK and Aus. So I felt real good.

I met a lot of people other than that. They had a interesting thing about them… they wanted to do or go exactly where I wanted to. For eg: I wanted to find a block, the person would need to go to the sanme block for something else. These weird coincidences happened 4 or 5 times throughout the day!! I met a lot, I mean a lot of ESU guys and many of them were pleasantly surprised.

I shifted from the main guest house at Adarsh Gardens to a smaller one called Saptagiri. It is more like a small house with a nice mix of resident. Purohit from CCD Calif, his wife and daughter was the first I could meet. Very friendly and sweet family. I met an young Aussie named Brad and he was very conversant. Later I met the remaining occupant another Aussie named Mark. Brad was finding it hard to adjust with Indian food and water, coz of “all the bugs”. He is planning a 3 week trip all over India, of course, including Kerala before leaving for Australia.

My junies mailed me that they are missing me!!! I was in systems committee and it was the underdog. Now it seems it has assumed a prominent position. My portal and the software I’d developed will be used as “TAPMI Intranet” portal. More importantly professors are after it as a learning tool, exactly as I had envisaged. Aint it cool?

So looks like I’ll be here till sunday, thats plenty of time to roam about this Garden City. This is turning out to be one random decision that I’ll never regret.

A long gap indeed. The fact is that I actually forgot about this blog in the first place. Later, I was trying to look for a new site when I retrieved this account from my mail archives.

So where should I start? Joining infy on 3rd of May we had a wonderful start. The one week stay in the hotel (Fortune Katriya) was too good. We expected to stay in Hyderabad for some time so Dinakar, Danny and I found an apartment in Banjara Hills, one of the poshest residential areas. The rent was low, about 4K for a 2 BHK. We found a maid etc but had no plans for cooking. Despite Dan and Dinky being unsatisfied with Mahalakshmi mess, it became “the” eat out for us.

After the one month stint in ES University (headed by Narry), we got our practises allocated. I fancied EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) for its tech appeal and package neutrality. I and another guy from IISc called Arun Prasad and Vinod (plus a lot of red herrings) ran around a lot for it. But only three of us opted for it and subsequently we got it. My posting was in Mangalore with Arun Prasad from the 1st of June. My roomies were in CRM got hyderabad (or so they thought!)

The rest of the story involves a brief stay (10 days) at Mangalore infy guest house and finding a house in a place called Kottara close to Minfy (Mangalore Infy!). Sadly there was no practice specific training. We waited till 21st june when I came down to hyd for TIBCO training in Infy. Today it gets over (last three days was for the mock prj) and it is time to go back.

So its time to pack. This visit to hyd was very fruitful. I brought number of pirated books like “Da Vinci Code” (finished reading), “Hollywood Wives” (used copy), “Handbook of Palmistry”, “End of Shareholder Value” (used) and “Atlas Shrugged”. Moreover went to places like Durgam Cheruvu (romantic area near a lake), Birla Mandir, Birla Mueseum, Sangeeth theatre, Abids Sunday Book Mart, Big Bazaar (Walmart of hyd!!!) and Charminar. I met a lot of old friends who I’d met in TAPMI interview like Vasudha and Ujjval. I made new friends like Suma and Pallavi (classmate of Preethi Raghu, Saras ’n Woody)

Thats all folks, time to leave!

Please note that I will not entertain any request for TIBCO “training institutes” in response to this post. I simply don’t know hyderabad well enough, not to mention “TIBCO training centres”!

I’m becoming too dependent on the Remainder feature of my Nokia. Unless, I do that I risk completely forgetting it. It happened yesterday when I forgot about the dinner and yet, again today, again for the syscom dinner. In fact, I already had a semi-dinner at 6:30 pm.

For those who know me, know that 6:30 is shockingly early for me. Apparently, it was because I woke up at around 6pm after a 5 hour nap. Must have been a result of too much of mulling over during the Ad Management class. Now, that would make any man hungry (or woman for that matter. I’m not a sexist but I really don’t know :) ). It was even better to go out with Govind, because he is such a gem of a person. But not all gems are known to the junta, right?

Thankfully, IK (my fellow syscom guy) reminded me while I was browsing in the CC. The junies had an HR assignment, but they agreed (they are learning to cope ;) ). We went to Pit Stop. I was only guy who went for the non-veg pizza and only guy who said 8" rather than 12". It’s called Chick ’n Spicy. It was, in my opinion, the best of the four. Karthik ordered a spicy one, and was fuming after the first slice. He was visibly surprised because typically the spicy dishes in most restaurants are not spicy enough for him. Curiously enough when IK tried the same, it wasn’t spicy at all. He commented with a red sweaty face that he must have had the piece with all the capsicum first and that too in quick succession. Probably, but unlikely. “A Learning Experience”, as he put it. TV kept us entertained for a while. There, I made up my mind not to see Monsoon Wedding (for its artificial-sounding and hackneyed Hinglish) and definitely see Rumble in the Bronx (for the amazing antics of Chang). We (senies) gave some gyaan on electives and placements and parted with a glow of satisfaction.