Day 257 - 7th July 2011

Had our second session on the subjects offered in the second year. Today's session was taken by the area heads of marketing,advertising and market research. Each of these areas have pretty interesting subjects on offer. We have a couple of weeks to decide on which core subjects and electives to choose. The good news is sports marketing is a 2 credit course with 20 sessions - 10 sessions more than last year. Managed to clock in a two and a half hour siesta in the afternoon. Played a little tennis in the evening before the rain gods decided to be kind to us. Continued the tradition of the rain dance in the badminton court. Thankfully now the temperatures have dropped to humanly tolerable levels,but the flip side is the number of insects that will now be found all around campus! Post dinner MCSA work kept me busy. Have markstrat from tomorrow, just hope it turns out to be better than markops!

Day 72 - 6th September 2010

All our preparation for the Markops presentation resulted in zilch - the prof never asked us to present. Maybe Aila!Markops needs to work on how its brand is perceived :-) Those were the only lectures for the day. Since we have the ID submission coming up in a couple of days, decided to come to the library to start working on it. We have to write an individual diary based on the results of certain personality tests that we gave online. Not very interesting but can't help it.

As per another MICA tradition, the juniors are supposed to throw a party for the seniors before the seniors leave for their rural projects. That party was tonight, so slept for a while in the afternoon and helped in jazzing up Palaash. During the course of decorating Palaash a new committee was formed on campus; 4M - MICA Maharashtra Mitra Mandal, the group of all Maharashtrians and Pseudo Maharashtrians. Our punchline is 'Gheuntak' :-D The structure of the committee and designations will be decided in the due course of time.

The party was good fun, the people from our batch who organized it did a brilliant job. Was up till 7 in the morning, have loads of work to do today but first some shut eye beckons!

Day 71 - 5th September 2010

The eco. prof really knows how to make people study. After most of the batch stayed awake the whole of last night trying to complete the assignment, he didn't ask anybody to present it in front of the class. Instead he announced that there would be two surprise tests anytime this week! Thereby ensuring that we continue studying.

Something very strange has been happening over the past couple of days - no matter how much I sleep, I still end up feeling sleepy! I slept for 7 hours last night, which is a luxury out here, still I ended up feeling drowsy throughout class. Came back after lunch and slept for 2 more hours! That also didn't seem to help and continued to feel drowsy for the rest of the evening. Had plans to play tennis in the evening but laziness got the better of me and a I continued my journey in slumberland. All this has to happen at a time when sleep ought to be the last thing on a person's mind :D

Sankalp had planned the first set of performances of the year at the Open Air Theatre(OAT), this time it was from directors in PGP1. However there is something strange relationship between rain and our batch, during our freshers party it rained the entire night and it rained tonight as well, so the plays had to be performed in the audi. Nonetheless they were really good, there were 2 english plays, 1 hindi play and a mime. As repetitive as this may sound but our batch has some supremely talented people and it comes up at places where you least expect it! That got over by around 1 in the night and was followed by a batch meet with PlaceComm.

Once that was done our Markops group had to prepare a presentation on our company's performance and what were the key learnings. Our team has become famous not only in our batch but also amongst the seniors. Two major reasons, our (in)famous performance and more importantly the team name - Aila!Markops. That went on till about 3 after which I wasn't feeling sleepy at all. Went to Chota with Apu and Maushi before heading back to the room and calling it a day.

Day 64 - 29th August 2010

Sunday bloody sunday! Never imagined spending a sunday in lectures from 9 to 6 and then a markops submission to be done by 8. Had 2 double lectures of QT and PoM. Had lectures in the audi after quite sometime, and I realised that it is still very difficult to stay awake in the audi no matter how interesting lecture is. The PoM prof showed us a video clipping about organization structures in which there was talk about org structures being clearly defined and all goals being communicated in the simplest possible way, with the intention of nurturing a spirit of 'intrapreneurship', need to start getting used to such management pfaff :-D. Though he also agreed that in theory everything seems easy and when it comes to implementing such stuff it is never easy. Started working on the markops assignment at around 630, although our results aren't exactly something to be proud of, I feel we have learnt a lot over the past few days, analyzing a number of reports on brand perception,competitor intelligence,market forecast etc. and then arriving at a decision - a pretty satisfying experience. Our primary aim today was to ensure that the SPI did not decrease and reduce our inventory by as much as possible. Ended up achieving both of them, in face the SPI went up marginally, which felt good :-D

LitComm had organized a mock Parliamentary debate after dinner, I hadn't seen one till date so decided to attend the session. Was pretty impressed with the format, will be interesting to take part in one such debate just for the experience.

That takes care of the boring part, now for the friend of the day and today it's the turn of my roomie -

Rajat Sharma aka CR -

Ironically my roommate was the last person I met on my first day out here. Throughout the day when I was in the room he wasn't and vice versa. It turns out that he was staying about a couple of kilometres away from where I was staying in Bangalore! His nickname comes from the fact that he is the class rep. i.e. junior MCSA, so technically Im living at the 10,Janpath of Palaash ;-) His responsibilities as a CR keep him away from the room most of the time, I have lost count of the number of people who have fallen sick and have been taken to hospital by him (at even the most unearthly hours), yet he does all of this without complaining. The most important thing though is the fact that I consider myself pretty lucky to have got a roomie who values cleanliness equally if not more than me!

CR - Long live HQ ;-)

Day 62 - 27th August 2010

Last day of Markops for this week. Things for our firm went from bad to worse, it was like Lehmann brothers and AIG put together. Just when we thought that our SPI could not go any lower, it reached 167!!! On discussing this with the faculty it turns out that we were focusing more on promoting our new products and had completely neglected improving our existing ones. That worked against it. There were a few positives out of this entire exercise though - got to learn a lot about analysing market research reports, which i found quite interesting, also got to learn a lot from our mistakes :-P Have another round of simulation to be submitted by sunday.

Had TI work to be done in the evening. Worked a bit on the blog and what content kind should be made available on it. Had to run it through the senior team in the night. They seemed to be pretty OK with it, will have another meeting tomorrow to see how to take it forward. Started preparing for tomorrow's QT test after that was done, apparently its an open book test (which is generally not a good sign). Nonetheless, went through some of the things taught in class.

In continuation of introducing my friends, today its the turn of -

Arvind Menon aka Mallu

This guy claims to be 27, though most of us think he has to be at least 34 ;-) He is a really good sport (at least until now), since he has the been the butt of quite a few of my jokes thanks to his receding hairline, without any complaints. His nickname is quite an irony because there is nothing mallu about him - no accent, no communist leanings, no affinity for the gulf etc. Still I guess this name will stick for the next couple of years. Met him also on the first day, while Bulla and I were analyzing Mithunda's Gunda, he kept himself out of the conversation because he doesn't indulge in such 'peabrained/brain dead' movies. Though Im yet to figure out what are the kind of movies that he really likes :-P

Mallu - have you hired that lawyer already?? ;-)

Day 61 - 26th August 2010

Another day of Markops. Our team had a good start, we were 2nd in terms of stock price index(SPI) after yesterday's round of decision making. But then things went downhill from there. SPI is calculated on a base of 1000. Anything below that figure is to be considered as a loss. After round 1 the SPI was at a respectable 1115 , it went to 1132 in round 2 but then we faced a Lehmann brothers type scenario in round 3. A few of our decisions backfired and our SPI crashed to 356!! It was a stunning drop which was totally unexpected. Nonetheless our team will hopefully regroup tomorrow bring our company back on track. This experience made me realise the kind of stress the kind of stress the stock brokers at Dalal Street or Wall Street must be undergoing, though this was just a simulation it definitely wasn't a very good feeling, going through something like this in real life, requires some guts!

Till today a very conscious effort has been made not to mention any names,of friends or faculty, on this blog. That trend shall be broken, starting today I will introduce one friend of mine per day on this blog, in chronological order of meeting them since the course started. Today's friend is -

Vineet Singh aka Bulla


He was one of the first few people I met on campus,met him at Chota. I initially thought he was senior because he was roaming around the place as if he'd been here for a year :-D The biggest mistake one can commit is asking him "Where are you from?", because he has lived in literally all states of India. So he first finds out where the other person is from and then goes on to say that even he has lived there! For this very reason he is also called national integration.
A big time movie freak, he can give imdb a run for its money, he might even be better since Bhojpuri movies are also his areas of expertise. It's pretty amazing as to how person can remember so much! Apart from movies his favourite pastime is sleeping. He is one of the guys who sleeps the most in class but is yet to be caught by any of the profs, which is an amazing talent.

Bulla - in case you read this, no offence meant buddy :-) "Mera naam hai pote jo apne baap ke bhi nahi hote" :-P

Day 60 - 25th August 2010

The entire day revolved around Markops - a marketing simulation game where you need to take business decisions and compare your results with that of virtual competitors. It's a pretty interesting concept, we completed 6 months of a 3 year plan today, the rest of it will be done over the next couple of days. Had another JIT experience today - although we were trying to work on it from 2 in the afternoon, the real work was began only at 630 with a 8 p.m deadline. Submitted the assignment at 745, which wasn't exactly JIT but still we weren't early birds either :-) Had nothing much to do after that, ended up spending the remainder of the day in my room, surfing the net and tracking the score of the India NZ match. Today seemed to be more of a rest day as compared to yesterday :-D