Eternal Souls

....
Jesse: Most people, you know, a lot of people talk about the past lives, and things like that, you know, and even if they don't believe in it in some specific way, you know, people have some kind of notion of an eternal soul, right.

Céline: Yeah.

Jesse: Okay. Well, this is my thought. 50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet. 10,000 years ago, there's like 2,000,000 people on the planet. Now, there's between 5 and 6 billion people on the planet, right? Now, if we all have our own, like, individual, unique soul, right, where do they all come from? Are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls? Because if they are, that represents a 5,000-to-1 split of each soul in just the last 50,000 years, which is like a blip in the earth's time. You know, so, at best, we're like these tiny fractions of people, you know, walking... I mean, is that why we're all so scattered? You know, Is that why we're all so specialized?

Céline: Wait a minute, I'm not sure I ... I don't...

Jesse: Hang on, I know, I know, it's a totally scattered thought, which is kind of why it makes sense. ..

From 'Before Sunrise'...Celine & Jesse...

Interesting thought....

Air Deccan - A second innings

After a long time, I travelled by Air Deccan. There seems to be something happening over there. It almost seems like Capt. Gopinath got up one day and said 'I am sick and tired of people cursing my company. My employees are all becoming demotivated having been shouted at so many times.'

Let me run a market research to do a perception map for Air Deccan. So now we have the dear Captain making enough announcements about how they are making it on time 88% of the time and we are only late 12% of the time.

So he gives all of his employees this bright yellow T-shirt asking his customers to give Air Deccan a second chance. It's an interesting exercise to change the negative perception of the public.

In many ways, this is an important exercise for the company. They need to boost up their sagging stock, their customer satisfaction scores and their employee morale.

Let's see if the captain manages to pull this off too...

ps:Btw, captain, it is perfectly legal to provide some directions to passengers when and where the flight is going to take off from at least 30 min before departure

Hedonism - the only way to be

I had almost forgotten how different Chennai was from Bangalore. After many months, I made a visit to this so deliciously Tamilian city...i have become too hedonistic these days to be really charmed anymore by Chennai.

Was like a sojourn to the old days...had a meal in one of those messes you find only in Chennai (and maybe parts of Malleswaram in Blore). great food..as clean as you will get for a 10Rs meal.

Living in South Bangalore amongst all the yuppies in Koramangala for a few years now, its almost become a given that the only joints worth existing are those that you can blow a lot of money for some normal food. I think it is good once in a while to do these kind of deviations...

It does feel I have come a long way on the road to hedonism...long live self-indulgence...one of my friends would agree.. :)

Smart Companies and the MBAs

This is definitely a question that I have thought of on multiple occasions. What makes a company diversify into a totally unrelated field, burn up their own cash cow and finally sell the business to focus on their 'core areas' after a few years at a loss?

I liked this article by Guy Kawasaki. I think it is a nice way to put things in perspective..

Of course, I like point 5 best... :)

5. Restrict the use of experts to narrow areas. Never use experts to create your product roadmap or marketing plans unless you want MBAs who have never run anything larger than a school snack bar to decide your fate.

Ms.Bansal has also talked about the yuppie MBA. Looks like we are not a very well-liked group not withstanding the so-called money (havent seen it yet myself though...but i guess hope is the way to the future) ;-)

New York, New York

New York is a great place, a city full of energy and a city that never sleeps..but when I am travelling back tomorrow to India, I feel good..

I feel so ready to travel back...I am usually the kind of person who likes visiting new places and try and understand the 'character' of the city.

New York should have been perfect. Dont know if it is due to the amount of work or the team I was working with...am sure glad India is calling...

I guess there are times when you want to be the adventurous one in the world exploring new corners and there are other times when you want to get back into the comfort zone that you are used to....

What a person is, I suppose dependent on how comfortable and what proportion of the time he/she likes to tread into the unknown...

The one good thing about this trip was the number of old friends I caught up with. I realized I knew so many people here - school, college, ex-colleagues, IIMB and some of them I had lost touch over the last 3-4 years and some of them I have not talked to in about 10 years...But its good to know that there are so many people who you can just pick off where we left off from...

Makes me think, I should definitely try living in Mumbai...

Sept 11 all over again

Its that time of the year here in the US. The day that changed the world (atleast here) ..Sept 11 is coming up...

I managed to visit the World Trade Center site today. I do not know if it is always the case or specially decked for the day. There was this photo exhibition that presented different facets of the disaster...As I was looking at all of this and looking at all the TV channels here going on about '5 years and after' (probably even NDTV and CNN-IBN are doing this back home), a lot of thoughts went off in my head....

Why is it so much simpler for us to accept disaster? Mumbai has had many such catastrophes in the last decade. Still I cant think of any memorial for the victims or the public even stopping to think about the unfortunate victims. In the US, the media and the political machinery ensures the public dont put behind the event.

I guess this event sure shocked a nation that had become complacent and arrogant about its own superiority. It was unfortunate that this happened with the lives of so many innocents being sacrificed. However, maybe we do need a machinery within our country to give the respect to the dead....we are almost at the other end of the spectrum...