Time..Opportunities...Regrets ?

At certain points in life you feel you should have done something a tad earlier..I was almost certain that this feeling was to strike at me some point or other during this 2 year course...It did,though from an unexpected angle/source... Last week I came across 2 situations, wherein I would have had more freedom had I finished my education one/two years before.. And one of those did put me into a deep & prolonged thought..

Certain actions might seem illogical..But, not everything in life can be explained rationally/ logically..I'm thinking of resorting to an irrational action ... something that seems outrightly childish.. But, my heart asks me to try my luck :-) .

( PS:- This is not to discourage anyone having significant workexp from doing MBA..Infact, workexp makes you more mature and your takeaways from MBA would be much higher... All thoughts and actions contemplated are from a strict personal perspective )

Ajith

The Six-Degrees Principle

Orkutting is fun..Its even funnier with this thing called 'mutual friends'..I know that it is not recent, but still there are a couple of interesting stuff thats associated with this..

There is something called as 'Six-degrees of separation' .. What it means is not that every two guys in world would be connected by 'six hops'.. It just says that the average number of 'hops' would be six.. There have been experiments to verify this concept in facebook, where the average hop-length turned out to be 5.73 ( Strong validation , I should say )

In the last couple of months, my orkut friends list increased from sub-300 levels to 470+ ( and still growing ) owing to IIMK admission..I've started looking into the mutual friends list whenever I get a new connection..And there have been instances when I got literally startled like
" Oh..How does he know HER ? ".. OR .. "Oh..man, she knows that bugger? How come? "...This sense of strangeness is quadrupled when u do random orkuting clicking on someone's profile ( I used to do this when I had ample free time in Oracle..but thats not the case anymore :( ) ..then clicking on their 'interesting' friends..and so on.. And u end up at a chick's profile ..but invariably, there would be some guy who'd be there in the mutual friends list...

Had orkut given a feature in which u can enter two orkut profile URLs and check if they are connected or not , it would have been even more interesting.. Eitherway, owing to these social networks, I've started to look for these 'degrees of separation' more often.. And as MBA students, we are told to do more and more networking..Though that doesnt mean just expanding the linkedin / facebook / orkut networks, this has become an integral part of it..

This is actually creepy at times..Like, after 10 years, when the social networks somehow use a common underlying platform & open communication APIs, practically every two individuals in any corner of the world could be connected in 'six hops' .. And if you want to know how social networking thing can affect your marriage chances, check this entertaining post by Vinay :-) .. There are people who do evaluation of potential partner by extensive 'orkut-research' and even for that matter 'scrapbook-research'. These people have been severely affected since orkut came up that security features and all..But I'm sure that people would find alternate, if not better ways :-)

PS:- I've quite a few tasks whose deadlines are tomorrow 23.59 PM and quite a few subjects to prepare for monday... But I knew I just had to post this regardless of whatever stuff thats pending... because without constant updates on this blog, I wouldn't just be myself... And I dont want that to happen.

Ajith

The B-school Life

So, 3 weeks here @ IIMK and I finally get some time to blog... There is nothing very particular that I plan to blog..All are kind of arbitrary..

Often many of us ( including me ) tend to think that our life has been tough and we didnt get what we deserved.. Here, I've met some individuals who have fought of ( or, are still fighting off ) lot of adversities. And compared to them, atleast my difficulties seemed to be trivial.. I tend to realise that the difficulties faced by each of us are kind of unique..And there is no point in benchmarking those..
So, what else are the changes that have come up in me ?

-- The total intake of tea & coffee ( Unlike quite a few people, I drink both ) has increased exponentially
-- I dont feel like sleeping till atleast 1AM ( excluding the time that I doze off in class :-) )
-- There are basically two choices here..Either insulate yourself and concentrate on studies or study a bit and enjoy the life here.. Though I had intentions of slogging when I came here, I quickly dropped off that idea and I'm enjoying my stay here.
-- I tend to find quite a lot of people who are better than me in each and every thing..
-- "Rewards are rarely proportional to the efforts " .. Thats something that one needs to get into his/her mind to survive here. Fortunately, I've accepted this as a fact long time before itself.
-- I think time management would be perhaps my most significant takeaway from this course.
-- Quite a few people are complaining that I'm out of touch with them..I accept it..Time has a high premium value in this system.
-- "Even if you win this rat race, you are still a rat" :-)
-- Every other week, you have a party... And yeah, I still stop at 2 or 3 pegs :-)

Ajith