The Turkey has landed

Welcome change to life.
They showed four movies as part of inflight entertainment during the lonely ten thousand miles. All seen before!And thats when I realised how many movies I had been watching for the past six months. Control has to be excercised...
Everything in this land has become good or better from what it was two years ago. I liked it all. However the traffic has become worst than ever. May be its because I have only seen regulated and disciplined traffic for the last two years.

Just a phone all away

Decipher the number......
1) Beethoven wrote these many symphonies. Myth says a cat has these many lives.
2) Every bowlers dream (cricket)
3) A ___ of Spectacles, scissors.
4) The only number whose number of letters is equal to its value.
5) V (Roman)
6) Hex- or Sex- they mean the same.
7) Every bowlers dream (cricket)
8) V (Roman)
9) Radio name for a plane carrying the American President.
10) Every bowlers dream (cricket)

Shazham.....

Someone needs to write a thesis on "Variable characteristics of time". The importance of a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you stand. Well I am about to stand on the right side and I want my time to freeze!! Shazham.....

Time Travel

How good it would have been had time travel been possible. I would love to travel into the future and see whats in store for me. And if I don't like it, travel back, make changes accordingly.
I don't know about the later but I am certainly due for some time travel. From 12 hours behind to 12 hours ahead!! May be beat the rotation speed of the earth and jump a day while doing so. Wonderful.....I better read The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy.

Going Retro!!

When I graduated from COEP it was "COEP". It had always been that for years. So much know is this brand name that if I say I graduated from Government College of Engineering, Pune, no one would know where I am coming from. But a simple COEP would do the trick.

So when they decided to go autonomous, which is good, it meant we could be COEP no more. Pune Institute of technology is what they came up with. But it was always (is and will) COEP for everyone. There were rumors of another "studious" college in Pune getting the name. But really speaking they could have never capatilized on this. Even if they had gotten this name, people would still relate us with COEP and not them. This way it would have been a loss to them (in a way an identity crises).

Anyways, the great news is that we are getting back what was ours. Our brand name COEP. It happens on 16th of Nov. Read about it here.

PIET is officially dead....long live COEP!!!!


Boat Club



Me in the Heat Engines lab

Whats inside Telco?

Recently Ritz forwarded me this article to read. It is about the Tata Group and their methodologies and ideologies and how they are in the market while being truely "very different" from other companies. I have worked in organisations equally big if not bigger than the Tatas, but Tatas stand out among the crowd.

"Tata is unique even inside India, where its rigid ethical standards are so well known that corrupt officials typically don't even bother asking Tata employees for bribes..." says the article. True to every single word. I remember Pune RTO failing me in the drive test while lesser drivers got through easily. Typically eight out of ten who go through Telco Motor Driving school flunk the test in the first attempt. Unproved aneocdotals have it that there are "other" reasons behind this. And then there is that famous incident when Telco wanted to buy the piece of land for its car plant in Chikli and refused to "massage" the system. And there is the deal with Honda Motors in 1985 that did not happened for "interesting" reasons.

Tata's are a professional group with a distinct set of old-school values. I remember when the first batch of team-members were made permanent at the car plant. Telco addressed the confirmation letters to their parents. Each letter was custom written. Imagine someone in rural India getting a letter signed by the highest authority in Telco praising his ward, hightlighting his achievements and telling how valuable his ward has been to Telco. Some of the parents were not literate and others read them the letter. Can there be anything more fulfilling than this? I read the replies from some of the parents and it was simply amazing.

Telco has worked best with their back to the wall. In late '85 there was the 407 trucks that saved them, then there was the SUMO and then the revival of Indica. I happened to ask one executive about Telco and how he felt about those survivals. He told me that is couldn't have been just strategies, improvement or plain luck. It must be something bigger than that. And that "that" are the people who work there, the people who feel that there is some part of them in Telco, the people who make Telco. I am fortunate to have had the chance to be a part of their legacy.

Telco's plant in Pune, India (Satellite pic from Google Earth). Telco junta can clearly recognise the B,C,D,E,H,J blocks and the Car plant

Great thought

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. “
- Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)

Gas Buddy

Gas prices have been reclining back to what it used to be six months ago. It has been a combined effect of inquiries by the government into price gouging, a mild winter and supply of crude.

Over the last few months when the gas price went from somewhere around $2 a gallon to $3 a gallon, someone found a good way of getting the best deal. Not a surprise as this is a country where everything that has a price has a deal. You have to only find what is it and who can give the best deal. Here is what you do to find the cheapeast Gas pump in your area.... go to www.gasbuddy.com and type in the zip code and...boom comes a list of the gas prices in the area stationwise. So if you are not brand specific and go by the best deal, this is where you need to go to optimize your purchase.

I guess long drives are "IN" again!!

In a little while

Some things are lost some left behind
Some things are better left for someone else to find
Maybe in time I can finally see
I just wonder......
- In a little while

I wonder what makes people change so quickly. I always remember the analogy of the fourth seat passenger in the Mumbai local train. He is constantly trying to push the others on the bench inwards and get more space to sit. No sooner does he get promoted to the third seat he starts pushing outwards. Five seconds to change approach! Newton could not fathom (just by seeing the apple fall) that forces could change directions so quickly or he would have written a governing statement. So it irritates the hell out of me when people are nice and warm one day and snub and cold the next. Sometimes they interject to say hello and somedays your 'hi' is aliens language to them.

Another Summer Day....

Another summer day
Has come and gone away
In Paris and Rome
But I wanna go home
Mmmmmmmm

Maybe surrounded by
A million people I
Still feel all alone
I just wanna go home

- Home, Micheal Buble

My time is coming!

Jarhead

Off late I have developed a malacious habbit of sleeping through movies at the theatres. Probably because of the dearth of good themes. But that was not the case yesterday when I saw Jarhead. Would have been wonderful to watch it sans the gibberish from the sides. Most of us were expecting a war movie with the usual red blue white story. But this was not to be. This is the story of a Marine and his company who went to the Gulf war and never got a chance to fire a bullet during their six months stay.

What jarred me was the thought of knowing all and not having a chance to make use of it. Imagine a marine completing the tough training, conquering the mental barriers and finally getting a chance to go to the defend his country only to find that in the end to did not use any of the skills that he was trainned in. One of my colleagues who has been to the Gulf war had given me a similar account of his stay in the gulf. His war was 14 minutes of high alert against an ambush attack which turned out to be false.

Voice mail is helpful

About a year ago I got this phone call that I was eagerly awaiting, expecting for a long time. The call telling me 'You are hired' (Trump style).
However I did not take the call at the first go, but let it go on voice mail. My palms were sweating when I IDed the number and I just did not have the guts to talk (or listen) in real time. Finally when I listerned to the voice mail I was on the top of the world. I felt like I had found my oasis in the desert. All the fear I had, all the frustration in me, all of my worries summed up in that one golden drop of water that flowed down my lychrymal glands. Suddenly all my questions seemed to be answered. That I had a mid term exam in a couple of day, that I had tons of homework, that I had a class which assured doing bad on in-class tests did not matter anymore. That walking for more than two miles a day, that budget restricted outside eating, that one haircut a semester, that no plan to visit home, those night outs in the library, all started to seem worth it.

I haven't felt this strongly for anything at any point uptil now. Start to what has been an amazing year of learning and living on the edge.

He who has the gold, makes the rules!

D-day

Diwali brings happiness to everyone. As I think of Diwali today I cannot but say that to me over the past couple of years it meant a long phone call to near and dear ones. And off course those colorful animated e-greetings.

I am well short of memory to remember what I did on Diwali day last year or year before that. But this year will be different. I am determined to make it different than those colorless, unmemorable days of the past. So we are going to get together and do a small puja and go out to eat.

Zindagi ka Saath Nibhata Chala Gaya