@XL-4 (Republic day at XLRI)

Today I woke up at morning 8:30 and rushed in front of XLRI academic block for attending flag hoisting ceremony at 9:30 am. It is nice to see so many people attending this ceremony without any compulsion. There were professors, their families, students and working staff of XLRI. Today it was 61st Republic day for the country. The first song performed by Bodhitree( The official Band of XLRI) was " Aye Mere Vatan ke logon, Jaraa aankh mein bhar lo paanee, Jo shaheed huyein hai unkee, jaraa yaad karo kurbaani". The song asks us to remember all the freedom fighters of the country who donated their lives in the cause of freedom for the country. We are the young generation of our country and fortunately we have not seen any major debacle/insurgency in our country. We are MBA students and the biggest tragedies we remember are 2002 Dotcom burst or for that matter the recent economic recession. We are troubled by "Satyam Saga". We are one of the most genuine persons in the country who have worked enormously hard to make our ways to XLRI. But we have a tenderness in our approach. We have a fear against instability in our lives. Do we truly remember the sacrifice of people done by our freedom fighters. How many of us do understand the enormity of the cause that our forefathers took up or how many of us can feel even a fraction of pain that instigated them to donate their lives to freedom movement of India. I think our generation is well past that pain because if there was even a slight feeling of gratitude, respect to our freedom fighters, we the so called capable ones would have fought prevalent poverty, illiteracy, improper health care in our country. Each of us would have at least taken more responsibilities in our lives. I really believe that we have potential to become a great country but we need people who assume their all responsibilties and make it a point to fullfill them.

@XL-3 ( An assumption is mother of any Goof-up)

I recently faced a situation where a small assumption led to a big trouble. It is highly disappointing when you try your best to ensure that everything goes right and still there are Goof-ups. I think one should try to learn from these mistakes and should not assume to many things in future about others/situations etc.

Other aspect of these situations is behavior of persons around you. Some people will just forget all the right things that you have done in the past and will behave in a very disrespectful manner. However some would support you on your face but would actually doubt your potential. There would be some others who would try to understand the real cause of the problem and will think rationally about your mistake and the outcomes to be drawn about you because of this mistake. I think we should try to check our own behavior if any of the persons around us is caught in any such situation.

@XL-2 ( Finance and Music go well together)

Today is going to be a night out again. I have a long assignment to do. A lot of financial calculations to be done. Its 4:18 am in the morning. I am listening to "3 Idiots" song, Give me some sunshine.. and I am loving it !!! Finance and Music do go well togther.

Or may be it is effect of the lyrics of this particular song ;-)

Up to you to comment.

DCP war !!!

People have many innovative ways to get fun at classes at XLRI ( learning is ofcourse fun ;-) but ppl always demand more fun). A Recent innovation is DCP war. DCP is "Desperate Class Participation". This is a common term across all B-School where teachers allocate some marks for class participation. Students however in order to get these marks will ask questions just for nothing and then it becomes Desperate Class participation.
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@ AOL course we were told that there are 3 kinds of questions ppl ask:
1- The questions that they dont even care to ask. like "How are you" etc.
2- The questions that they seek answers for. The questions where they disagree/agree, where they seek confrontation/confirmation.
3- The questions they ask to show their knowledge. Or questions they ask to show that they are interested? (Well DCP belongs to this category)
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So Next level to DCP is DCP war. Where we have made some teams in the class. For every question asked the team gets a point. And the team which asks the maximum questions wins. Now there are many ways to spice it up further. Like There are rules like if a member of a team asks a question, another member of the same team should ask a question before member of any other team asks a question. Otherwise the first team gets negative points. Then other ways are creating rythms in DCP where a moderator controls the time when a question has to be asked. And as soon as he shows a sign, a question has to be asked by a team with in 5 seconds.

Overall this is fun. And this does not even hampers learning. :-)

DISCLAIMER: Its just fiction with no reality. We are very serious about academics at XLRI.

@XL-1

I will continue to post some random thoughts and observations at XLRI under this title.

Gyaan@ART of Living:

Live with Happiness not pursuit of happiness.

Random Gyaan:

1- "Our Great Grandfathers lived only as rich as our grandfathers as rate of economic growth was almost negligible at that time. Our fathers lived in more riches than our grandfathers. We will be richer than our fathers. So we are a generation of value creators for the Society"

Well a very limited thought I must say. There are many other dimensions which can be added to it. Many objections can be raised against this statement also. But if you see all that hard work that our generation is putting up must be creating some value somewhere!!!

2- Learnt through an experience that to make good friends you have to invest time with them.(Well, yes, it works in practicality for sure)

Art of Living @XL

XLRI has arranged a 3 day "Art of living" program for us. Program has a great reputation across the world. Apart from other regular exercises somethings really struck me during the program. One was Sudarshan Kriya. I went to sleep during this Kriya(As a matter of fact most tormented souls of XLRI, who had barely slept in previous nights went in deep sleep). When I woke up, I woke up blank.It looked as if I had slept for hours. Before sleeping, I could feel vibrations in my head, similar to when you have drunk some glasses of Alcohol. And when I woke up I felt as I was at some other level. It was a wonderful experience. I dont remember last time when I went in such a deep sleep.

During the program we were asked to think about things that bother us. One thing that came to my mind was "Unrest" in the world. I was asked to imagine how world would look like without any wars and conflicts. I tried to imagine it and it was a wonderful sight. I loved it. There were no conflicts and humanitarian crisis like today at Iraq and Sudan. There was technological progress all around and everybody cared for everybody's gain. It is really difficult to understand basic reason for people doing things those take us away from this possibility.

Other thing was about living in Present. If we can even for a moment think just about present and nothing else, we would be smiling in that moment. So why not live every moment in itself and give you 100 percent to it rather than caring about past or future. On another level it seemed that disconnecting future and present is very difficult. But at least we should stop bothering about Past.

Overall it was a nice experience for a day. and there are 2 more days to come. I am looking forward to them :-)

New year resolution

New year resolution to be regular on the blog :-)

Merry Christmas

Its Christmas today and it is time to be around your loved ones. There are times when we express our love very explicitly and sometimes our love is very implicit. I think what matters the most is to have at least one person in this world whom you can tell, “God only knows what I will be without you”. Our lives have become very busy and target driven all the times. Sometimes they are professional targets and sometimes personal targets, we rarely sit back and enjoy the warmth of affection of our loved ones. We do spend time with them but our minds are at our work or even sometimes focus is only spending time with them. But human is created to have emotions by God and he wants our hearts to share love, happiness, sorrow with others and I think life is more fulfilling when we do just that. I think one can take a test to check if he is really getting the affection that he deserves in life or if he does love his loved ones wholeheartedly. The test is to watch two movies in a straight sitting, first is “Notting Hill” and other is “Love Actually”. Please repeat last 10 minutes of “Love Actually” once again. Now try to think of last time when you had the similar feeling. If you can remember at least one time in recent six months, you are just fine. Otherwise there is something that you are missing. You should start sharing your feeling with others, should open yourself. There is a lot of love waiting in the world for all of us. Have a great time ahead. Merry Christmas

PS: Post was drafted on 25th December only :-)