What I need..

is this. For now. Maybe for later too.

I haven't really done this before. Putting my emails on my blogs. But for once, just to make a statement, I will-

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Dear Sir(s),

I am a senior media trainee at SIMC, Pune. Majoring as I do in advertising, there are a few points of conflict between your filtering policy and my needs. I state needs because they differ apparently from wants, what most 20-year old college students would have.

Listed below are some of the needs-

1. Photography- As a future client servicing manager, I'd be expected to be sufficiently well-read and accustomed to various aspects of layouts of advertising, in which photography plays a major part. Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a famous photography sharing web-site where scores of Pro, semi-pro photographers share photography as an art. Flickr has a strong nudity/porn filtering system, and is one of the reasons why most pro photographers use it. It is not a personal storage site as declared by your filtering system.

Please review.

2. Marketing and Media (Social marketing)- Seth Godin is an acclaimed author of more than 10 books on Media and Marketing. Just because his blog resides on the typepad domain (www.sethgodin.typepad.com), doesn't mean he shares pictures of naked adoloscents.

Please review.

3. Video- I live in the Symbiosis Knowledge Village. There is one TV in the hostel. The area doesn't have chairs to sit around so we sit on the floors. The TV normally is tuned to Zee Cinema/Star Majha where the omnipresent carpenters/guards/plumbers/sweepers watch the oldest hindi/marathi blockbusters. So when I want to watch the Cannes Lions entries, I can't. Hence, youtube.com is not wanted but needed. Professional reasons.

Please review.

There are a list of about 60 websites that I feel very strongly about, but since the needs and wants are blurred on them, I would refrain.

Cheers,
Karan Rajpal
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Hope someone knowledgeable will manage to read it. I know its an exercise in futility, but no one's ever known me for lack of trying.

:-)

Ciao.

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Update- Two days Later-
They've unblocked Orkut and facebook. Neither flickr not youtube is unblocked. Guess Social Networking is a better option in the interests of our youth. Fizzy.

Moosing

Another evening at the golfview resorts. In between eating Khakra(which is a gujarati papad that's ready to eat- and this is the last time I've explained a word, and I will not italcize any hindi words anymore, as per the new Amitav Ghosh standards) and brushing the crumbs off my bed, I've been having to field some great questions-

From my roommate Y, who's an environmental engineer pursuing advertising amongst other things, who decided this evening to pursue an internship at McKinsey, the holy grail of consulting for some reason-

Upon seeing a list of honorory prefixes- "Eng. ka matlab Engineer hota hai na?"
When countered with a list of possible posting locations- "Aaj kal Australia kahan aata hai? Asia-Pacific mein?"
Looking at the options for cities- "Munich mein aajkal kya bolte hain?"
Looking at the options for choosing the option that best describes academic performance in the degree course- "Arre ye saale kya kah rahe hain, Summa cum Laude, Magna cum Laude, ye itni badi company aisa kaise likh sakti hai?" with reference to the phallic references in the last words.

Check it out here and think of more questions he could have come up with. And let me know.

Shani ki Jai

Yesterday, our two month old car got stolen. I hadn't driven it much in my days in Delhi this time, my brother using it to do what I used to do a long time ago, sell taps. With it is gone his on-the-go office. At any given time, I had a bedsheet, at least 11 bottles of water (empty mostly), all my bills and stock registers, and the keys to the factory. All of it gone. The police will try hard to trace it. And so on. I'm pissed. Someone also vandalised my bike yesterday in college. Broke the speedo console, dented the body and the fuel tank.

Major shani, my brother says. We are ordained to worship the blackest of all gods. Have to, he says. Good-for-nothing-student brother must obey working-as-we-should-in-the-family brother.

Class has been delayed by 30 minutes. So methought must take out time from irreversible bursts of speed of NFS Most Wanted and spinning on Cricket 2007, my companions to boredom. Suit yourself.

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Last night was fun. My roomie celebrated his 3rd anniversary of togetherness with his gal, also our classmates. Both are environmental engineers who've decided to give advertising a go. We (he) set up a poolside elaboration which included mango-flavored non-alcoholic champagne, candles, cake and agarbattis, all laid down on one of our favorite bedsheets. We clicked pictures, and had a whale of a time. Can't remember anytime I went through such elaboration for any of my annivs. Well, nothing except on(c)e lasted more than a year. Wishing against hope.
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My ability to convince people is going down the drain. Have spent some time with people trying to up their confidence. I speak too much and too much about myself, and success. Narcissism is becoming a automation inside me. Must keep in check.

I think it has something to do with what needs to be done. To achieve, to conquer and become saner. Maybe then I'll talk sense.

This post is just another way of being so blah about myself that I couldn't care more. I'm broke for the first time in my life. I cancelled a trip to bombay because of it. I've been known to do things on the go whenever I feel like it. Long ago I told my Dad- "money isn't everything". He has since reciprocated by choking my money supply while I study. I've consumed the remenants of my salary, PF and other convertibles from working days. Good we are in wilderness. And god knows how much I miss my RCB's from Subway, the pastas that hang in my dreams, and some other random food articles that have clogged my arteries from the time I can remember. Food here is an exercise in punishment.

Learning to live like a student for the first time.

One of these days, I'll figure out why I post things like this here. These are my feelings, things I should jot down in my personal journal. Why I choose to post them for public view is to be known. Yet.

.*.

There are too many things to be shared. This was the longest time in the last 5 years that I've been without the internet. There were major withdrawal pangs in the beginning, spending as I did about 3-4 hours each day doing stuff (exclusive of orkut/facebook/linkedin/goodreads). But since there was so much to see and do since I've been back here, life has been an interesting ride.

The new campus is kick-ass. I've read quite a few hillside brochures about the resort being nestled in the hills and all that baloney. This is the real McCoy. There are green trees all around, and even the grounds between them are covered with grass. And the green is three different colors- the black green, the dark green and the fluorescent green, so all in all we have a very green campus. Building and Infrastructure is still under construction, but we are in a nifty campus with all the trimmings. The girl's hostel has a few issues as of now, but all that is riffraff issues with a campusinconstruction.

All in all, this has to be one of the best campuses in India, and it has SIBM, Symbi's 'flagship' brand as they call it, SIMC, my alma mater, which is now India's largest Media and Communication Institute, simply because of the no. of students we have for a UGC recognised degree course (all others still give diploma's), and SITM, the telecom MBA school, a sector which is red hot right now. If you think this is PR for where I am, you are possibly right. But it takes a very big idiot to not enjoy this place.

I have a large room for 3. Same roomies as I've had for the last year. We are 3 of a kind. Only today, we've christened ourselves Badke Bhaiya, Majhle and Chutke Bhaiya, for we've decided that we are going to fight MNS in our own way. Just by calling each other just that.

Its been too long since I last updated. So there are too many random things floating in my head for me to put them down in order.

Here are some of them-

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There are no classes happening. As per official estimates, we are supposed to have 12 hours of classes each week, and supposed to work on research and dissertations etc.. Ofcourse, no one gives a flying saucer about that, and we are on a true roman holiday, complete with afternoon siestas, moving to english summers, and some entertaining cricket in the evening, followed by leisurely walks to the mountain tops around. My room overlooks a nine-hole golf-course, reportedly owned by Jackie Shroff, and so on. Everything's provided for, and Yes, I did the unthinkable and the undoable the other day. I washed my clothes. 9 July 2008 will go down in the annals of history that I washed my clothes. Basically just dunked them in surf-infested water for a couple of hours, and then washed them in cold water properly only to let them hang to dry. If you have better techniques let me know. I'm sure a couple of people in this world will be pretty happy that I managed such a feat.

There's nothing to it. Except Inane boredom.
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College, even though with lesser classes is more interesting now. Most people have learned a lot during the past 3 months, and the classes are sporadically interesting. They mostly end up being discussions between me and the professor, but others now come up with interesting observations. Also, the blondes have gone to the PR section, so I am spared the endless chatter. And I'm calmer, happier and saner, in that order.
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Even though I'm a student of SIMC, where most people come only in two cases, in MBA, when they can't get through anywhere else, and when they truly feel they have a calling in Journalism or film-making. Of course, there are the in-betweens and the have-nots(read brain), its been truly intriguing knowing people here. A lot of things that I thought happened in the movies, have happened. I've seen real-life characters- melancholy, off-color, odd-balls, blondes, brilliance personified. I can't place myself on a pedestal and say I'm above all of them, I'm an in-between somewhere there. I've come to love a lot of them, and hate a couple. Hate was something that didn't exist in my system before, but I guess life teaches you.

Yeah.
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SIBM is India's no. 4 MBA Institute. I've met exactly three people from there. This is to ridicule them and tell them in my personal way what they are. They won't ever reach here, but this is the way it goes-

Sample 1- S, a 2nd year SIBM Student. Ex-boyfriend of the star gal of our class. Who's way beyond anything he can imagine of getting any day in this life. Reduced her to smithereens in front of me and D for no reason. I truly, for the first time in my life, felt the urge to kick someone in the balls. Didn't. Repented. He's a shame to our gender, and to Delhi, lives as he does very near my place in Delhi.

Sample 2- Name can't remember. Was walking around with one of my classmates. Met us while me and D were taking the aforementioneed mountain-top hike. Dropped himself in mid-conversation rather rudely. But still ok.

Sample 3- Boy from Nepal (and that's not the qualifying criterion, just a fact). Met him once before last year, he's a friend of a gal in class. Now this requires some telling- We were doing some marketing assignment, and there was some disagreement upon the different between line and brand extensions (which is inane but important), and the teacher is known to blow everyone apart. So gal from class, being very prudent, took him away to ask what it meant (to not show none-of-us knew what they meant, and we needed a know-it-all MBA from B-School to tell us. Sample tells her, she comes back, then he comes walking back to us. We are having a lively discussion, he gives a good and cogent example of shoes, and SKU's and other related jargon, which I field easily, but flies over others' heads.

Next, he thinks we shouldn't refer to Kotler for this. Next, he thinks that a previous issue of Kotler is better. Next, he thinks we are wasting our time here. We should rather be reading No Logo by Naomi Klein. Problem is, I read it about 3 weeks ago on recommendations of some erudite classmates, and it has nothing to do with the issue. I counter jab, contesting what he has to say. Dude rattles and preens, and then throws the elite B-School jab. Quotes, of all people, irrelevant to the matter in all aspects, Winston Churchill!!

I'm truly floored. Flabbergasted. The quote is about history being made and something. And then smiles beatifically, because he thinks I'm speechless. Due to his brilliance. In Unnecessariness.

These are the only three I've encountered. They are in no-way representative of B-Schools or Symbi. I'm waiting to meet better behaved, more accommodating human beings. Various books, blogs and other paraphernalia has always stereotyped them into the above-like category, but I have hope from humanity.
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