On Being Thankful

**Post backlog**

Thanksgiving is huge in the US. Every year, Thanksgiving officially ushers in the holidays, the lightening of the wallet, the heavying of the closet and the weighing scale. Having no family in the US, Thanksgiving offers me an opportunity to squeeze in a trip since it’s a day more than a traditional long weekend.

This year I decided to head back to the Bay Area to meet all the friends I have been missing since I moved to Seattle. Also, the weatherman called for clouds and rain here (surprise!) and beautiful summer weather in SF. It was a no-brainer! I hung out with the bestie, meet up with OR and NR and their adorable 7week old K! I also drove down 101 to meet AC and her adorable new baby, L. Both my girlfriends make beautiful, natural mothers and it was a pleasure watching them in this new role.

My last evening in SF, the bestie and I ate at one of our favorite joints in Burlingame, where they still recognized and remembered us. We talked about the things we can’t tell anyone else, fears, hopes, dreams, insecurities. We talked about being thankful for each other and the life we were given.

Role Models

As an early user of Google Plus, I have come to love the flexibility and selectivity the social network affords me, especially in comparison to Facebook, whose privacy settings I have finally given up trying to understand as they apply to the timeline format. More on that in a different forum. I started to add companies to my circles when they first came out with that. And recently I’ve started to add people I don’t personally know. I call this new circle the People I Admire circle.

To this circle, I recently added Drew Houston. This was in part inspired by reading about him in the much tweeted about LA Times article (which, by the way, doesn’t really add much to the much circulated Forbes article about him and Dropbox) and also in part inspired by his Google+ profile. I discovered that he went to undergrad the same years as I did, albeit in a totally different part of the world! He, and the article, made me think about my years as an undergrad, around the time I began this blog. I think about my ideas, motivators, priorities at that time and hold it up against what they are today. If you had told me back then that I would be where I am today – literally and figuratively, geographically and professionally – I would have dismissed you as an incompetent fortune teller.

bI realize now the importance of having role models. But that’s just such a generic thought. I wish I had known the importance of having role models for the right reasons. My undergrad major was driven by my desire to escape computer programming. I turned to mechanical engineering because it’s what my father had done. It was an easy choice. In retrospect, it was a great choice, I loved my coursework and the skills I acquired. But in 2001, I had no idea what it entailed and what I was going to do with it four years on. Same time, half the world away, Drew Houston was getting into MIT and thinking about starting his first tech company.

Back then I didn’t know he existed. Today I admire him immensely, not just because he has this wildly successful company that actually means something to a lot of people and not just because he has this strong vision of building the next Apple or Google. I admire him also because as someone who is the same age as I, he has shown vision, maturity, motivation and determination to do something with his life. I think the word I’m looking for is focus. He has remained focused on the thing that matters most to him professionally, and given it his all. He’s just one example. There are other thirty year olds I can hold up… or the twenty two year old Doogie-Howser-of-the-tech-world co-founder I met a couple months ago; or the Google Guys whom I’ve admired pretty much all my professional life! In comparison, my own professional history reads to me like a drifting log.

I am still trying to figure out what my “thing” is going to be… you know, the thing that you were born to do, the one you’ve been preparing for your whole life without actually knowing it. A month ago, I stood at (what seemed at that time) a very important, life altering crossroad in my professional life. I had been building up to it for a while now, taking certain decisions and choosing a path to get there. When I finally reached, I threw out the obvious choice and selected an entirely different one to go down (remember the drifting log?). I still can’t extrapolate forward the dots in a way that makes any sense. But I now have role models whose successes, failures, tenacity, creativity and focus I can look up to. I am fortunate that my role models are real people, who I could easily run into at a terminal at SFO. It makes the dream seem that much more achievable. It makes me believe that I will be able to connect the dots someday soon. All I have to do is keep moving forward.

Missing

picture from Fall 2008, welcome picnic for CO2010 at Flagler

Being loaded on medication and working in your pajamas gives you plenty of time to think. And be introspective. And acknowledge emotions you have suppressed because of your daily routine of being too busy.

A couple weeks ago, my Strategy professor from Darden, Prof. Greg Fairchild, was in San Francisco to discuss a case born out of his research into social enterprise. We discussed a venture capital firm that believed in investing in companies that brought in a double bottom line – social good as well as the profits. I remember sitting in a class during the first couple of weeks at Darden – don’t remember which – where we repeated in unison to the question, why do you do business – “to make money.” Graduation and plus-one later, Darden has been great about drilling into my head that a business is about more than just the money. I cannot tell you how many times in the last year I have reminded myself of that lesson.

I took a friend with me to Greg’s case discussion. My friends and family being in India, and my own lack of words to describe my experience at Darden, I have never been able to fully share what it feels like to be sitting in a Darden class. So when the opportunity presented itself, I took one of my closest friends to the Marriot for this discussion. Driving back home and ruminating on the experience and the discussion, she told me that that evening was the happiest she had seen me in a long time. At the time I assumed I was just happy to meet a professor whose class was one of my favorite ones at Darden. My friend argued that there was a certain energy in the “class” – and in me – that evening that she had not seen before (and she has known me for over six years now).

This weekend is my first year reunion at Darden and I will not make it there. As I read blogs of current students at Darden, I almost wish I was back there. I’ve realized what my friend was talking about. I miss Darden, so very much. I miss being there, being challenged every day, being forced to think about big pictures and social good and learning life’s lessons. I have realized that my ability to throw myself completely into something I am doing has resulted in me filling up my calendar with “work” things and forgetting about big picture living. And when I am with my Darden crowd – at a brunch, at a case discussion or a happy hour – I come alive, because here are the people that prove to me every day that it was not a dream. That it happened and that I will always have those two years at school.

I stand by my decision of not attending reunion due to various constraints, but come Saturday I will be wishing I was sipping wine at Flagler Courtyard and catching up with friends and professors and the staff at Darden, telling them of all my adventures since I graduated last year.

The End of a Long Journey

... And the beginning of a new one.

I am writing this from LAX as I wait for my flight to San Francisco. Chances are I will continue this on my flight (yay for free wi-fi) and then continue some more from San Francisco. There is a lot to say, and I’m hoping to make up for the silence of the past couple of months. I board this flight today with some small degree of trepidation but also with a fair amount adrenaline rush that can only come at the beginning of a new adventure. I’ve lost of how many flights I’ve boarded in the last six months but I can tell you that this is the sixth city I will be heading to in as many months and hopefully I’ll stay here for a while. As I checked in my mammoth suitcase at the curbside check in a while ago I thought to myself that I’d feel very suicidal if I had to lug it through another airport any time soon! Thankfully it is the end of a long journey that began at Charlottesville and took me to multiple places and people… but it is over finally.

From having zero job-offers to finally getting something I was so passionate about (but didn't realize until epiphany struck), life has changed indeed! In my obsessive search for the perfect job over the past two years (and anyone who has been through the process will tell you it’s a two year process), I have discovered much about myself and not all of it has been flattering. But all of it helped me narrow and broaden my search as the situation demanded. That discovery helped shape my final decision and the subsequent move from the east coast to the w(best!

It is normal to be job-search-obsessed in business school. I thought it was just my class reacting to the havoc the economy wrecked on us. But as it turns out, it is an affliction of every bschool student no matter what the economic climate is. And dutifully job-search obsessed though I was, I will openly admit that it was not without a large dose of self-doubt and the road was not always clean and clear. I will also admit that my ultimate success was not so much hard work as it was just sheer luck. And that is what makes the “success” so hard to celebrate. There are others in my class – some close friends too – that still haven’t found their offers and I know that the difference between them and me today is just dumb luck, a fortnight and nothing more.

I was discussing with a classmate today about our respective job searches and while he has found success too, we both had to acknowledge that we owed our success and sanity to our network of personal and professional contacts. Our alumni base had been very generous to us during our search process, even if just with advice and words of encouragement. Our classmates at Darden have been great with all the support, the couch to crash on or even just over the phone with all the positive cheer.

While my life moving forward is very different from the way I had envisioned it during the summer of 2008, I am pleasantly surprised and very thankful for the way it did turn out. Don’t punch me in the face, but sometimes you just have to trust the process!

On being desi

Earlier this year, I spent a weekend in DC with a couple my family knows well, who have been like second parents to me while at C’ville. Over filter coffee (Tamil style) one of the mornings, I got to talking about their story of how they came here so many years ago, met and married each other and now had a full, happy life in this country. I wondered who had been their support system when they first moved here, at a time when Indians in America were concentrated in the Universities and the Valley and were not as ubiquitous as today; I had them, and over my three years in America, various other people, who have been my support system to help me settle down. I wondered who was there for them, whether they brought a year’s worth of tamarind from India for sambar and special idli rice and even their filter coffee powder!

Since my move to Florida, I had not cooked anything Indian, and had survived on fruits and pasta and ramen noodles… nothing wrong with it, but when I started craving curries and rotis I knew I had to fix it. At one of my fruit-buying trips at the local Publix, I spotted an Indian. I struck up conversation with him and asked him to give me directions to the Indian store. And as a freebie, he threw in directions to the Indian temple too! So this morning I drove up to the Indian store and within ten minutes I had a basket full of frozen rotis and daals and spices. I got to talking with the store owner and she offered to give me ideas on all the spices and stuff I would need to get my kitchen started. As I browsed through the aisles (there were just two), I savored the sound of all the people shopping there and the various languages they were conversing in.

I have always believed that as someone who cooks a lot Indian food at home, I wouldn’t want to go to an Indian restaurant on the weekends when I eat out. By that same principle, I’ve always tried to get to know non-desi folk at school/work because I rationalized that I left India to get to know people of the world. But today, as I perused the aisles of the store, I savored the little India around me, enjoyed speaking Hindi with the people there and felt comfort and at home for the first time at an Indian store.

I guess no matter how much we try to acclimatize ourselves to our new “home” land – America or Argentina or anywhere else – we never really stop being desi… You could suppress the desi-ness but it comes out in the least expected places and times… sometimes all it takes is the sight of bhindi (okra) and you can almost smell it frying in your kitchen in India. To my desh on its 64th year of Independence, I hope you know that your influence stays strong even so far away.

(End of a) Beginning of the End*

For the past week or so I have been living the retired life right here in Charlottesville. Well retired might be inappropriate, more like the job-seeker’s life. Every day I drink my morning tea in front of my laptop as I catch up with email, make my incredibly long to do list and post something from my apartment for sale on craigslist.

I experiment with my breakfast – because it’s my favorite meal of the day – and a good breakfast of pancakes and fruit puts me in just the right mood to tackle the day. And then I come to my “office”. There is a bunch of us that comes to school every day religiously to hole up in an LT room and work on looking for work. It’s like going to the office – it builds the discipline of sitting in one place for hours to get the job done, and on coffee breaks I control the calories by walking past the classrooms and the tables laden with delicious food for the MBA for Execs people and hanging out with the other office-goers.

Allow me to whine a little please. I hate packing. Phew, there it’s off my chest. I love travelling don’t get me wrong, and I would happily brag that I can pack real quick when I have to do a trip. But packing for moving is absolutely a nightmare, no matter how many times you’ve done it before (and I have unfortunately done it too many times). I also have started to believe that perhaps my suitcases shrank while they were in the closet these past two years!

I leave C’ville at the end of this month because my lease ends and it doesn’t make sense to hold on to this place any longer. Everyone’s leaving and it makes me sad to watch them go… with some people I feel like I may never see them again and it’s scary and sad all at the same time. I am heading to SoCal first to spend some time with my sister and hope the family-treatment will help settle the chaos that my mind has been these past few weeks. I always have fun when I hang out with my sister and this time we’re planning a west coast road trip which will be great. I’ll move to the bay area next month and just take it from there.

But before all that is the mammoth weekend of packing that’s coming up tomorrow. Wish me luck.

*inspired by this Bon Jovi song called Welcome To Wherever You Are.

My own C'ville Goodbye Tour

In my last post I wrote about wanting to show my parents around C’ville and all the places I hung out at during my two years here. Last week, we did just that and then some more. I took my parents to eat at some of my favorite joints here, showed them the sights and sounds of some places that were almost second home to me and then also took them to a few places I hadn’t been to for lack of time. From favorite restaurants to hole-in-the-wall crepe joints to the vineyards and the caverns... it's been a week full of picture taking and playing the tour guide!

In addition to showing them around, I have also been doing a few goodbye lunches/dinners/coffees/breakfasts when I can, which has been difficult with them around but I still try. I think the one ritual I will really absolutely miss in “the real world” would be my Sunday brunch/breakfasts (not so much Sunday after school, since everyday has been Sunday!). Just like this morning, I had a wonderful brunch with Oren and some of my other favorite Darden ppl and I tried to stay in denial that I won’t get that again – unless we all turned up reunion (in which case, Oren, can we go to Blue Glass Grill please?) which is a year from now.

I always knew I was lucky to be here in this beautiful town but more importantly among these wonderful people… in fact, I have never found myself among so many like-minded, likable people and as Prof. John Colley told us on our last day of GMTA class, it doesn’t get any better than this. And as I show my parents around and try to relive my out-of-class experiences from the two years, I feel like this is my own personal goodbye tour of C’ville.

My parents leave for California in a week’s time after which I begin my own process of moving there, selling my stuff and emptying out my apartment into my two suitcases and a backpack. I want to keep everything, yet I know I can’t. I am yet to de-Dardenize my laptop – archive emails and documents – and honestly, I’m just procrastinating.

Here’s a picture of breakfast this morning before the Roots left C’ville – that's right, Mimosas with breakfast, because we can!

Graduation

The view from the day after

600 cases, 8 quarters, countless cold calls, late nights and TNDCs later I am finally an MBA.

Yesterday the Full Time MBA Class of 2010 at Darden graduated, under the encouraging gaze of Thomas Jefferson’s statue at Flagler Courtyard and under a blue-gray sky that threatened to spill over any moment.

First we had the main graduation ceremony at The Lawn in Central Grounds (UVA) where the whole university’s graduating class (ie from all departments) gathered to take their degrees. After a lot of balloon-flying, clapping and hooting, we were finally allowed to shift our tassels from the right side (no degree) to the left (degree bestowed). It was a great feeling to be sitting in that historic place and to know that I will forever be an alumnus of this beautiful and historically and intellectually rich university. From there on, it was on to Darden for our ceremony and to receive the diploma. As I sat there and clapped for all my classmates getting their degrees and later walked up to take my own, it dawned on me that the umbilical cord was finally being cut, and we were free to go out into the world to do everything we dreamt of when we came here.

We went to the grand staircase outside Saunders Hall right after the ceremony to take our picture and then it was pictures time with the family, friends and whoever we could find. One last grand Darden bagged lunch later, I was home.

After a lot of confusion on rain or not, I was so happy that the rain decided to wait until after the ceremony. In fact, as we finished our pictures at the grand staircase, the first big drops of rain started to fall and by the time my family and I made it back to Ivy, it was pouring in earnest, as it can do only in Charlottesville.

I’ve had a night to sleep over this new status as an MBA and Darden alumnus. Somehow it refuses to sink in. I woke up this morning expecting to feel different, but I was disappointed. I was the same person, still unable to function without my morning tea, still basking in the wonder of having a United States driver’s license and still very much in love with Arch’s FroYo! Somewhere inside me I know I’m now different, much better than the person I came here as, two years ago. On the outside I am still me, cringing that yet another goodbye is here, wondering when the stability I have craved for but always avoided will come to my life.

This morning I earnestly missed my Darden friends, wished I had another day of trudging through the school for a class, yearned to call some folks for coffee at our favorite coffee shop at Barracks Road and as I type this out, I’d rather be hanging out at Italian Villa cracking jokes with the gang than in my room going to bed before midnight. Real life calls, but I will always treasure the friendships and adventures this place has allowed me to have.

This morning, as I drove my parents around my favorite places in C’ville, I couldn’t help but think about all the people in my life that made this incredible journey possible. From support, to essay reviews, to just their time on the phone/messenger/person when I needed it. The list is too long, but this roll of paper that is my diploma would not have been possible without their support.

Dear Darden, you will be missed, but I will cherish the title of being a Darden alumnus for as long as I live.

Last Day of Class

Today was my last day of classes at Darden. My brain refuses to process that the madness is over – no more three cases a night, excel models, hanging out in the LT rooms trying to hammer out a model worthy of a cold call. The ride’s been hard but boy has it been good! This experience comes highly recommended for anyone looking for a complete outside-the-comfort-zone experience in business school.

There will be room for reflections and wrap-ups later. I am on my way to the last Cold Call (social) of the year to be followed by the final deliverable of the Leadership and Ethics Through Theater class, which is a play they are staging this evening at Abbott Auditorium.

I couldn’t bring myself not to have this video from the Follies last week (by my classmate Shepro) on my blog. It was a great way to wrap up Follies and had many students in tears. Since then we’ve all watched that video on YouTube multiple times; today, as farewell to students in my General Managers Taking Action class, our professors played this video for us (and then took the whole class out to lunch at The Tavern!).

Passing the baton

A few months ago, a new club was born at Darden, the Darden South Asia Society (DSAS). It took over a year’s worth of work in petitioning and designing the vision and mission of the club; but finally the approvals were obtained and we held elections to determine the first ever leadership team of DSAS. In the few months that we have been in the team, we have tried to give more direction to the club by holding events as promised in our petition but by also involving ourselves closely with the Career center and Admissions.

And then a few weeks ago, we held elections to select the team we would hand over to as we leave Darden. This weekend IJ, club president of DSAS hosted the present and future leadership team at his place for a “retreat” where the current team appraised the incoming team about our workings, events and vision. Tomorrow, we will hold our first weekly meeting with the new leadership, as we begin to hand over responsibilities to them.

One of the things we struggled with in our brief stint as the leadership team was choosing what we could achieve in the limited time before end of the year. We wanted to do everything, but often times we had to reign in our enthusiasm for the sake of practicality. It was great to hand over those ideas to the incoming team – unlike us they have a whole academic year to take the club a notch further.

In passing the baton over to the first year students, we are giving away something we planned and envisioned for the South Asian community at Darden. We wanted to create a club that not only organized the famous annual Bollywood Party or inter-school cricket tournaments but also one that provided career and academic support and mentoring to incoming South Asian students. But this was not a club targeted solely at the South Asians, as our membership list would testify. With the region becoming the hot bed of business, we wanted to use the club as a platform to help the greater Darden/UVA community understand the intricacies of doing business in South Asia. In my admittedly biased opinion, I believe we have achieved everything we set out to, and we still have events in the pipeline!

Here’s a memento IJ handmade for us – needless to say, it has the pride of place in my room.

For information on DSAS, visit our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter or contact us at dsas@darden.virginia.edu

Guest Post - Michael Goff, D'2010 on Innovation

I’ve been meaning to host a guest blogger for some time now so I’m very happy to welcome Mike onto this space. I’ve long felt that although the 16 of us bloggers are pretty cool there are yet some other cool people we’ve known here that aren’t out on the blogosphere. It’s only fitting that my first ever guest blogger is someone I’m so fond of and so proud of. He's always sporting an infectious grin and it’s hard not to be impressed by his intelligence and his good humor. Mike thanks a bunch for doing this!

I know Mike through our one semester spent together in Section 5 in the first year. He’s wicked smart and always has great contributions in class, but he’s also a really cool guy outside of class. Mike’s one of the many double-Hoos at Darden, which means that he went to UVA for undergrad too. Before Darden, Mike worked for CACI as a technology consultant and come May, will move with Camden, his wife, to Washington, DC to join BCG. Mike matches his awesome in-class contributions with outside-class involvement in Darden Student Admission Committees, BGiA, the UVA Outreach Committee and several Darden soccer teams. In his spare time (and he has plenty), he likes to perfect his chili recipe… and run marathons, like this picture shows! Over to Mike!

One of the great things about business school is the opportunity to take classes outside your comfort zone and to expand your skillset beyond the traditional marketing, finance, operations, etc. functional areas. Last fall, I took a class called “Developing New Products and Services.” The goal of the class was to identify a market opportunity for innovation and then develop a prototype for a product or service to capitalize on the opportunity.

My team identified a gap in modern technology, which allows people to read news conveniently online or on an e-reader, but the decrease in circulation of printed newspapers reduces the opportunity for manufacturers and stores to put coupons in front of consumers. As a solution to this opportunity, our group set out to understand how people shop and use coupons and grocery lists.

I foolishly volunteered to develop and code an iPhone application that would combine the concepts of coupons with a grocery list that could be carried into a store and then scanned for a membership card and coupons. The idea was to keep everything in the one item we carry with us at all times: a cell phone. I don’t regret the task, but it was by far the most difficult task I’ve taken on in business school.

I learned several lessons through this experience:
• First, I’m no developer. I was never good. I proved to myself that I can figure things out, but that’s the end of it.
• The iPhone is an amazing device that can do some crazy stuff, and most of its power stems from some very basic tools and objects.
• There’s no substitute for effective project planning to predict issues before you encounter them. It also helps to know what resources you have available and realize they’re going to be insufficient. The key is the creativity to dig deeper in a pinch to get the job done.
• The secret to problem solving is breaking a system into its component parts and challenge fundamental assumptions that may be difficult to recognize.
• Any time you’re planning to innovate, it’s better to generate lots of ideas and test them as quickly as possible. It’s a lot better to fail early (maybe even often) to get where you want to be.

At the end of the day, we had a great time showing everyone our prototype. I think I showed the app to everyone I know. I’ve never shown my parents a paper or exam, but I was pretty happy to whip out my phone and say, “Ever wanted to search for coupons while you were shopping in a store? There’s an app for that…”

Think big, and then think small!

Last year, when I went to the session on choosing electives for second year, there was one class which consistently appeared on all the panelists’ (in this case the second year students of last year) list of must-take courses. A part of the Taking Action classes, this course brings back Darden grads (and some non Darden grads) to the classroom to take a class for the students and is called the General Managers Taking Action (GMTA). The case is supplied by the guest and we come prepared to discuss it with him. And since all the cases are real-life situations, and issues he/she faced, the discussion takes on a very action oriented path and we learn, literally, what he/she did in detail.

Today we had a 1986 grad who worked in investment banks come and talk to us. I was amazed by how “real” he was – we talked about the world economy and the banking industry and the housing bubble and BRIC among other things, and it was all in English and not banker-speak! I also thought this speaker was exciting because he was part of a firm that invested in Silicon Valley startups and technologies and his enthusiasm and appreciation for technology was very apparent. My favorite part of this class is the end, where two students ask the speaker for advice for our class and things he wished he knew when he was graduating. Today’s advice was “think big and then think small, do the little things, work hard because there is no fast and easy path. And don’t be in too much of a hurry.”

In my mind, there are two trends that are emerging from all the sessions I have had so far in this class: one, the higher up you get in an organization, the daily challenges and issues you deal with tend more on the OB and people management side of the spectrum (as opposed to the technical, spreadsheet model side); two, everyone talks about being in touch with the people we went to school with here… they wax eloquent about the intellectual pool in the school and some even talk about how the network is lifelong and helps them in professional and personal ways!

The more times I hear the second advice, the more I start to wonder if I am investing enough time and effort in building these relationships. I have come to realize that there are some fantastically interesting people here and I did not in the past and probably will not in the future have the opportunity to interact with such a diverse . There is so much personal growth I have witnessed from my associations here and I wonder how much of the iceberg I haven’t scaled yet. This year has been very different because there are people I haven’t seen all year – for reasons such as exchange programs or just taking a different set of electives. I go to a class with one of my learning team mates and I haven’t found the time to say hi in the three weeks we’ve been in that class together. There is a constant struggle to experience everything in these last few months, and yet this economy and my yet unsuccessful job search acts like the Sword of Damocles over everything I want to do. However, I feel better about it today because I am going to dinner with some friends I haven’t caught up with all year… I have to try to get more of these in before May.

Do I dare look back?

Long post coming up...

I did not want to do the customary year-in-review, but then thoughts, they come and go and what is this blog for, if not to capture them before they run away? So I plod on, in a stream of consciousness ramble that is a function of a heavy tummy from too much food and heavy eyes from little sleep!

So I proudly celebrated a full calendar year of being vegetarian this year and I’m really proud of it. I am not counting in all those accidental meat tastings… the only half-full outlook to those incidents is that I am now super conscious when I am ordering food and make sure to mention my preference for absolutely no meat or meaty broth in my food. Technically I’ve been veggie for more than a year now, but one full calendar year makes me feel so good about myself, that I have decided to remain veggie for as long as possible. And it’s been easier than I thought!

I travelled quite a bit this year – maybe not as much as I would have liked but I did go to some really interesting places and that’s what counts, right? Right! So let’s see… Washington DC, India, Brazil, California – see it wasn’t much. But my trip to Brazil was most memorable and it’s gotten me on the track to planning another trip to the continent – more on that as it unfolds. Another serendipitously good trip was the summer in India. Weather aside – it was either incredibly hot or annoyingly wet! – I went to places that I couldn’t point on the map before the summer and all of it in the country I profess to have spent the first twenty something years of my life and profess to have travelled extensively in.

I spent a fantastically ups-and-downs filled year at business school… and since this blog has been all about business school for the most part, it would be unfair to talk more about it. It would suffice to say that I saw way too many ups and downs this year… there were times when I thought I wouldn’t survive and other times when I just wanted time to stop and hold on to the moments. I found out much more about my friends here and made a whole bunch of new ones too. Like a database keeping up with times, I purged and I added… and then some more. Over the months that passed, I saw different facets to the people I thought I already knew well, some pleasant some not so much.

One thing that I did consistently through the year was to look for a job – first the internship and then full time. I wish I could say I rounded off the year in style with a fantastic big bucks offer, but sadly I cannot. However, I have hope – green shoots and all that, so maybe in next year’s recap, I’ll be able to write all about what a fantastic journey it had been… and why not? Believe it or not, looking for a job – and the inevitable rejections that come with it – are enough to teach you a lot about yourself as it taught me this year.

Which then brings me to my things to do next year. As always, it’s to lose weight. I know I know, it comes back every year to haunt me, but this year I’m really going to do something about it – starting from January 11th (this is SO not a good way to start on a resolution!) - and since I've already begun last year, it's off to a start of sorts already! Other things I want to do are remain vegetarian, get a few more stamps on the passport, oh and get a job! Some other plans for the year are to experiment with cooking – especially baking – and to make sure that my experiments are all given away to others to eat! I also really want to get back to reading – and maybe once I graduate, I cannot cite the three-cases-a-day excuse for all the things I’ve missed out on and the people I’ve not given their due attention to last year. This year I just want to be a better, happier person... not such a tall order is it?

Oh and this year I also want to figure out what I want to do with this blog – that’s right, sweeping changes await this space. Happy new year!

Wine and women

Over last week - exam week - there were a few social events thrown into the evenings marking friends going to India on vacation or going away on exchange next quarter. one of them was a ladies night, another was a surprise party for a dear friend going on exchange and was held at the Root residence (THANK YOU JD and Roots!). And at both of these events that I attended, there was a cross-section of Darden women (and men - but they were playing a comic game of Guitar Hero).

And much later, after these enjoyable evenings, one of our exchange students from Italy pointed how she was inspired by the women she had met on those evenings and at Darden. At no other place had she met such independent minded women who knew what they wanted out of their lives... or at least knew how to figure out what they wanted out of their lives... they shared similar attitudes and thoughts towards life, relationships, career, food and wellness among a host of other things. And they inspired her to be like them - to stand up as women who had the courage to follow their dreams and desires. We are a minority, she said later, and we must stand together, for each other.

I thought about what she had said, and couldn't agree more. We are a minority and we are precious. The support we are capable of giving each other is phenomenal, and we give it so freely only to receive it in plenty. I will miss these women when we graduate, but I know that my life is richer just by knowing them.

Picture-book

I used to spend a lot of time clicking through the Darden website as an applicant a couple years ago. I remember looking at pictures and trying to form impressions and associations in my mind. I would think about how they looked smart, in their suits and neat hairdo and flawless make up…and I would feel a little intimidated, I have to admit. I wondered if the journey I was embarking upon was something I would be able to fit in with, if I could be one of them and do it seamlessly.

Today I was clicking through the website again. I saw the international and domestic student contacts, the club pages and some student videos. And in those pictures, I saw my friends. At some pictures I just laughed, at the thought of a Halloween costume or a quip in the Cold Call Chronicle or the memory of a fun incident. At others, I looked with some pride, at their pre- and post- business school achievements. And then at some there were the fond memories of cramming in an LT room for every day of the first semester. There were some I just know as classmates and others that I know personally, know their trials and their triumphs, know their families… There is no intimidation now. Just pride and affection. And mild surprise at how quickly it all happened.

SY Weekend Escapades

There’s a lot going on in the ville these past few weekends. And because I (and nearly all of my classmates) realize that our time in the ville is now limited (Q1 is nearly over, can you believe that?!), we’ve been trying to make the most of it.

Last weekend the UVA Symphony Orchestra from the McIntire School of Music at UVA performed at the amphitheater for the public – for free. Called the Symphony under the Stars, it began a little past 7pm and had an amazing line up of music. Highlights included selections from the West Side Story, Carmen, ET theme music etc. A bunch of us went that evening and sat on the grass for a sky deck view of the stage. The weather has been cool in the evenings these days and the setting was perfect. We walked past the Lawn apartments on our way, built by TommyJ to promote more interaction between students and their teachers at UVA, now home to selected students.

The day after, on Sunday, Nobel Prize Winner Professor Mohammed Yunus of Grameen Bank spoke at U-Hall, on the topic Solutions To Poverty. A bunch of us attended this one and it was well worth the time! Professor Yunus is an inspiring orator and his story of how he founded the Grameen Bank and his motivations were very interesting to hear. I made up for not taking my camera to the Symphony and took a bunch of fuzzy pictures.

Yesterday the Marketing Forum at Darden and I had a great afternoon listening to the big names of CPG talk about successful marketing campaigns. On grounds were DuPont, General Mills, J&J (and their fantastic Olympic campaign called “Thank you Mom”), Frito Lay and Heinz. And today is the India vs Pakistan cricket match and Darden’s South Asian Community is all ready for the madness. We’re screening the match live in one of the classrooms. For those who can’t bear to walk to school on this rainy morning, we’re watching the match on the projector in the home of a second year with parathas and beer. I’m wearing my Team India tee and blogging live from the venue. Cheers!

U-Hall; seen here is Prof. Yunus.

SY - the best kept secret

The class of 2009 waved the carrot of an easy year under our noses all of last year. We “trusted the process” and waited for our time in the sunshine. Then SY came. And the myth was just that - a myth!

It’s been a fortnight since school began and I’ve been crazy busy. I have 4 subjects this quarter and thanks to my brilliant class selection skills (with a little help from SN, D'09), I’ve made sure that my school day begins at 10AM throughout the week. Last quarter I had 8AM and 10AM classes early and late week respectively which completely ruined my sleep cycles. This quarter 10AM classes mean I get to sleep a little after midnight and wake up at a modest 7AM – anything earlier than 7AM is the middle of the night anyway! Just my kind of schedule! I also have my classes all week (as opposed to taking all my classes early or late week and leaving the other half of the week free). But that apart, every “break” between classes has been crammed with calendar appointments – some I set up with other people, some I make for myself as reminders for things to do. So that boxed lunch stretched out on the grass in Flagler Courtyard has been pretty distant so far.

Adding to the schedule has been the job search. We’ve also formally begun our on grounds pre-recruitment process – networking nights and info-sessions; it’s time once again for foot-suicide in high heels.

Crazy busy is good though. I'm enjoying my classes and all the non-class stuff I'm getting into. I’ve enjoyed catching up with classmates, hearing about the summer and the plans for this year. The summer seems to have been pretty eventful for most people. As for me, I’m still trying to find myself. And I’m having a more effort-filled go at it since I’ve returned. I’ve also begun to spend more time in the silences I talked about last time. I think I might finally be growing up. Eeks!

Freedom is...

...a word that we throw around to justify bad behavior, short skirts, hurtful words, jumping signals in the night…

Every year Independence Day becomes a time to reflect on the importance of where India is as a nation today. Having grown up in urban India, I have known freedom since I was old enough to yawn. Freedom meant that I could choose to wear the kind of clothes I wished, wear my hair short or long, black or red… It meant that I could play cricket with the boys as a 12 year old. It meant I could choose the books I wanted to read, the amount of religion I wanted to practice, the languages I chose to learn or not. Freedom meant that I could choose to study a branch of engineering as the only girl in that department, and no one stopped me. Freedom means that I can proudly go to a country on the other side of the world to get an advanced degree… because I want to… at which age, my mother had already had me. Freedom means that when I marry, it will be to a man of my choice, after my mind is ready to accept him as a partner. But this is not just me; this is every urban Indian man or woman.

Freedom is what I saw in rural India this summer. It was where a woman could walk around in her community, doing door-to-door sales, unaccompanied by any male member of the family. She could be an entrepreneur… and a mother… and a cook, homemaker, a wife, a daughter-in-law. And freedom meant that she could juggle all of these roles with WonderWoman-like dexterity. Freedom is where the son of a single mother from a small time town in rural Tamil Nadu could dream of getting an MBA degree from India’s premier business school… to achieve and then go on to start his own firm.

Freedom means that we no longer have the benefit of someone else’s wisdom, that we go on to make our own mistakes to learn from them. That we fall and get up and fall again. That we chart our own course, take our own risks, with no template that we have to follow, with no comfort of knowing how it all will end. Freedom is knowing that life comes full circle, but meanders in ways unique to each of us, to the choices we make, the heartbreaks we endure, the sacrifices we make, the successes we earn. Freedom is blooming where we’re planted. Freedom is, but only, a state of mind. Freedom is… everything we want it to be.

To India, Happy Independence Day.

Internship - the last mile

I’m on the last week of my internship here. While work has gotten less exciting in the past three weeks (i.e. no traveling), it’s been information overload. I had one really slow week that frustrated the hell out of me – it’s hard enough to wake up in the morning, even harder to make it to work when it’s pouring outside – the least I expect is to be busy for the nine hours I’m at work. Instead, I had enough work for about an uninterrupted half day and then I’d wonder what I should be doing. Not that I minded it so much. You see, sitting in the middle of the action, you pick up stuff just from hearing and seeing. So although I didn’t get an opportunity to work with as many people as I would have liked to, I did get to learn a lot from observation (kind of like the way I learnt to cook!).

But that was just the one week. The one after that has been pretty busy. My final deliverable is a creative brief to an ad agency, one that encompasses a number of brands. After some analysis on the regions we are piloting this initiative (that I’m working on), we came up with a few brands that have the highest salience (how’s that for jargon?). I have spent the better part of last week meeting with the brand managers of these brands and studying brand materials I have obtained from them. While I have enjoyed meeting these people and learning about the brands and how they have been designing the campaigns that I see on outdoor overheads (OOH) and commercials (TVC), I wish they had time to talk to me about other stuff… like what keeps them here, what they like about their job, what their career graph has been etc. Basically the typical networking buzz except that I actually really WANT to know this about them. More than just an exposure to the workings of a typical CPG firm, I am using this internship to evaluate whether I want to return to India after Darden. Unfortunately, people here have been way too busy and I am constantly aware of the long hours they put in everyday, including Fridays.

On Saturday morning I return home for a few days before I have to leave for VA again. It feels like my ‘vacation’ is ending. It was great having free evenings with no cases to prep for the next day. I am actually reading – the newspapers, magazines, books… I have enjoyed walking around Nariman Point in the evenings after work, looking at headquarters of a lot of major corporations. It’s been a welcome change to be able to watch Sunday night movies on tv, with nothing to ‘study’ for Monday morning. But I’m ready for this to end because I really want to spend some time with the family, not just hurried weekends like I had over the past two months. In the meantime, I have this week to get through.

Turning the page

** Warning: Looooooong post ahead

First I must apologize for the extended period of silence. Things have been a little unwieldy since school gave in to summer. That’s right; I am officially done with first year. I have spent the better part of the last few days trying to come to terms with the feeling… I don’t know if I should be happy or sad… Honestly, I feel kind of numb. This year has been a little hard to digest. Typical of the Darden program, so much has been thrown at us this year and so fast, that sometimes I have trouble believing I actually went through the whole year and lived to tell about it!

I remember how it felt at orientation, oh 10 months ago. A sea of unfamiliar faces, everything was at once befuddling yet exciting. There was a sense of nervous expectation, a sort of go getter attitude. I walked in to Darden with dreams that were big for where I came from, yet seemingly modest given the type of school I had come to. The economy was just showing some signs of weariness, but the red alerts had not set in as yet. I may have been $60000 in debt but I felt like a million bucks!

And then the floodgates opened and suddenly it felt like sensory overload. Names gave way to faces, acquaintances became buddies and second years became inspirations to look up to. Suddenly Microsoft, McKinsey, AT Kearney, UTC, Danaher became more than just tickers on CNBC, they were for real and I was sharing glasses of wine with them or corresponding via email. In class, we were talking about real companies, real people, real problems. Excel became my new best friend, my alarm clock my worst foe. On Thursday mornings, it seemed like the night couldn’t come soon enough to go back to bed, and yet there I was letting my hair down at TNDC. Weekends left only a whooshing sound in their wake as they sped by and then there was the 100 case party where I sang till my voice went hoarse, forging new bonds even as I did so. Days merged into nights and days again, and I stopped to take it all in only during winter break, when time seemed to stretch on forever. Soon it was 2009 and with it came a slew of disappointments as the recession had spread its tentacles into our summer recruiting. The upbeat mood of the first semester gave way to more somber countenances in the second semester and expectations we reset and we scrambled to find employment for the summer. Even in the midst of all the self doubt and falling self confidence, I made time for the GBE to Brazil, the best forced vacation in all my life and one that I’m not likely to forget for years to come. Business school taught me to leave my worries behind as I went to explore a new country and was enriched by the experience.

I don’t really know where the last quarter of school went, but here we are. The year seems to have flown by and as I meet people who are joining business school this fall, even the recession seems to bounce off them and their optimism. But for me and my class at Darden, there is something about this recession that has bonded us together like no previous batch at school. We rallied around one another, lauding one person’s success with a bulge bracket investment bank just as we supported the other that got yet another I-regret-to-inform-you email. It was May and 20% of us were without direction for the summer, yet we threw farewell parties and danced our hearts out at the Bollywood, Japan and LASA parties. There were days when I was filled with hope that everything will be ok, yet there were days of despair. On the latter, I was never alone, finding support and encouragement in the success stories of others or just in having lunch together at Café 67. And yet, this much cursed recession forced us to expand our boundaries. People took risks, followed dreams and went where others would not look in a regular year. While someone went to Africa to do economic development another went to DC to work in sustainability. Someone found intellectually rewarding work in an 11 member VC firm while someone else found a window to showcase his Crystal Ball skills to a government firm. Some people traded their dream jobs for more satisfying start up experiences, while others just walked away from the rat race to start their own thing and thus give employment to another classmate through the Batten institute. As for me, I had a strange turn of events. I came to Mumbai to work with the firm that was my dream employer through most of undergrad and my days at Infosys, one I had lost hope in when I chose to pursue an MBA abroad. Not only was this opportunity at Unilever serendipitous, even more interesting is the nature of work I get to do. I am working with one of their most talked about CSR initiatives, the Project Shakti.

I have a ton of impressions from coming back to India after a year. A lot of time spent in commuting has given me enough fodder to ponder and reminisce. And while I miss Darden and its familiarity, I am discovering a different work culture at Unilever, and I constantly compare and evaluate. I also spam my friends’ inboxes with all the conversations I wish I could have with them! But as I go into week 2 of my internship, I look forward to being able to get back to writing about all that goes on in my head.