One of the professors whom I admired a lot and respected at the Indian School of Business was Prof. (Dr.) Rakesh Vohra.

Prof. Vohra taught micro-economics and more specifically, took up the challenge to teach game theory to a class of yearning-to-be-managers-and-all-that.

I am yet to come across a professor with such a complete command on his subject, and whose retorts and responses are far more insightful than the subject being taught (Prof. Robert Stine of Wharton is another who belongs to this breed).
Holding a chair in economics at the Kellogg School of Management does speak for itself.

Prof. Vohra also takes PhD. courses in Mathematics, and has authored the book “Advanced Mathematical Economics”.

I would like you to check out his gallery of selected paintings. I am happy to note that the copy of “Vedute Di Roma Moderna” by Giovanni Paolo Panini (1759) is a painting I own and that it finds a space on his gallery.

The reason why I mentioned Prof. Vohra today? Because a friend of mine pointed me to an excerpt from the “Teaching” page of the professor:

“The grade for the course will be based on class participation (cold calling) (10%), homeworks (40%) and a take home final (50%). The class is a mixture of lecture, case discussion, modeling/analysis (of the kind you have seen in DECS 434 and managerial econ) and some blah-blah (in which the softer side of management is dicussed leading to no firm conclusion but a warm fuzzy glow and the satisfaction that all sides of the issue have been brought to light; group hugs optional).”

I met Shreyas around 3 years ago at one of the social meetings organized by the Gujarati Association.
A tall, well-built guy with an extremely endearing personality, he came up to me and discussed the idea of starting a cricket team and roping in some other members.

I was readily interested. At that point, very few things would excite me as much as facing the new ball on a well laid out cricket pitch. We immediately got into the plan and managed to gather a team of 11 members who played decent cricket.

Shreyas was an awesome fast bowler. A left-hand pacer, he could be mistaken for Wasim Akram if observed from far. He came in with a short run-up and bowled incredibly fast yorkers and in-swingers.

We rented a pitch at Palace Grounds and started practicing in the nets every Sunday morning. Shreyas would lead the proceedings and of course the bowling attack. I had the pleasure of smacking some of his beautiful deliveries through the covers. I should admit that such occasions were very rare. More often than not I had bruises all over and would be walking back to the pavilion, while Shreyas would just settle down for the next batsman.

Taking a wicket was not his victory, unlike many bowlers. His victory lay elsewhere. He considered himself a winner if he could just ensure regular practice every Sunday. He considered himself a winner whenever he got a chance to play cricket.
That was his passion for the game.

I got more opportunity to interact with Shreyas at the various social occasions that we attended together. He would always be ready to help out others, serve food, organize people and ensure things worked.

A couple of weeks ago, Shreyas departed this world. At an age of 35, a heart attack is probably the last of your concerns. It was this innocuous and seemingly strange carrier of death that struck Shreyas. The death call arrived 5 days after Shreyas and his wife were blessed with a baby.

I only wish the baby had a chance to know how wonderful her father was.

Rest in peace, Shreyas. The next time I land on a cricket pitch and look down at the other end, you know who I am going to be thinking about.

Celebrating Prathibha Patil, an Amit Varma article in The Mint:

Consider, first, her spirituality. We are a spiritual nation, and Pratibha Tai actually converses with spirits. When she was nominated for the presidency, she revealed that she had been told by an enlightened soul that she was destined for bigger things.
“I had a pleasant experience,” she told an audience at Mt Abu, where she had gone to meet a lady named Hridaymohini aka Dadiji, who runs a “World Spiritual University”. She had chatted with a gentleman named Dada Lekhraj, who died in 1969 but has presumably hung around since. “Dadiji ke shareer mein baba aaye,” she told the audience. (“Baba came in Dadiji’s body.”)

During the emergency, she had announced, “We are… thinking of forcible sterilization for people with anuvaunshik ajar (hereditary diseases).” This is laudable, because it is in sync with the oppressive policies of our great leaders Shri Nehru and Shrimati Gandhi (Indira, not Sonia), whose governments repeatedly denied us personal and economic freedoms— for our own good, of course.

Pratibha Tai displayed a similar subtlety when she spoke out against the purdah system, claiming that it originated as a protection for women against Mughal invaders. The fact that she said this with her head covered spoke volumes about her feelings about the world today. Is it not awesome to have a President capable of such nuance?

I am not quite sure about how I feel about my country’s President, or the Presidential post for that matter.
This country has reached a point where a certain mass is above and away from the dithering of the government and a certain mass has to face the problems that the other mass can only write about.

Economic Times launched its Gujarati version a few days ago.

“For the most successful business community of the country”, the ad claims.

I doubt the Gujaratis are going to read ET to do their business. In fact, they can teach ET a thing or two about how to do business without reading pink literature.
These guys just *know* how to do business, its an inherent thing.

Being a Gujarati, I now feel betrayed by myself that I am not into business. An odd one out across all aspects – A Gujarati engineer (when have you heard that?) and, well, a Gujarati MBA. Now, why would a Gujarati need an MBA, my relatives might have remarked. Engineering was bad enough.
Above all, a bigger blasphemy – being in “service” and not in business.

I have decided I need to be in business.
I have the genes, they need to be brought out.
Business, here I come. And I mean business.

On my way to office this morning, I was stuck in the usual traffic jam at a place midway between office and home.

It was a dense jam with cars, two-wheelers and autos perfectly positioned with almost no space for air to breeze through.

While conversing on the phone, I hear the one noise that I didn’t want to hear in this halted flow of vehicles. An ambulance screamed and wailed, probably reflecting what the relatives of the patient inside were feeling.

The traffic didn’t budge for 5 minutes. The siren continued to claw at people’s ears but not a single soul was able to move, even if one wanted to. Finally, the traffic began to move and I managed to reach a little closer to the traffic cop at the junction. The signal turned red and the ambulance was still screaming behind amidst the crop of metal and fumes. I walked up to the traffic cop, told him about the problem (although it was almost impossible for him to not be able to hear the ambulance).

Then the cop did the unthinkable. He looked at me, didn’t bother about the ambulance, went and sat inside the small metallic enclosure and began noting something in his notebook.

I did the usual – went back and sat in my car.

The ambulance continued to be stuck there until the signal turned green again after almost another couple of minutes. People moved to the side and let the ambulance speed through until it got stuck at the next traffic signal.
Another signal, another jam, another cop.
Another life.

This kind of blogging is getting boring.

I am thinking of revamping this blog (probably move it elsewhere with a different name and theme and all that) and writing stuff focused around a few themes.

The themes, of course, are yet to be decided upon. But I would definitely prefer doing so rather than the current blogging style of writing about various and diverse subjects, with absolutely no overall coherence.

Observation: Today is Friday the 13th.

So?
So, this.

Wiki tells me:

A Friday occurring on the 13th day of any month is considered to be a day of bad luck in English, German, Polish and Portuguese-speaking cultures around the globe. Similar superstitions exist in some other traditions. In Greece or Spain, for example, Tuesday the 13th takes the same role. The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia.

So?

Day 2 in Gurgaon.

It rained last night so the weather was a bit on the less-warm side this morning. Not that it matters really. People are in air-conditioned apartments, get into air-conditioned cars and step into their air-conditioned offices.

In the evenings, people throng to air-conditioned malls before hitting their air-conditioned apartments again. This place seems to adopt an isolated lifestyle and reminded me of my days in the US. No connection probably, just a feeling of similar lifestyles.

Raodyboy and I hit a restaurant last night only to be told off because one of us was wearing floaters and not shoes. Had a bit of an argument, but couldn’t do much (as always). Calmed my anger and disappointment by convincing self that the other person was just doing his job.
Kill the sin and not the sinner, I thought to myself.
So we left the sinner, with a vague action plan on how to kill the sin, and approached another place which didn’t have any qualms about how our feet were dressed that evening.

Day 2, like I mentioned, is here already.

The old style of writing:

4:30 am – Woke up
5:00 am – Cab to the airport
5:45 am – Big jam at Bangalore airport (at that hour!)
6:40 am – Boarded the flight. Kingfisher was a disappointment (if you know what I mean)
7:00 am – Because of the above reason, slept peacefully
7:30 am – Woken up for breakfast. Nice breakfast. Kingfisher was not so much of a disappointment
9:30 am – Landed at Delhi airport, hit by the blazing heat and I loved it
11:00 am – Reached Gurgaon, hit by the blazing skyline. This place is quite different from any Indian city/town you might have seen. Sky-scrapers, aesthetically beautiful concrete and glass buildings – all looked more like a Manhattan skyline.
11:05 am – Work started
6:00 pm – Work ended
6:30 pm – Blogged

It’s been a year, exactly a year, since the Mumbai train blasts.

The culprits are still at large. Compare this to the way the London police was able to nab the perpetrators of crime within a relatively short period of time.

How many of us even remember about this event anymore?

The following list, prepared by Dilip D’Souza, reminds us of the victims who fell to the sweep of terrorism that hit Mumbai on the 11th of July, 2006:

We Remember You