F: PG is such a huge part of your life, is there life or an identity for you beyond PG?
Me: mumble mumble

After the exchange I did wonder if I really thought of anything other than PG (food doesn’t count) since I am back from the US  - MBA & all.  I think I am lucky. I have something on my mind all the time - its either dreams, worries or just the sheer happiness of managing something as beautiful as PG.

Like a baby that has grown healthier & is growing fast - I am realizing how fast I need to let go of things at PG to ensure its own growth. At last count there are 15 folks working at the HQ and the number will be doubling in the next couple of months.

Every waking moment, I think about what to do better at PG, who else to hire, how else to do things better, how to manage the resource crunch and yes .. the ever elusive question of ‘where is all this heading’.

I do wonder if I have a separate identity beyond PG, but honestly I am not sure I care. I consider myself lucky that I get to do the things I do, touch the lives I can, help build a beautiful workplace, help people make their educational choices, work with world class folks and continue to dream.

F: Do you like the way the world is?
Me: No
<brief pause>
Me: I have PG.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.- Albert Einstein

I feel constricted. That feeling in your throat that never lets you complete your thought or your sentence.

Everytime I’ve been challenged in my life and I’ve lost myself - I’ve hit back. Brutually. It has been like making a point, but over a period of time, you tend to forget to whom the point was being made and that is how I have grown through my challenges and my pain. I stand at another crossroad this time - not knowing where I will land if I start. May be the fear of starting pulls me back - the safety of the known. I haven’t run in a looooooooong time, just lazed and ambled around… I don’t know if I am going to start running again. But if I do, the next time I stop, I hope I have grown to be a better man. The thing about running, I’ve always run for myself - that has to change. I have nothing to prove to myself now - I need to run for my people. Lots of promises to keep and lots of people to take care of. I hope I remain worthy of what I have received all my life.

Signing off this blog.

Will start a thread in the PG forums and continue about my Life at W there.

I’ve simplified my blog theme. Comments?

Stuff done in the last week.. umm..

Attending more parties. Wharton junta seem to party a LOT. On any given day there are 3 parties you can attend. Plus with 800 people around, you can rest assured at its someone’s b’day, anniversary or whatever. Plus the junta parties like its got no other business. I attended a couple of parties, and most of them are held in pubs. Now there is this thing about noise levels - I dont’ like em to skyrocket :p . So I guess I meet more people at school than at the pubs. Plus ofcourse there are so many parties are people’s homes….

Then ofcourse I spent some time auctioning! AHA, At Wharton courses are auctioned and every junta has a fixed set of points so that they can bid on their favorite courses. Auctions are put into place because every class has a limited no. of seats available and students need to bid on courses that are of utmost interest to them.  But there are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many courses that its humanely insanely impossible to attend all of them. So I decided to take up a couple of faculty lectures and trips that would help me figure out the insanity of business at the best business school [ self plug ] . Mwahahahhaa

Some of the courses/lectures/events I bid upon for preterm and won are:

and these are events/lectures that will be done in two weeks and is in addition to the preterm courses am taking! So these are the events I am filling and fitting into my schedule whenever/wherever I find a lil spare time
There were around a 100 events/stuff to chose from and therefore I guess no two people would have a similar schedule! Fin guys have stuff from trading simulation to hedge fund lectures to what not and guys like me have again equally interesting stuff to delve in. That kind of hints at the vast resources available to the junta here. Pick an area and you can find enough stuff to indulge yourself for the next two years!

Off the Wharton front.. I bought a 27″ TV and a surround 5.1 speaker system and a 5 CD/DVD/MP3 Player with changer and stuff for 250$ .. beat that :p .. the joys of purchasing second hand stuff from a guy who was leaving town .. now I am not sure if these things are gonna help in the long run.. but hearing music from those towering speakers..sheer bliss!

As you can see I havent started studying.. yet.. wait, I’ve never studied. I just got lucky that I even got there. Do I have to study now ?  Um.. I’ll adopt a wait and watch approach before I answer that

As soon as I landed up at Philly, I had two class mates pick me up drop me at my apt and then help me settle in. The next entire week revolved around shopping for furniture, food, utensils and those parties and err… a little bit of sleep. Shopping is TOUGH. More so because none of the gang here has a car. Wharton is bang in the center of the city and almost all the junta live just around 30 mins walk from the place. Insane parking charges and insurance charges ensure that almost no one has their own vehicle. That left gangs of us to shop, lug stuff around and WALK for miles! Hey, I’ve walked more in Philly in the last one week than I’ve probably walked in a month in Mumbai!

Major thanks and cheers to the amazing classmates without whom, it would have been hellishly tough for me to have settled in here. I got free food, free advice, free furniture assembly and more importantly am getting to know the people I would and can bank on. With respect to people, I am so sure that coming to Wharton was the right thing to do! Ofcourse there are niggling concerns when I think and talk about my companies, but heck - I am sure they shall remain sorted out

The junta at Wharton is err.. too humble I think. Almost never, have I gotten around to seeing someone talk about themselves and their accomplishments.  The Indian gang is damn well represented. Looks like there are close to a 100 Indians (Indian passport holders and Intl. passport holders) and its a great support group as well. All it takes is a few calls and a mob assembles at any given place for food or for helping out

People are so willing to share and help out & that is a great hallmark of this place. All you need to do is ask and voila someone, somewhere out there just makes it happen. I’ve learnt more about the finance sector in the last one week than I did in my life and classes haven’t started. I hope the luck continues, because I know I would need all of that and more to get through my math exams and other stuff scheduled to happen soon. Wharton is going to be, what I make and push myself to make out of it. Nothing more and nothing else. It has humongous resources at its disposal and sometimes I really wonder, if I am even capable of leveraging what needs to be done.

First semester is supposed to be hell and beyond and I guess I am going to find it extremely tough to keep it all together. Heck, I’ve never studied all my life and now I have to study along with the best in the world. So its back to academics for me and um.. wait.. may be I should find a way to interview bill g and donald t. (btw, the donald is a wharton alum )

Starting on !

Ordinary conversation with an extra-ordinary person! But when the person was as extra-ordinary as PK, this simple piece of communciation meant more to me that anything else at that point of time!

PK was none other than Dr. Philip Kotler

Just back from interviewing the living legend, the father of marketing, Dr. Philip Kotler - 1 on 1. I was able to hitch a ride with him all the way from the airport to the taj hotel where he was staying for the night.

Story for grandkids ++

Stay tuned at www.pagalguy.com for the full story and the interview!

Everynight, I am on my knees looking upto him and hand him my cross so that I can start carrying it the next day, again.

Updates: Had to cancel a trip to bangalore for the IBA Scholarship selection event because my grandfather had a surgery scheduled. This surgery was then postponed due to him having some blood clots in his legs. I have mucked some major stuff with respect to Wharton since I rarely have been at home for the last 10 days. Hope I can salvage it on reaching there. Havent been NASEOH in almost a month now .. its painful to not be able to go there ..

I have so many loose ends here to tie up here at Mumbai and I hope I can get to half of them before I am forced to leave this place. Where is my angel ?

Update: Surgery postponed from Saturday to Wednesday and then preponed to Tuesday. 15 hours from now is the surgery. On my knees.

Further Update: Surgery postponed again to Friday. He is getting weaker and his kidneys are causing problems.

Surgery Done: Four hour surgery later, he is in the ICU. Doctors are sure he will recover soon. After his condition stabilizes, he will be moved into the general ward. Docs have mentioned that a lot of physiotherapy will be required to get him back to walking.

Out of the ICU: He is now out of danger and has been brought out from the ICU. Tomorrow and day after are going to be crucial because the doctor wants him to try to keep his feet down, but its going to be tough because my grandfather is one tough cookie and refuses to listen to anybody! He is feeling a lot better though and I hope to see him try to walk and then we can get on with the physio sessions.

Angel status: Found
Back home: We brought him home a few days back. He is feeling a lot better, but still can’t try to walk. Physio sessions start in two days and the stitches will go out at the end of the month.

Its heart-breaking for me to leave behind what I have here, but I need to go for a whole different set of reasons. In the last couple of weeks my beliefs have been challenged so much that I lost myself for a few days. Yesterday I had a rather interesting conversation with my youngest sis who has proved to be wise beyond her age. I had no clue that she had grown up this much

We were talking about relationships and their ilk and she said .. “people grow and not always into something better”.. that struck a cord with me. There are things that I have always held close to my heart and I guess I always will. No point in growing up. Thanks dudette. I am glad we share similar genes :) :)

That said I am taking a break from work and everything else to head out to conquer a few mountains. Once I am done with em, I will know what I need to do with my cross.

~Adios and wish me luck for my future.

Best of luck in winning those free free free air tickets!!!

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4 years ago, I had interview calls from IIMA, IIMC, IIML, MDI, SCMHRD, XIMB and a whole bunch of other institutes. I remember being rather elated. Keep in mind this was pre pagalguy.com time and I didn’t have access to even an IIM grad. Since I was a commerce grad, I had basically no network to turn to. No one in my college ever went to an IIM and whenever I spoke to the coaching class dudes I was misled . It was sheer determination that pulled me thru and got me my calls. I slogged like a possessed soul to prepare for the interviews, so much that I still feel I was way over prepared . I had printed, collected and archived approximately 6000 pages worth of material so that I could go through them and prep for my interviews.

My interviews went rather well and I was pretty sure that I would make it to an IIM. The result days were a different story altogether. It was a lost cause. One after the another, I was rejected at all the IIMs. I remained hopeful that I would atleast show up on the IIML 2nd or 3rd list. But that wasn’t meant to be. Interestingly I made it to MDI and a whole bunch of schools below it.

Decision time - I was asked by my parents to consider MDI , but I refused. I refused for a very simple reason. I didn’t like the people I had met that day on the interview panel or the students who had come in for the GD. Looking back, I cant even begin to imagine how arrogant I was in this situation. A 20/21 year old kid not joining a school because he didn’t like the people at the GD. Arrogant or plain marked stupidity, I wouldn’t know. Although I didnt care much about infrastructure or professors, for some god forsaken reason I didn’t want to goto a place where I couldn’t learn as much from the students. Till this day I dont know why I was that way and I remember explaining it to so many people and pretty much every one thought I was nuts.

I think I was being plain arrogant and cared about myself. I cared about the people I interacted, the place I learnt, what I learnt. I stuck to what I thought was right and ended up starting two companies. Its been an accelerated course in business if you may so call it and here I am sitting pretty with a Wharton admit and am probably one of the youngest indians to have made it to Wharton.

What went right?

The fact that I was rejected everywhere? I had money to start my businesses? When my friends graduated from the best schools in India and made more money than I ever did? When I was bleary eyed working 20 hours a day just to sustain a dream without a clue of whether it would work out ? The pain of losing my first client? The hit in your gut when you plan an advt. campaign with the only money you got and you get no response? The challenges of hiring people and sustaining them? The challenges of not whining when almost nothing ever seems to work out? The times I have had to work nonstop for 4 days only to find that it was a lost cause?

See, I brought this all upon myself because I didn’t get admitted to my bschool of choice when I was 20/21. I am sure many of you will make it and more people wont to a school of your choice. But you know what, stick to what you believe in. Its the only thing that will remain with you in the long run. When you wake up every day of your life and realize that you have lived life on your own terms, you will be a lot more happy and satisfied with how life turned out for you. You may be destined for bigger things in life, keep pushing on. The gods have to relent at sometime and give you, your due