Ambition and Round Up of 2019

I don’t remember what my ambition was earlier.

Now, my ambition is scaled down, to meeting nice people, looking at Nice DPs (and awarding the good ones), and some good food and drink (like Vietnamese coffee and Irani tea), books, blogging, occasional travel, films, singing and listening to music (retro, Hindi), watching my students do well in life..

Slightly off-track - I was trying to recollect what happened in the last 12 months. 

A wedding in Hyderabad, one in Mumbai, and another in Bangalore, and yet another in Delhi recently- made me a preferred wedding guest (!) of friends and family-one who can’t balle balle though 😊- just a friendly warning! Can be a wedding photographer, though..try me out!

A visit to the Kishore Kumar memorial and house in Khandwa. A conference trip to Bali, and another to Chennai, from where we visited Kancheepuram and its magnificient temples. In July, we hosted an international conference for the second time, and were overwhelmed by the number of attendees.

I also re-visited Calicut, and IIMK where I had worked from 2003 to 2005. And of course, met numerous students- in Ahmedabad (Manjari, Punyashlok, Ankita and Ishan, Keyur,..), Mumbai (Tosha Dubey, Urvashi, Abha Kulkarni, Siri Adi, Khyati, Anuj, Shraddha, Nishka and Vikram Rathi, Garima and Dwipa Shah, Akshat Surana, Sampark.. ), Delhi (Padmapriya, Shweta Agarwal, Shruti Sharma, Aditya Naag, Nikita Kumar, Sharmistha Singh, Sunil Kataria, and my new personal photographer Kanika Mhendiratta), Pune (Neha Adiga, Divya Singh), Bangalore (Shatakshi and Varun, Anushka Mishra, Savitha, Bharath Shenoy, Anshita (with hubby and their twins), Anusha and Aashish, Sreeram), some for the first time, some for the second or third. This part- meeting students and colleagues, I would like to repeat next year, and the year after...have a few more pending invites.

IMTians, above and below. In Mumbai

IMTian Anshita above, organiser of a party at Bangalore, and below, Gurugrammies and Pranksters.

Anam, IIMI alum, above, and Kanika, IMTian below. Indore and Delhi.

Friends and colleagues- in Bangalore, above, and Tollygunge, Kolkata below.

KIAMS alum Shweta above in Delhi, and Divya Singh (ex-IMT, author of a case in the book) in Pune.

Below, KIAMS alums Sharmistha and Sunil, Delhi.

Met a few of my old colleagues from IIM Lucknow at Ranchi where I had gone on invitation. Trips to Belgaum (near where my Dad grew up) through the monsoon rain and one to Kolkata to meet a friend (Dash) were also highlights. So was one to IIT Guwahati, a lovely campus. Also went to BITS Goa, and stayed at a small beach, Bogmalo. 

Of course, I gave away a lot of DP and Photography Awards-this gets more difficult, but motivating. To close the year, I got a new car after exactly 14 and a half years- replacing my loyal warhorse (Esteem) with the new Wagon R-getting a loyalty bonus too. My book, Marketing Research -4^th edition- got published this year, and contains a lot of cases from my Indore students. Met a few of our alums in Indore too, like Harshad (and his wife), Tamros (his wife too), Ruminder Kaur, Ritu, Pratima and Arshia Mulla. Of course, I connected or chatted with many more online.

Ambition

I was impressed by the play Julius Caesar which I studied in school-mainly, I was impressed by his ambition.

So I decided to be ambitious, like Big Bro Julius.

And got into studying like crazy, and maxed all my subjects in school. Almost topped my class in the board exams too.

After going into college, this translated into trying to watch all the (Hindi) films in town..and almost did that in the five years I was there. In my MBA days, looking at all the other smart and ambitious people that surrounded me, I decided to go slow, and concentrated on reading non-text books- Like PG Wodehouse and others.

During my stint in the U.S., my ambition changed to travelling to all the States that united to form the USA...well, I travelled to around 40 of the fifty states. Threw in a few European countries too, on a Eurail Pass.

Coming back to India, I concentrated on writing, mostly, and managed to write a couple of-horror of horrors- text books! That some people actually read them is a tribute to their patience. Blogging followed, naturally, thanks to being egged on by my BIL. That some people actually read them never ceases to amaze me.

Looking at every Tom, Dick and Harry writing his autobiography, I grew ambitious, and wrote My Experiments with Half-truths. Somewhere in between all this, I played Golf (starting at Harihar, continuing at Nagpur), and also created a small Golf course at IMT Nagpur.

Now, my ambition is scaled down, to meeting nice people, looking at Nice DPs (and awarding the good ones), and some good food and drink (like Vietnamese coffee), books, occasional travel, films, music (retro), watching my students do well in life..

Also visited the famous Saraafa in Indore, among other things..had been a long-time ambition.