The Ideal World

 The ideal world will never exist, if history is an indication. There will always be warmongers, demagogues, megalomaniacs somewhere in the world who will manipulate circumstances to try and perpetuate themselves by means foul. Also scamsters, criminals, corrupt officials and so on.

So, what does an average Jane (or Joe) do?

Stop wishing for an ideal world. Instead, improve yourself if you can. Do your job well. In a small way, get into doing some good for others, through an organisation, or a group of friends.

If you can even teach your kids some values and ethics, it may not change the world, but it may make a difference to their lives.

Also, enjoy what you have. There are many blessings we all have in terms of family, friends, career, or whatever. Enjoy these to the fullest. Get into creative pursuits- read, write or create music. Or play Golf.

You may still get through it unscathed.

NIFT at Gandhinagar

I once did a session on Digital Marketing for the NIFT faculty online. Got to know Prof. Bhaskar Banerjee and Jagriti Mishra during that program. Both teach at NIFT Gandhinagar. So when I got an invite to meet them in person at a Conference they were hosting, it was a definite go.

I went there yesterday, and also got to meet the students of a Masters in Fashion Management class, during my visit. We spoke about Personal Branding for employment, among other things. There were a few well-known people among the Keynote Speakers, who spoke about the Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-sufficient India) theme in general, from different perspectives. I spoke mostly about Tourism which can go slow, and a bit about fashion entrepreneurs, among whom I mentioned Rajasthani Rangrez (Aditi Atre is the founder), and Neerya (Swati Sinha is the founder). Both are ex-students from IMT Nagpur.

It was interesting, on the whole, and I also got to meet Manjari, my ex-student who works at Gandhinagar now, with Adani Institute of Digital Management. Some pics- 

Mehak Singhi who was also the Emcee,  second from left in my row, and Sneha, on the extreme right. Dhanali I think, is on my left, with a few others. Mehak turned out to be from Bangalore, which I just left and we had a chat over samosas after the session.

Prof. Jagriti Mishra.

With Manjari Mundanad, left, and Bhaskar Banerjee, right also in the pic

Sneha joins for a selfie.

Vandita, prof. at NIFT, who co-authored Manjari's paper, during the presentation. With Chhavi, a student volunteer.

On the wall was this photo..

Balanced Scorecard Approach To Life

 I have now read a few-quite a few- ways to approach life, from philosophers and self-help gurus and many well-meaning people across the spectrum. But my mind went back to something I had read in an article, that talked of a Balanced Scorecard to measure a company's performance. Maybe this can be adapted to scoring how well we are doing on various measures of success. You can tweak this to suit your life goals, of course, but the general framework can be as follows-

Success in career. This for a working middle class person is an essential fact, for about 30 years of his/her life. You cannot wish it away. Therefore, some amount of success is required to keep you afloat. If you are a housewife, maybe you can skip this.

Success with enterprise. You may not be an entrepreneur, but you can be enterprising, and take the initiative and do things. Simple or complex things. You can go on a trek, make some meetings with family or friends happen. Or anything else. A game of Bridge or Golf, or whatever. For academics, a conference paper, leading to a visit to the conference. 

Creative pursuit. A book project, or a painting, or learning a musical instrument, singing, acting, photography etc. This could become a lifelong companion. 

Supporting Role in someone's life- a child, parent, spouse are obvious people that come to mind. But it could be a friend or stranger too, like your working for a cause, like pets, or disadvantaged people.

Living life without too much of planning and thought, spontaneously, enjoying it to the fullest for its own sake, apart from all the rest of it, expectations, family, society, come what may.

Hope this helps in some small way..

4- Month Anniversary at Prestige

 It's 4 months ago that I joined Prestige University, Indore. What is exciting is that it is a brand new setup, and we are starting from scratch, in a beautiful building and will be adding faculty and non-teaching staff in good numbers as we go along. The process of admissions is on, and will give students who join us some unique advantages- like a 5-month long internship during their MBA program. 

A few months later we will also launch a 5-year Integrated program, leading to an MBA degree. Placements will be common to all MBA programs, some of which are unique, and the Integrated program.

Speeches

 I was at an event full of speeches recently. And it struck me forcefully, yet again, that Indian speakers, with some exceptions, don't know how to construct a speech for a given audience. Professors are no exception. I have seen many drone on through their allotted time and beyond, when audiences have lost interest, at conferences galore.

Maybe this is a subject for communication experts to explain to such speakers/wannabe speakers, but here is my two bits- I'll keep it short, thank you.

Know your audience, and what makes them tick. Or at least, might interest them.

Have a loose structure, at least. A PPT (Power point), for all the criticism it gets, does force you to write down a structured presentation. You can always deviate a bit from a structure, but it gives you a frame. And an approximate timer.

Keep it short. Use some visuals if you have a presentation.

Use anecdotes if appropriate, and personal experiences. Shows you have been there, done that.

Humour also can make it easy on the audience, if used intelligently.

That's it..as promised.

Knives Out- A Play

 Views of my blog have been 776668 till date. So I trust I have some regular (loyal?) readers, and some who browse and stop by.. so I want to share an experience of a live play performed by IIM Indore students starring some friends, and superbly directed by another friend Shweta Kushal. Knives Out, adapted from a film of the same name, was staged on Feb. 17th. Some of the excitement is captured in these pics-

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Some of the cast including Prachi and Aakansh. 

The private detective and the policemen.

The immigrant nurse with the detective

Other important characters - members of the family

Aakansh looking old- older than me, he joked.

Some more caught in the act!

The audience is important too.. Pratishtha and Neeti behind us- Sohni with me.

Before it all began.. Sleeping Beauty Prachi and a part of the set- well designed.

All in all, a great show! 

Loyal Friends

 Who are your loyal friends? Several tests exist, in my case-

Those who like to and try to keep in touch. 

Those who communicate even if I don't always do so.

Those who write.

Those who play Golf.

Those who like photography.

Those who are not too serious about life, or anything in life.

Those who read.

Those who like Hindi music/films.

Those who I can spend hours chatting with, without knowing how the hours passed.

Several of you fall into these categories- the final two are

Those who read my blog, and those who laugh at all my jokes. Ha ha,.. 

Keepsake Photos

 Photographs are a great way to remember people, occasions, planned events, chance meetings, and places too. Many of us have a Taj Mahal pic from our visit to the beautiful monument. I have one from the Eiffel Tower, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa too.

My grandmother's pic at the steering wheel of a car (she didn't drive) is one of her best in my collection. Another is from when many of my aunts had visited us with their kids - my Mom had six sisters and a brother. 

Another category is with students, alumni or colleagues from various workplaces. Some I meet repeatedly and some I met maybe only once. But a photo reminds me of the fun time we had. There is one with Vivek Gupta - a colleague at IIM Lucknow, which was during a hailstorm we had on campus. I went home, got my camera and we took some memorable pics. One with Avinash Mulky too, during this short time.

Many of the vintage pics from IIM Bangalore-an architectural wonder that I was lucky to be in- are now priceless. A couple with the Clemson Tiger- he was a mascot of Clemson University, or one during a break in the Football game -very colourful, are similarly priceless. 

Pics with family - particularly when our daughters were small-are gems in our collection. Digitisation has made it easy to preserve these, but I have a huge collection from pre-digital days, including a flight in a Cessna over Clemson! 

Some Corporates I Encountered

 Worked for Living Media group, the publishers of India Today, in my first job. Before that, Widia who made cutting tools in Bangalore, for my internship.

Marketing Research company, MBA in my second job out of Bangalore and Mumbai. Met Muthu here, and we remain friends to this day.

The Kirloskar group, which founded KIAMS at Harihar. They had many engineering companies like KBL, KOEL and KPCL. We wrote a capstone case on KPCL, and did a BPR consulting project for KOEL.

We recently did MDPs for Whirlpool and the Tata Group (Retail) while I was at IIM Indore. This entailed some research into their operations. Of course, there were other MDP participants from various companies. At IMT Nagpur, we started an MDP for Asian Paints.

Radio Heroes

 Kishore Kumar was definitely number one for me, among singers I heard on radio. Then came all others, maybe Asha Bhosle was second, if I had to choose. Rafi, Manna Dey, Mukesh, Lata, and so on. Among the older generation before these, I liked Shamshad Begum and Mubarak Begum, and Geeta Dutt.

Much later, I came to appreciate KL Saigal and Pankaj Mullick. And ghazal singers- Jagjit Singh, Pankaj Udhas, Ghulam Ali and Mehdi Hasan (I have seen live concerts of the later three)

The announcers of Radio Ceylon/Sri Lanka were favourites, but Ameen Sayani was an all-out winner with many sponsored programs like Binaca Geet Mala, S. Kumar's ka Filmi Muqaddama, and so on. 

The Chhaaya Geet on Vividh Bharati was a favourite (it's on right now- what a coincidence!). Otherwise, Aap hi ke Geet on Radio Ceylon which had the latest hits from current movies.

Why am I recounting all this? Because Feb. 13th is World Radio Day. That's why!

Lovebirds Special - Photo Contest

 Since it's Valentine's Day 2023 in a couple of days, I ran a Lovebirds Pic Contest on my facebook page. This was the outcome and announcement of results-

Now I know that love can be expressed in many ways. And so we are left with no choice but to give Awards to different categories of Lovebirds. So here are the winners in different categories-

Jyothi Gurumurthy- Modern lovebirds

Ethnic lovebirds- Meghana Khadilkar, Arun Vasudevan

De(adly) looking lovebirds- Ananya Nandi De

Chashma wale/Spectacular Lovebirds- Nidhi Sharma Chanana

Kaala chashma wale lovebirds- Poonam Bhatia

Waadiyon mein khoye lovebirds- Rimjhim Verma

And the Overall winner and category-

Suave lovebirds- Saurabh Sharma

All the Prize winners are eligible for a free stay at my place, 2 days and one night, any time till the next Valentine’s Day. I said you would win BIG! Try me!

Brand Launch Diaries

 We are launching a new brand- a brand-new MBA program at Prestige University. Naturally, there's a lot of work to be done in the awareness-building. In addition to digital media, we are doing a few roadshows in partnership with Career Launcher and others. The idea is to acquaint potential students with our brand. Pics from one such outing in Delhi. 

The team- Chandrashekhar, Divya, Manish and I..

Counseling in progress..

Some faces in the crowd of students

Students at our stall

We pose- above (with Kanika, from CL) and below,