as the interim media director, one of my jobs is to update all council websites.running after people to get information to update their websites, accommodating "ASAP" requests of updates at 3 am, sitting up till 4 am working on a ridiculously archaic CMS in which Ctrl-Z results in all images getting getting removed from the page (while the text you wanted to undo stubbornly stays on), taking hours to make the simplest of changes, putting all of my all of my past work-ex, skill and expertise to shame, i was still dragging on...practicing self-motivation to the fullest. until one day, after many days i ran into one of my dearest friends (errmm yes...you got it, you need to run into even ur dearest friends in mba at times...both of you being forced-workholics doesn't help either :P my advice, dont make friends...or dont work so much :P but i digress...),

so as i was saying...after many days of having spent an entire night updating his concerned webpage, i ran into him and this was where all my self inflated delusions of performing a crucial task for my school and the future batches, was shattered and crushed into a fine powder that the wind (which is a rare commodity in Singapore considering its hard to find breeze even at the sea beach!! it came at the most inopportune moment) promptly scattered into the fine dust; and drowned me into the eternal reality of client-vendor relationships.... and my heart almost instantly cried out,

sigh o sigh..
i wonder why...
i take so much pain...
all to no gain...
wen all I seek is client satisfaction...
with my client alas i have no more interaction...
its back to s/w my friend
wen from SRS to bugs, all is yours to design
and yours to defend!!

why my dear faithful reader you ask......

coz after hours of my work and days of waiting to get atleast an acknowledgement the words that befell upon my eager ears were that he had "NOT YET SEEN THE PAGE!!"

alas for him! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and certainly not if she happens to manage ur s/w and control your media + publicity ;)

to start my revenge...i dedicate this post to the One-Who-Has-Not-Seen-The-Page ;) :D

sound the bugles...the war is on!!!

of headaches and...

i have my own will. and so does everything that belongs to me. including my headaches.as beings of free-will, they crop up when they want to, no matter how inconvenient their timing is. if you remember my marathon 24 hours headache, you would know what i am talking about.

i used to blame my sinusitis for it, but that has long subsided into a not more than a once-a-week-for-a-few-hours occurence; but then you see, they say stress, lack of sleep, poor eyesight, too much laptop, too much thinking, too little thinking, too much eating, too little eating...too much air-conditioning, too much sun, pretty much everything it seems to me, can be a cause for a headache. and so when one of these headaches hit me, i no longer try to weed out the root cause.

given the continuous inflow of "new findings" of harmful side effects of this medicine and that, i don't take these either , well not frequently at least..

so here i am,in one of the most technical courses of my entire mba, blogging! and dont get me wrong, i am not fond of cribbing to the whole world, on the contrary i find it in really bad taste., and definitely a waste of space! and yet, my head is threatening to split into pieces and this is all i can do to keep myself from walking out! tch tch...

what's worse is that i have just spent the past 2 days relatively free, to the extent that i actually Facebook-ed!! if only my old friend had decided to plague me a little earlier, I would have found it easier to cope.

but no, just like the quintessential unwelcome, uninvited guest who arrives just as you are locking the door to go out and then refuses to leave, leaving you wishing if only you hadn't spent the last 5 minutes searching for keys, you might have escaped this misery.....my dear old friend arrived just as i was about to enter this class, suddenly, unannounced, unsuspected...leaving me with no choice but this...

that i must forget the $$$$ of money i am spending per class and pen..err type...my pains away, showering my mundane and entirely ineffective attempts at turning my misery into humor, on my poor unsuspecting readers,...who would open this post with the hope that this time., finally, might have written something to hold their interest

alas! dear readers... must as i thank you for your unfailing hope that some day i shall rise to be the writer you should like me to be...once more i do nothing but disappoint....

well my headache's gone..if thats any consolation! ;)

Its unbelievable! i have been back to school for over 20 days now and I haven't blogged. not once. it isn't that i haven't thought about it, coz i have, its like some one once said to me, becoming an editor kills the writer in you. i think ever since i took over the NUS MBA students' blog, i am just always so busy scouting writers for the blog, editing and putting up their write-ups, that my own writing falls to the bottom of the list.

But fortunately for the writer still lurking in me, yesterday a freshman walked up to me and said,
" i love your blog"
"eh? you mean the students' blog?" [ ya. the compulsive editor!]
"no no , your blog. the personal as well as the mba one. especially the mba one, it did give good insights into the life here at nus mba"
"errmmm..yaaa thanks! im glad you found it useful"

it reminded me, that i am guilty of ignoring one more thing that i personally like. in the past years, i have given up sketching, photography, dancing, and now..even writing seems to be getting lost in the other, more "worldly" matters.

so without further rhetoric, what have i been upto since i got back.

well, i have moved houses, and a lot of our friends have left for exchange, so the first week went in settling down in the new houseand attending loads n loads of send-off parties. almost one every evening. yaa....i had gotten pretty sad by the end of week!

so anyways, the next week was orientation for the freshman batch. ofcourse i was one of the volunteers helping out; and i remember sitting there and thinking "We can fail 2 subjects and still get our degree! wow i didn't know that!!" ;)

it was exactly the same, i mean EXACTLY. the dates, the times, the schedule, the only difference was this time i was on the other side of the table, handing Out the goodie bags. it felt weird, the year literally had flown by. and soon it will all be over. but i get emotional again, as you can perhaps see, i am not in my best spirits. Oh nothing, i suspect i just might be coming down with a bad case of too much pending work ;)

well so orientation ended, and ofcourse the hilarious week of module add-drop started, and this too was EXACTLY the same as 2nd semester's add-drop weekk; with the exception of superficial details of subjects and professors.

in the meantime i also took two extra courses with ESSEC. i hosted/organised a couple of events, attended a few workshops and yes, had a lunch at my place where, to my delight, a lot of people turned up! :) umm dont get ideas, i wasnt cooking! it was a potluck :D

and here i am. its been only 2 weeks since the sem started, and already i have so much backlog of work its not funny!! i dont know what i am doing with my time honestly!! i havent even taken stock of the work i need to do for the subjects! pfff....

you know its funny...ppl have so much fun in their /MBAs, and everyone tells me that no one ever studies in their last sem and people just party and have fun.

i wonder why i am nearly always overloaded with work!

sigh......

well atleast now that the jinx is broken, i hope i will record my last sem experiences more regularly. i cant stop time, but i can immortalize it :)

About Practicums, NGOs & PostWar Rehab

Somewhere in the first semester we got an email offering a 2MC Consulting Practicum with an NGO called MAG International. With zilch knowledge of the practicum or the NGO in question, and armed with nothing but the starry-eyed enthusiasm that only fresh entrants into the b-school possess, of course I signed up for it, of course I had Alex and Tulika with me; even in that starry eyed phase; I wasn't that lost ;) A few initial meetings and the first semester swallowed us. There was no option but to put it off to the second semester, keeping in line with the second nature called Procastination :P

But when we did finally get working on it, it was such a tremendous experience. As b-school students, who have paid huge money just to get in, and at least expect to make huge money as well, day and night work on case studies on how companies make and lose billions of dollars; working with a constant thought that money is scarce gave a totally different dimension to the thought process. Not just that, but the people we got to talk to, both inside the organization and outside, the government officials and corporate contacts we got in touch with; yes perspectives that would have never occurred to us; things we wouldn't have thought of (ahem..offices we wouldn't have visited :P) ..and lessons we wouldn't have learned; lessons ranging from simple humility to cut throat diplomacy

And then of course there was the added awakening about post war rehab; which to me at least only comprised of immediate refugee camps & donations for food and healthcare. this project brought home the ever lasting destruction that a war brings upon its victims and decades long consistent rehab programs spanning housing, food healthcare, education, employment and the start point of it all, land de-mining, that are needed to bring back normalcy into the lives of people victimised by mindless wars.

yes it was another module to worry about, another report to write, another set of meetings to organise, another presentation to give...but it was totally worth all the pain.

And working with Alex & Tulika just made it so much easier and better than it otherwise would have been

looking back

So J-Bhai's blog made me realise that while I was busy cursing the traffic driving back and forth from work, he has done half of my job. his posts on Internship Search and a day in Sem-2 took care of two blogs to write from my to-do list. and very thoroughly, I must add. Thanks J-Bhai!

So putting all the pieces together, really why did the second semester feel so diametrically opposite to the first. i was living in the same place, taking the same shuttle to college, it was the same canteen,the same lounge, the same people, and yes subjects and professors were different but that's a given isn't it. I guess the difference was, and really these reasons were pretty much applicable to most of us, we all felt much more in control. We had chosen our own subjects, and yes of course we still landed with subjects / profs we hated, but the feeling that it was our own doing some how made it easier to bear.

Also, by now we knew each other reasonably well. And that made group dynamics very different. Much more easy going, relaxed and stress free. We depended on each other far more and there was a lot more trust. Of course we were also acquainted with the working styles of most people around and psst...knew of those who have none; and had learnt how to cope with those too.

A lot more people had moved near campus, which meant a lot more parties were thrown at homes and there was a lot more off-time to get to know each other. That made working together easier. We were well into the process of becoming friends.

A lot of us had added responsibilities of the Council and its various clubs and that made life totally different. While it meant a lot of additional events to organise / volunteer for and a LOT of extra work; it also meant a growing sense of belongingness to the school. It wasn't just about taking classes anymore, we were doing something to make a difference, cultivating a culture, attempting to add value to the school, to our class mates and hopefully to future batches as well.

But of course no write up on this semester can be complete without the mention of the exchange students. Honestly, I personally hadn't expected so many, and that too from Western Univs; I suspect it was the recession's doing though I haven't dug any previous years' stats to prove it. But whatever the reasons were, it was an absolutely terrific thing to happen. It totally made up for the hitherto lack of diversity in the Indian-Chinese dominated batch. There were canadians, americans, french, norwegians, italians and many more. Though I dont remember if there were any australians, or anyone from the african continent; but I could be wrong about that. if there were then I did miss the opportunity to meet them. But whoever I did meet/take a class with had different perspectives, work methodoligies, and as Alex claimed, different drinking styles ;) It was very interesting to see how people do fall into stereotypes, how which nation you belong to does have a huge impact on what you think. In any case, the point is NUS Business School hadn't felt this global a b-school in the first semester. Cultural diversity and exposure were epitomised this semester, and I for one totally relished the experience.

I could go on,...and I probably will, but I think in short, it all started with the feeling I had, landing back in Singapore in January, after a month long break at home. It didn't feel strange. It did feel just as it had done when I had landed at the Delhi airport. It felt like I was home.