The Hot Seat

The role of an MBA involves defending a presentation that was made by someone else. The role of an onsite coordinator involves defending the work done by the offshore team. The role of a manager involves defending some appraisal decisions on which you don't have much control.

When all these roles roll into one, it is hell. Well, atleast hell is not cold :)

The Last Anthem

His vision started to render
Scenes that made the heart tender
How can the mind help
Do anything but meander?

The bad and the good
He saw whatever he could
He would have leaped ahead
If only he could

In his life set the sun
It was over, all the fun
In the moment he bore thoughts
A ton of thanks to everyone

God, for me you cared
Friend, for me you dared
Thank you all the people
With whom a moment was shared

All the struggles he bore
Vanished as the last tear dried of the core
No more sorrows and no more worries
For the material did not hold him anymore

Movies & Tastes

Each person has his/her own tastes. Then how the heck do we declare some movies as great and some as pathetic? I guess it is based on more people liking the movies and the so called great minds' (critics) opinion. Over the past month I have watched a lot of these "good" movies and the only inference is that I am neither past of the mass nor am I a great mind. Movies like "No country for old men", "Pulp fiction", "Reservoir dogs" and "Usual Suspects", which are considered very good movies, failed to please me. The part that is sadder than the movies are the after-movie-day conversations that go like this...
A: "Hey, what did you do last evening?"
J: "Well, nothing much. Just watched a movie"
A: "Which one?"
J: "No country for old men. The movie was...."
A: "Man, what a movie! It won so many Oscars"
J: "Yeah, sure did. But...."
A: "Great movies like that come only once a blue moon. What a movie, what acting by cast blah blah blah"
Guess my opinion does not matter here.

With a membership at the library and an apartment mate with a Netflix subscription, getting movies has become lot easier. But my affinity towards movies is definitely going down. Not that I had much earlier :)

Déjà vu

Over the past year every time I found the newspapers report something bad for the TATA group, it seemed like "Hey, didn't I read that few days back?" The poor company has had so many mishaps last year - The issue at Singur resulting in increase cost and also delay in the release of the Nano; the acquisition of Citigroup's BPO arm just before Citigroup lost its steam; the acquisition of the land rover and Jaguar which aren't doing well; and the bomb at the Taj Mahal hotel. And just when I thought that the New Year will turn out to be good for the Tatas, the news on Satyam comes out. Wait, the Tatas own TCS and not Satyam, right? Yes, that's true. But the Tatas own another firm, Tata AIG insurance. Guess who is the primary insurer providing Directors and Officiers liability insurance to Satyam? Déjà vu?

Asatyam

There is news about Satyam everywhere. The company has gone against its name (Satyam means Truth) and lied in its financial reports with bloated numbers. It is weird to note that Satyam won the golden peacock award for corporate governance in 2008! That puts a big question mark on the process of deciding the award winners.

Satyam has been in the news in recent times for all the wrong reasons. First it was the bribery case with World Bank and then the controversial attempt to take stake in the Maytas (The reverse of Satyam!) companies. I was personally shocked when I heard the news of the bribery case. Now the financial misreporting is something beyond my wildest imagination. I might have been less shocked if this were with an oil or energy firm. But IT? Geez!

Most media report on the attempted Maytas acquisition as a means to move money to the Raju family. But I seriously doubt it. Since Satyam had a huge deficit between reported earnings and the actual earnings, may be they were trying to correct the records with an acquisition. Something like buying stake in the company and transferring money only on the records. This would have accounted for the deficit in Satyam's records. Does this help the Raju family? Nope. The Raju family has only a 10% stake in Satyam while they have 100% and 40% stake in the Maytas companies. So if this was supposed to be a way to correct Satyam's records, then the family actually loses money in the process. I hate to disagree with the media, but my point of view seems to make logical sense.

All the focus is now on Satyam. But I would like to see the effect of this on PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is tough to believe that a scandal of such scale managed to avoid the eyes of the accounting firm. When Enron collapsed in a somewhat similar situation, Arthur Andersen went down with it. What is going to be the verdict on PWC?

New Year Wishes/Resolutions

A new year is generally started with wishes and resolutions for the year. Apart from the usual generic wishes like "World Peace" (remember Miss Congeniality?), my specific list of wishes/resolutions include
a) Mental strength to force myself to exercise for atleast 4 days a week. I have read somewhere a phrase that goes like this - "It is easy to quit smoking; I have done it hundreds of times". I guess my form of it would be "It is easy to start exercising; I have done it hundreds of times". This year I want to keep continuing after starting.
b) A good work-life balance while in India. In blunt words, stop spending more hours at work. Push back when called for early morning and late night calls on the same day, meetings on public holidays, and the like.
c) Blog for atleast once a week. From about 15 blogs a month for 3 years, I fallen to a total of 9 blogs in the whole of 2008 (3 since Feb '08 if I have to sound even worse). I will like to make a comeback this year.
d) Read for atleast an hour over each weekend - could be a novel or even an insurance book.
e) Participate more in festivals. The idea is to plan ahead and look at things that I can do.

I am starting resolution c with this blog. Wish me luck to keep this flowing.