:: Sense - The Way I Sense ::

Mediaah, Pradyumn Maheshwari’s blog critiquing the media, and more specifically, India’s biggest media group, is no more. I’ve been reading his blog on and off over quite a period of time. The manner in which he and his sources brought out the stories was, if nothing else, a very poitive step for the Indian blogging community. But, alas, as is the case with any critic who feeds off only a single entity, his blog too was targetted by way of legal notice and now he has taken his blog off !! This article at OJR talks more of the same and gives a few interesting links. Sevanti Ninan’s article at The Hoot presents a more balanced view.

Like the author there has hinted at, mebbe it indeed is time the Indian blogging community too started exerting its muscle(if any)…Or is it a case of over-estimating the under-potential !!!

The other day, somebody reminded me that I was in a B-school….So, presumably, or rather tragically, i should also blog on all things b-school…..So whatz happening @ my B-schooling life….Well…Nothing at all….Currently am on a Management Research Project….Yea, grandiose at it may sound, again-like all things related to an MBA, it isn’t really half as big….It is that same old familiar management way of souping up and hyping up what can at best be passable for work done on a long weekend….Indeed, many have been questioning the need for this project towards the end of our course, the practicality of this project….And with most guys cooling off their heels doing such projects as industry analysis of colored water or dirt-cleansing chemical bars, surely is indeed a learning experience

I seem to have taken a liking for all things g00gle, right from their colors to their darned spiders to their so-very-miserly adsense program…Not surprisingly, the feeling’s mutual :D….For all that i know, g00gle’s now indexing my blog right on the first page for such keywords as “icfai” !! And i’ve been getting increasing hits from perplexed junta who prolly have gotten admission in here and wanna know if they will be placed ….To all of them, folks, lemme make this clear to ya all….Placements here had started a l000ng time back and will likely continue for a few more weeks….It ain’t like other schools where it is a matter of minutes and hours….But having said that, yes, you do get a shot at some very good profiles….But in case ya one of those to whom the packet reflects your culmination of aspirations and sense of achievement, well, you do get a few opportunities at that too….At last count, there were over a 100 companies that had recruited from campus, and that figure is increasing by the week, albeit slowly

And as for me, well, i still have the available tag shining brightly round my neck…But that is for reasons varied…And foremost would be an inability to reconcile myself to working for a lotta profiles that had come on campus…But yea, make no mistake…They were sure lapped up by lotsa others…And yours truly has some historical baggage too that doesn’t really make things a stroll in the park….Watching out how this ends…If indeed I am gonna get placed or not …So in case, ya guys have a g00d profile to be filled @ your offices, ya know whom to ping ;) !!

ps: btw, Yahoo!’s Buzz is a gr8 way of killing some time…Do give it a dekko
pps:Came across a beautifully written piece on marriage here

The recent HBS 119 issue really struck me hard….Here was a School, or rather an institution which has acted as a model for schools around the world, one that is indeed a factory of knowledge…One that has produced amazing cases on all aspects of management thought, but most importantly on those relating to Ethics & Technology….

Considering all this, i indeed find their decision to ding all the 119 people who had a peek at their app status very very surprising !! Where were the famed leadership abilities of the decision makers at HBS?? And where were the technologists…The ones who pioneered hacking back in the heydays of the blueboxes et al…Didn’t all the snoopers follow the highest levels of the famed MIT “hacker ethic” !!!…But hey, Show me one true hacker who’s gonna accept that this was a “hack” and these poor souls are “hackers”!!! Its about time people started to acknowledge the fact that any computer knowledge, other than clicking and browsing sites does NOT constitute hacking…Indeed has been a big letdown to see a school of the order of MIT succumb to some pathetic media reporting and the spin woved by THE biggest culprit in the entire episode, Applyyourself!!! Hell, it doesn’t require hackers from MIT to say that this wasn’t a hacking issue, a school kid could tell ya as much !!

Indeed, one of the very surprising twists to the entire episode has been how both the schools and a section of the larger applicant community (less the 119+42+1+……..) gave ethical dimensions to the actions of the 119…Yes, Ethics indeed are something that is something amiss in the current crop of people the worldover…But isn’t that the result of a more generic problem of increasing materialism?? To talk of failing ethics as the reason for these people to “hack” into the system smacks of a total lack of understanding of practical realities, both in terms of what is ethical and what is not and also in terms of how getting to un-linked pages is termed hacking !! And not to even mention of the umpteen number of other applicants who, having missed the 9hour window, now cry hoarse from the rooftops about their higher moral ground !!

As I see it, THE sole people responsible for the entire fiasco are the HBS’s Info systems team which decide to outsource the process and more importantly, Applyyourself, which has a system that allows their clients to upload pages that can be directly accessed by the customer before the date annointed by their client….In other words, for having a real crappy piece of software…. My heart goes out to all those people who have been dinged at various schools….And to all the real “hackers” at MIT !!!

Come to think of the entire episode, really have to admit, the IIMs exhibited a VERY high level of maturity and understanding when the CAT results leak issue came out and we had to issue a clarification Very sad indeed that the same can’t be said of HBS, and in my personal opinion, of MIT !!!

ps: Prolly this article @ the Harvard Crimson, sums up how even the staff of Harvard’s oldest daily newspaper feel about the entire fiasco, the result of a st00pid software !!!