Zindagi Na Milegi Dobaraa...

The Bridge of Logic

In Nov 2014, I went through an extremely stressful experience. It actually affected my mental balance. And I was supremely desperate to get back to my old self and get my balance back. As part of that I spent 4 sleepless nights thinking about a lot of things which can help me do that and it came to a point where an extremely powerful thought hit me.

The thought hit me as a result of my attempt to solve "World happiness" as a consulting assignment problem. It might sound funny and impractical but the thought was extremely overwhelming for me. The solution involved looking at the entire planet as one giant company with its people as the employees/owners and coming up with a robust sharp strategy to ensure that current stress levels are brought down to 0 so that the economy booms disruptively. In the process, every single person becomes happy as well since every single problem faced by one individual is a business opportunity for another individual. So the strategy needs to be formulated considering an extremely long term vision of ensuring all problems faced by every single individual on the planet are solved through innovative business solutions.

It is not possible to tell you what that powerful thought is because you'll reject it if I don't build your capability to take in that thought correctly.The posts below will help you build the capability for yourself and at an appropriate later time, I will pitch in that thought so that it helps you in the right way to lead a totally stress free life.

Please note that I was extremely excited in 2014 and some of the posts you'll read might really freak you out. That's because it was extremely overwhelming for me. So, please keep that in mind while reading these posts.

A friend by the name Karthik Sharma posted a comment and later deleted it. You'll see what I'm referring to below.

Below is a testimonial from Gautam Kumar Das who attended my lecture. This testimonial was collected from him as part of some analysis that needed to be done for a course I took in Term 4.

So what happened after this?

After a week at home, I came back to IIMB to present my work to Prof. Sourav Mukherjee, Dean and Prof Pranav Garg from the Strategy Department. Pranav Sir was my Competition and Strategy professor. I reached back on a Saturday evening. Sunday morning was my meeting with the professors. I think Exemius - one of our campus fests was going on campus that weekend and Saturday night was for music performances.

Since I did not know how my meeting will go and since I did not genuinely know whether I'll be continuing my studies at IIM Bangalore, I wanted to perform one more time just in case I never get to perform again. Luckily, I think Ishaan from the other section took a video of the performance which you can see below. I sang this song called "Take me home country roads" by John Denver. I screwed up in between, which I acknowledged while singing itself (You'll understand when you see the video)The initial audio is slightly unclear but it will clear up.

Probably my favorite and most emotional performance of all time. I screwed up in between. Still. Loved it :) (Play in full screen and with good speakers if possible)

What Happened after that?

Continued in Post Mckinsey Story

IIMB - CULCOM \m/

(photos still being updated)

Last 2 years of education. I wasn't sure whether I'll be able to chill out in life after MBA. So decided I definitely need a dedicated social platform for this. I joined IIM Bangalore's cultural committee (referred to as CulCom henceforth). Not that I didn't make friends outside of this group. In fact, most of my closest friends are outside the culcom group. But culcom provided me the platform to conduct events, make new friends, interact with a lot of outside people and I just loved it. The main scope of Culcom's work is to conduct events spanning the year for the students in the campus and most importantly, conduct the biggest B-school cultural fest in India - Unmaad !

The above is the set of folks who got selected to join the club. There are 4 verticals/departments within the club - Events, Publicity, Sponsorship and Infra. I wanted to get into events because of my music background. But I think the seniors were looking for someone with a strong music background to join the infra vertical since they wanted someone capable to handle the Professional shows event which is taken care by the infra vertical. I was initially hesitant because I knew I was also signing up for a lot of manual labor work like carrying our stuff and all that. But the seniors finally selected me for the Infra vertical and I accepted it. And buoy! That was the best decision I could have made from an IIMB - Social life point of view.

That's the infra vertical - 5 of us handling different categories of work. Vivek, Issac, Suneesh, Preetham and Rahul. After we got selected for the club, the seniors wanted us to come up with some sort of wacky introduction for each vertical. We were brainstorming and I came up with an idea. I observed that the initials of our names can be combined to form the word VISPR and that can be connected to how the other verticals can ask us for help. "We are VISPR. You can just VISPR your needs to us and consider them done" and for the rest of our campus lives, we were called the VISPR group.

During our second year, Sunny also joined us since the seniors decided to expand the team. So the group became called VISSPR. Even our whatsapp group is called by that name.

We had to conduct parties on campus and be the bartenders for the parties. Trust me! It was super fun. In our second year, we hardly did the bartending since juniors were there. But in our first year, the 5 of us had a killer of a time and I don't think I'll have get to be part of a better team in my life. Below is a performance by me and Rahul. We were a little stoned while Preetham recorded this video. I'm playing table drums and Rahul is on guitar. Very short video.

Managing the party at L square. For people not from IIMB reading this post, L square is the party spot on campus. If you've seen the movie 3 idiots, L square is the place where that the Dean/Prof Sahasrabuddhe comes with that cuckoo bird and gives a speech. The stairs you see in the pic above are where the students in the movie 3 idiots actually stood. Anyway, that's Sumit, me, Abhinav, Preetham, Kumudini, Indu, Rahul and Sakshi.

That's my Swag pic from our first L square party. The theme was "Nerds and Hotties" Lol.

I think this was Dandiya night. I had no idea how to use those sticks. Vivek, whom you can see in the picture towards the right end was teaching me how to use them and dance along with that. Was a fun night I remember.

I used to be on my headphones all the time! I mean ALL THE TIME! Below is one of the promo videos that was created for Unmaad. It was called "Superhero Song". So, Siddha from the events team was coordinating to make the video. She wanted actors to be part of the video. She had initially asked me also to join but because of some other work, I was about to ditch and Siddha asked me to come. Shown below.

Within the first 15 seconds of the video, you'll be able to see me and after that, I'm not in the song anymore. But it's a very nice video. Check it out if you're interested. Priya and Vivek, both part of Culcom sing in this song.