Am currently reading “Genome” by Matt Ridley…
What an amazing book ! Along with Desmond Morris’ writing it forms a great set to understand us human beings and our position in the order of things ! One quote that he makes struck me:
“Entropy and Information are opposite sides of the same coin” Awesome !
Yesterday night was a scare !
Ekta gave Saachi some multi-vitamins before dinner. And then we went out for dinner. Chinese. At a joint called Mandarin near CMH Road. Awesome food.
And whatdya know?
Saachi pukes all the stuff in about 7 instalments between 11pm and 1 am !
We frantically ring up the pedeatrician at midnight (after crazily hunting for his number) and he tells us to give her two syrups.
Fortunately the Manipal hospital has a pharmacy that is open through the night…but they have only one of the syrups…and say the other would be found that time of the night only on Residency Road…
We call the doc again, and he says the other syrup isn’t that necessary. So after all that running about ….Saachi slept..and we cleaned up the house and breathed a sigh of relief !
I’ll try and not keep too much to the ’serious’ focus on XL (you can do a search on yahoo and google and find stuff for that!)
These next few posts are basically for XLers to relive those ‘JLT’ times at XL, and for non-XLers to know the ‘un’official part of XL that go so much into shaping the identity of an XLer.
So how does an XLer pass his/her day?
So now you get the main drift?
Dadu/Niranjan’s is the lovely samosa/ciggy joint that sustains Xlers when the mess does not!
Bishu’s Night Serai- A one stop shop for Maggi, Coffee, Tea, bread masala to get you through the night and those incomprehensible cases !
JLT – The name of the lovely lawn , called Just Like that ! Why? who knows, JLT!
OMAXI- The Old Monks Association of XlrI. The top of the XL social totem pole ! Led by the cheif (in red hood!) and clad in white or blue hoods….yelling “PBC” !
Wet Nights - Contrary to what people think only stands for the wetness of the liquor flowing in the party hosted by OMAXI.
Frax- The Free Riders Association of Xlri. The people who sleep through XL and learn how to be be a burden on others without doing anything 
has been converted into both an adjective and a verb e.g. “You frax!” and “I have been fraxing this whole term, so won’t you do my project ?”
GRAX – Gossip and Rumor Association of Xlri. Also translated into a verb “We have been graxing about that RG chap”
RG – Relative Grading, the way you get a D even if you get 80/100 just because the top guy has got 98/100 and nobody has 89/100 ! As is wont, has been converted to a verb e.g. “The topper keeps on doing RG every term” .
Put Sack – to crash to sleep (comes naturally either in class or in your room!)
Put Enthu – What an XLer does when he/she needs to pump up the excitement.
Put Fight – What an XLer does when the end terms or paper submissions are looming large.
GBM - General Body Meeting (alas! Not an orgy yet! ) What XLers do to timepass as a group.
IIMC – The only other management institute in Eastern India with whom XLers have a weird relationship ;-P
Mess Food- The one hate after the previous mentioned item that unites XLers across the generations.
Bodhi Tree – The shady place where XLers have bonded, having DMC (deep meaningful conversations) with other XLers!
The Un-official XL Alumni site
OK, here are some facts (and fiction!) about XL (the loving nickname of XLRI) located in jampot (the loving nickname of Jamshedpur) in the Indian state of Jharkhand (earlier part of Bihar):
XL was established by Fr. Quinn in 1949 …yeah its the oldest B School in India !
On the 25th anniversary of XL, Fr. Tome said:
“What does 25 years mean to me personally. Certainly not the
building, not a campus, not even a viable institution. Let me put it this way. Some
years ago, when Raisa Maritain, wife of the famous French philosopher,
Jacques Maritain, wanted to thank God for all that had happened in her life,
she wrote a book about the greatest gift God had given to her and she
entitled the book We Have Been Friends Together. That is what this anniversary
means to me…
“Unlike similar institutions that are amply funded from the very beginning,
for both capital costs and operations, our resources totaled zero. I will
share the secret with you once again. I believe it to be true, even though
it is against all the laws of that dark and murky science of economics. The
secret is this: decisions precede and generate resources, and not the
other way round.”
That statement in many ways sums up the spirit of XL and XLers (pronounced Excellers the products of XL. Even today the XL management states the defining culture as:
“The culture of XLRI is such that it accelerates the members’ passion for achieving excellence in everything they do. While informality, flexibility, humaneness, and espirit de corps are the hallmarks, growth and development of the whole person with integrity and ingenuity are the ’summum bonum’ of the culture in XLRI.”
Also added a page with 4 poems of mine…
Got this link from The Alternative perspective newsletter I get 
It’s an article by Shashi Tharoor (the author of The Great Indian Novel and The Mammaries of a Welfare State) who is also a civil servant and UN employee on what does being Indian and India mean for him. I think it captures the ethos of India beautifully !
Well, this is India of our day-to-day experience – full of anomalies, inequalities, confusion or diversity (depending on how one tries to understand it)… Contemporary India, perhaps more than any other time, is Many Indias. To quote from this article by Shashi Tharoor, India is: “snow peaks and tropical jungles, with seventeen major languages and 22,000 distinct “dialects”… 51% illiterate but which has educated the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers… birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties and 300 ways of cooking the potato”…
Three British icons are hogging the media headlines these days:
1. David Beckham
2. Harry Potter and
3. Prince of Wales, William
ET compared Beckham and Potter, beginning with the games they play and said that Harry won hands down as Quidditch is an infinitely superior game than football (just one ball, and that too without broomsticks !)
Beckham and Harry Potter match almost the same in popularity in Asia, but Potter beats him hands down in the US where Beckham’s popularity is not so much (except Gurinder Chadha’s film with his name coming in at number 10) …which is why as a brand Harry Potter is much more valuable than David Beckham and probably longer lasting. Beckham is a mere Muggle after all !
I took this test on Quizzilla…I don’t agree with the results !!
But decided to post this anyway…!
You are Lust.
Every part of you screams “Do me now!”
You exude sexuality and while others sometimes
view you as a slut, you see yourself as only
giving into your base desires.
What Emotion Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
People who know me would surely disagree !!
I got this in a forward from a friend…
I usually don’t like posting forwards on my Blogs…but I am making this an exception (its the first time…so sue me!!)
Excerpt from an account about a traveling experience in india:
To the uninitiated, driving in India is bedlam. It is like amusement park
“bumper cars” with horns, except we have yet to see an accident.
India is a country of many languages, and I think horn honking is a
language that drivers must master before they get a driver’s license. In
fact, it seems to be one of the more important requirements. I paid careful
attention in one of our cab rides (20 honks in 4 km), and here is a starting
glossary of horn honk meanings:
* “I am passing you!”;
* “Hey, you’re passing me!”;
* “I’m just going to drive about 1 cm from your back bumper for a while, OK?”
* “Can you please move just a little bit to the side so I can pass you by squeezing into this impossibly narrow space between your car and the oncoming motorcycles/ bicycles/ ox carts/ cows/ goats/ food vendor carts/ pedestrians/ cars/ trucks”;
* “Its a nice day and I’m just tooting for the heck of it”.
Car horns also answer other car horns with “yes” or “no” signals, although
to my untrained ear, I cannot tell the difference. Unlike North American
horns, car horns here never seem to be impolite or rude – they never say
“MOVE” or “hurry up”.
Of course, the horns could just be used out of courtesy to truck drivers.
Every truck has a hand painted sign on the back bumper saying “Horn OK
Please”, so honking at trucks may just be the polite thing to do.
My favourite thing in India traffic has to be the tunes that cars play
while they’re backing up. In North America and Europe, trucks sometimes
sound a high pitched “beep…. beep… beep” when they go in reverse. India
has turned this to an art form and applied it to cars. I am now compiling a
top 10 list of car reversing tunes. Candidates so far include “Jingle
Bells”, “Happy Birthday to you”, and some Frank Sinatra tune whose title I
don’t know because it is not “do be do be dooo”.
This is my new blogchalk:
India, Karnataka, Bangalore, Indiranagar, Hindi, English, GAUTAM, Male, 26-30, Poetry, Reading.
On the XL grax egroup we are discussing if Blogs can become a Truman Show kind of phenomenon
Actually over the last 4 years of living in south India’s 3 metropolis’ (Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore) I’ve discovered amazing cuisines.
In Hyderabad I fell for Hyderabadi (biryani and kababs) and Andhra cuisines (really really really hot food!)
In Chennai I discovered Chettinad cuisine…which unlike the south indian thali is loaded non-veg !
And of course, I don’t have to tell you what food I discovered in Bangalore!
Bangalore has stoked my desire for Malyalee food, specifically Appams and Mutton Stew )
Yesterday for dinner I tried Appam and Fish Curry at this joint called Coastal something…at Koramangala …amazing !
Followed it up with this rich chocolate cake at Barista….yummm! Did remind me of the Meringovich cake in Matrix Reloaded )
Prof madhukar Shukla has started a Blog on Alternative perspectives the newsletter he maintains!
have opened a page on Ryze
Ryze is a Business Networking site and it seems to be pretty good. Lot of Indians on the site
In fact I met two guys from school and some folks from XL too…
In terms of guestbook activity and visits I am doing quite well
damn !
Something wrong with my Management specific Blog
It’s not getting updated !
So I think I will update some thoughts here !
I have been trying to get a job recently…
It’s quite a tough job…
I have been using all channels…
contacting online recruiters like Monster India, naukri, TimesJobs, and I have got some leads.
However the simplest ones are the ones by contacts which is where the XL alumni comes useful…and the HR Jobs for XL /TISS alumni egroup…
specially since the work I am looking for is more in the Training/OD/ HR Consulting domain…
Blogger is giving me problems…this is a test message
Some of my posts today on HRgyan on Call centre companies having a non-poaching agreement:
Interesting debate. In fact IMHO, call centres first need to have
some kind of agreement on their billing rates before going for such a
measure. The more they commoditify their business offerings the more
they will find retaining good people an issue.
I was reading some data that said that 40% of people who leave call
centres/BPOs actually LEAVE the industry! That is something the
ITES/BPO/Call centre industry needs to be worried about much more
than poaching.
They also need to go for innovative solutions for the recruitment
puzzle, instead of the usual undergraduate and graduates. Zo, I today
saw an advertisement by MsourcE which explicitly targets the above 35
age bracket to get them into the industry.
Another interesting initiative that a call centre in Delhi tried was
housewives working 4 hrs a day !
From the 2020 Social SiteView my page on HR Professionals
Email me: gg@gautamghosh.net
Call Me: +91-98731-41236
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