Tips&Tricks for CP

Tips and Tricks for Class participation(CP):

Disclaimer : The  characteristics mentioned in this blog are purely fictitious. Use it at your own peril.

Before we advise you on the tips and tricks , here are the following stereotypes in the class.

1.       People who raise their hand and wait for their turn

2.       People who raise their hand and assume its their turn

3.       People who get a chance to speak and put others to sleep

4.       People who have already lost hope on class participation

People who belong to category 4, please read further. Everybody else, thank you for your time.

Tips& Tricks

1.       Wear a Govinda style or a flashy red shirt- yellow pants to attract attention. You don’t have to raise your hands after this.

2.       If flashy shirts are on short supply, please create some spare cardboard hands. This will ensure your hands are up all the time.

3.       Get a mike and start with the words “Please let me finish”.

4.       Identify the perennial the CP heroes and give them some Center Fresh (zubaan pey lagaam)

5.       If the whole class is giving one opinion, give an exact opposite opinion even if it doesn’t make sense. The attention has been diverted and you have got the airtime.

6.       Sit next to a CP hero, and the moment he starts to talk, swap your name plate with him. Undo the process, before he catches you in the act.

7.       If you have nothing to contribute, just stand up and start talking about your personal experiences, use appropriate technical jargon according to the subject being taught.

Please email us your experiences after you follow the above tips.

Cheers.

 -Natarajan & Rajgopal Iyengar

Back to School !

To say that last one week just went by, before I could blink an eye would actually not be an overstatement. This is the kind of welcome you get, when you decide to go back to school after almost a decade. Only solace is the pristine surroundings of IIMC, which calms you and makes you  appreciate the finer things in life. From the first week itself, studying till 2 am has become the norm. Our security guard actually put things in perspective when he said that 3 or 4 am will be a daily routine by the next term. Yet in the middle of all this chaos, none of us (at least most of us) are feeling perturbed.  Whenever we have 20 minutes to spare, it’s been getting utilized either by going to the gym, playing cricket or as in my case catching a quick nap.

The classes have been nothing like our engineering days. The commitment to show up in class before time everyday emphasizes on how much we are looking forward to learn. Either that or we are incredibly scared of the professors, and to be thrown out of a class at this age will definitely be an embarrassment. The quality of the teaching has been outstanding till now.  But to do a pre reading, assignment or case study and then listen to 6 hours of lecture will take us some time to get accustomed. Add to that a surprise quiz, which in reality is more of a shocker, makes you wonder about the fairness of life. The word class participation has taken a new meaning altogether. While in the engineering days, we used to hide in the back benches and avoid eye contact with teachers, here one would be lucky to get a chance to put his point through. And the reason is the rich wealth of experience everyone brings to the table. Right from IT classes to Human behavior everybody has a story to share, and unfortunately the instructors have to put their foot down sometimes so that they can at least complete their slideshow without interruption. I have probably learnt more from my classmates and instructors in the last one week than what I learnt in my previous job in the last one year. And that’s precisely why I think everybody should go back to school after a while, just to rekindle the curiosity and to rediscover the child in ourselves. Once we realize this, everything else will fall into place.

The dorm facility has been amazing and the food has been good so far. The best part of the hostel life is the camaraderie you share with your classmates. Although most of us are in our thirties, the hostel has taken us back to our college days. That includes right from borrowing the iron box, giving bumps to class toppers to searching tea and snacks in the middle of the night.

So, that’s pretty much the synopsis of my first week at Joka.Let me end this blog, again with a quote from our beloved security guard “Yeh toh shuruaat hai sir, picture abhi baaki hai”.

And miles to go before I sleep

Yesterday was my last day at my company and I got a lump in my throat by evening. I just could not say goodbye or thank you to my team or my managers. This was the place where I belonged, I was the first recruit for my team back in 2006, when they started our center. I was 25, had no idea where I wanted to go , what I wanted to do. I had quit my previous job (on a whim) on a Monday and already had planned to pack my bags and go back to India. Just applied to a company on a friend’s recommendation. Surprisingly, I got called the very next day and by Thursday I had my personal interview done. There were a couple of directors in the panel, who told me that it doesn’t matter what I know, what matters is what I do with it. I took their word and joined them the next Monday, didn’t care about the money (which I should have) or the field (IB), just went with my gut.

The last six years were fun. Worked in mortgages in the worst possible time, put in long hours, got butchered most of the weekends and yet somehow managed to be on talking terms with my wife :) . I learnt the art of maintaining sanity, even when your best friends get laid off, even when the business folk use choicest of abuses every other day, even when a 5 person team has to do 10 people job due to budget cuts and to top it all, even when after all this most of the team gets a zero bonus due to a “bad year”. Gone were the days when 15-20% bonus made everybody droop, we were thankful just to keep our jobs now. Yet somehow throughout this turmoil I developed an affinity to my company. I could not be bitter at all, for what I learnt at my company far outweighed the hours I put in for them. Made great friends, actually enjoyed my work, and yes a couple of promotions helped the cause as well.

Last year, I thought now was the time for a change and I need to reenergize myself. I wanted to go back to school. Gave my GMAT, applied to a few schools and got admitted in most of them. After going through the economics and logistics part I narrowed upon IIMC. The road was easy till now. In the last couple of months it dawned upon me, how incredibly difficult it is to walk away from everything which you built brick by brick for so many years. I had a family, friends, a home, cars and a steady income. To turn back on everything, pack up the bags and proceed to India has been quite an eye opening experience. Although everybody around me is pretty appreciative, the fear of the unknown looms large. I am pretty sure most of my batchmates might be going through the same kind of emotions in varied degrees. Friday was my last day at work and I still have no clue what I am going to do come Monday.I am 31 now, have a vague idea about where I want to go and what I want to do.Lets hope the next one year journey turns out to be interesting and enjoyable.

Till then, as Robert Frost says in “Stopping by Woods on a snowy evening”
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Truth about Tiger Moms

This excerpt is from my latest Toastmaster's speech

Hello all, today I am going to talk about a little controversial topic which is all over the news lately.

For the uninitiated, a memoir of a mom released this month called "Battle hymn of the Tiger Mother". It’s about how an Asian mom raised her two daughters in USA. A small preview was released in Wall Street Journal. That published bit was so controversial that stirring debate raged over internet and the Asian mom and her daughters made it to the cover of this week's Time magazine. Before I start talking about anything remotely related to this topic, let me tell you what the passage preview contained. In the passage Amy, the mother makes her 7 yr old daughter Lulu learn and play a piece in piano continuously for 4 hrs without a water or restroom break. Any grade other than A is unacceptable in their household. Once, she rejects her daughter's greeting card, saying that it was not good enough. In short she plays the role of a tiger mom whose cubs she thinks would one day rule the world.


There has been a huge uproar against the book, but surprisingly it made it to the bestsellers list in the first week itself and its selling like hotcakes in e-book version as well. I am not here to build a case for or against the book, but instead I am here to talk about my experience growing up as a kid in a middle class family in India.

If you take this book to India and read out aloud a few passages in the street, very few would be surprised or create a stir about these passages.It’s not because, Asians are tough parents, but it’s more, a result of making most of the limited opportunities one gets there. Things have changed quite a bit now in the last 10-15 years because of the economic boom. Back in the 80s and 90s, the only grade acceptable was indeed 'A', because anything lower would not get you into a good school. Every parent wanted their child to become an engineer or a doctor, because anything else might not lead to a luxurious or good life. None of the sportsmen were millionaires. Music and arts were respected, but not very well paid. Twenty years back my city in India had two engineering colleges and one med school and its population was 1/2 million. Only thousand odd kids could go to these schools, so the parents had to assume the role of a hard task masters, there was no other alternative. "Survival of the fittest" mechanism fit the theory, I still remember the day when I had finished my middle school, my parents had to stand in line for the whole day just to get an application form of a prestigious private high school. Though I never made it to that school, I still think I turned out ok.


For the lack of time I am going to wrap it up here or else I can go on and on about many more tiger parenting stories.I don’t know whether it was right or wrong or whether the same Asian methods should to be replicated here, but what I am definitely sure of is that if your kid is trying to play a piece for four hours, he definitely deserves a restroom break. I am not a parent yet, so no personal tiger parenting stories from me. But I am sure most of us in this room have their own sweet little story to tell.
Thank you.

Mortgage backed Securities

After more than a year in hibernation, I am going to start blogging again. Hope this time , I will be more prolific than my previous attempts. From here on, most of my posts are going to about investment banking or financial products related. Just thought that I should jot down whatever limited knowledge I have acquired in the last five years. So here's the first installment.
I am going to talk briefly about Mortgage backed Securities , just a general overview. In the next few weeks we will get into more details.

What are Mortgage Backed Securities?
MBS is very much similar to bonds, but here the securities are backed by mortgages. A bond is a promissory note where a corporation (or a Government) obliges to pay a certain sum of money every month and at the end of term repay the original sum back. In the case of MBS, the repayment is backed by mortgage payments (by the homeowner).

On a broader level, this is what happens. A few mortgages which are similar in nature are pooled together. They are securitized by either a Quasi governmental agency (FNMA, GNMA etc) or a corporation. These pools of MBS are sold to other institutions. Every month, the owner of the pool will receive a portion of the interest payment and principal on the mortgages. There are many risks associated with the cash flow, right from prepayment to loan defaults. Because of MBS the risk of the loan is distributed among all the stakeholders and is not limited to only the small bank which lent the money ( not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing :-) )
Other than small banks looking for liquidity, MBS is a good way of converting a illiquid asset into a tradable instrument. It allows the banks or the originators to diversify the financing sources as an alternative to traditional bonds and stocks. Balance sheets looks more sleek, and the risk is now distributed across the globe.

Hawaii!

Had gone to hawaii last month. One of the most beautiful places I have ever seen!

emails and Letters

Had heard this nice speech way back, from Srimathy at the toastmaster's.
Here's the gist, its a good read.
Dec 2007, the week before Christmas, I decided to send a gift to a family friend. I was trying to make a point, that I did not care for expensive gifts and what really mattered was the thought. I chose a book, “Life’s little instruction book.”, cost about 7.00$. I wanted to tell them that it was a fun book to read with someone you cared about. I was also wishing them a life full of happiness and joy. Keep all this in mind as you listen to my story. I went online to Barnes& Noble.com.

I ordered the book, selected Gift wrap and spend a lot of time compressing all this into 250 characters. I clicked the confirm button and soon I got an email confirming my order. There was no gift wrap and there was no personal message. I panicked. I called customer service and after a long wait I spoke to a real human voice on the other end. I was told that the gift wrap could not be fixed but a personal message was easy to add.

I spent the next fifteen minutes spelling out an Indian name, and with all the tension tried to recreate the message in 250 characters. I was not completely happy with how it turned out but I let it go. Finally the book arrived in few days. No gift wrap, no message and surprisingly, the from address was theirs too. So they were left wondering when they ordered a silly book. They were polite to me but the meaning of the whole act was totally lost. Far from how I had imagined it.


I would like to talk today about the charm of hand written notes and letters.Communication modes have changed a lot over the years.Especially now that postcards have been replaced by status updates in facebook and twitter.The new culture is one of speed and hurry. Everything is shortened and we sometimes do not even write complete sentences. I know a friend who signs off as R. In the midst of all this, why is it more charming to receive or send handwritten notes or letters?

There is a charm to choosing fine stationary and writing with a fountain pen. People sat down just to write a letter. We did not communicate in short sentences so often and so there was more to communicate in the written form. More of it was also retained by the recipients. There is something about letter writing that lets your thoughts flow. If you are in the right frame of find, it is almost unstoppable once you begin. You make a special connection with the person to whom you are writing. History has many a record of collections of love letters, educational letters and travelogues.
There is a fine collection of letters that Nehru wrote to his daughter Indira Gandhi when he was in prison.

Those of us who are from the age of letter writing have our own treasures. The last time I went to India, I brought back a large bagful of old letters. I still enjoy holding the piece of paper in my hand, feeling it, and cherishing the old times… Strangely I don’t have any letters from the last five or six years. The internet age has taken over and I really dont read even a week old email

You may notice that of late even Christmas and New Year wishes are not addressed to individuals, but to groups. Mass distribution lists are good for work related communication. But when you received a ‘happy new year’ note along with 50 others copied on it, it seems very impersonal. Probably its fitting with the times of hurry and speed.

In the evening when you pick up mail, it would be nice to receive a letter for a change instead of bills and catalogues. If you enjoy that, take the time to write to someone and you will be surprised at how much joy there is to writing.