Inspiring Citizenship - TEDx Pune

Aga Khan Palace - Pune

I came to Pune a year ago to do my MBA. As I look back today in retrospect, my stay has been a truly remarkable one. I have been introduced to several fascinating people in Pune who have enriched my life beyond words. I have had the fortune of interacting with philosophers, farmers, artists, technocrats, geeks and entrepreneurs whose panaromic perspective towards life have expanded the horizons of my thinking. 

The sphericity of business - Reviving an age old perspective

Sphere of Business on Prezi

Management and Organizational Challenges in India - The sphere of business

Hello Folks,

I presented this paper day before yesterday at All India Management Association. I shall be embedding the presentation I made using Prezi in my next post.

The sphericity of business: Reviving an age-old perspective

Introduction:

The first decade of the twenty first century has been quite remarkable for India Inc. as it heralded its resurgence as the cynosure of the world along with China, spurred by globalization and information technology. The most fascinating aspect of this riches to rags to riches story is the way it arrived at the right moment, realizing its innate strengths developed in her tryst with the forces of history, to lead the way in these interesting times.  Interesting is infact an understatement to explain the bewildering changes happening across India and the world.

Something has fundamentally changed all over the world. Although we see feeble signs of change across the isolated corners of India Inc, it would be dangerous to label them as aberrant behavior across the fringes. The traditional rules of business, sanctified by the collective wisdom of the previous centuries, are getting desecrated and we are coming across blasphemous rules for doing business. Digital revolution is devouring the big-fat entertaiment monarchs which have thrived parasitically on Intellectual property. Several consumer giants are finding themselves enmeshed in ecosystems like Internet over which they have no control. Several Indian Brands are slowly waking up to the world of real-time, pay-for-performance advertising.

The last lecture - B2B Marketing

Hello folks,

I wrote this few months back in my official college mail  after the last lecture of my most favorite subject happened from Oct 2009- Mar 2010. I felt so endearing towards it, i decided to publish it.

Cheers

Venkat

"What I thought was unreal, now for me... seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real... which seems now more to be unreal. "

Fred Alan Wolf - Theoretical Physicist in What the &^%$ do we know

Even in wildest dreams I didnt expect that I would be playing around with this quote in a business class which was christened officially as B2B. However, as nature unfolds its mysteries with infinite possibilities,

Goodbye

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 13; the thirteenth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

My legs are walking in a feverish pace. With my hands firm on the handrail, I climb down in a series of bunches of steps to the atrium. I could have been easily mistaken to be a tarzan stuck inside a B-School campus. I often wonder why am I in an eternal state of hurry. I often chuckle with an air of profoundity whenever somebody says “No hurry”! Are they turning out to be twenty first centuty Hiranyakashyap demons who vehemently declared that Lord Narayana never existed! This joke actually turned out to be an excuse for me to lead a life trapped over a perpetually accelerating treadmill. Yes, MBA life is more like watching Charlie Kauffman’s movies ( Remember, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or Bourne Ultimatum. You don’t know what’s going around. You find yourself running aimlessly for cover while professors are conspirating everyday to make your life miserable by an endless fusillade of casestudies and assignments. Wait, It’s not that I hate doing all of this. I love my professors. I enjoy doing this, as long as I find the topic interesting. However, after some point of time, I become tired and I don the hat of the wise spectator standing above the clouds, “What am I really doing?” “Is this an exercise aimed at reaching the ultimate limits of my knowing or am I finding a jolly good reason to inflate my ego by showing off my intellect amongst my peers” After all, it feels on the top to do something very interesting and win accolades from my professors, much to the chagrin of my friends. I remember reading long ago how AR Rahman tries to crush his ego everytime he sets out to compose music. If a saintly person like AR Rahman “tries” to crush his ego, I can be very well excused for my pandering of ego. I have often noticed that there is a strong sense of epiphany in stumbling upon an interesting insight in the process of exploring the pearls of information strewn out in the ocean of internet, often ego takes over in the verge of completion and makes me a king having conquered successfully a territory of information. Wait, I am not a saint to assert that I have successfully destroyed my ego. I am an ordinary human being after all.
It takes a while to let the power of supreme wisdom dissolve these clouds of egoic thoughts. I begin to ask myself the biggest question of all, “Why am I taking this so seriously, when I am going to bid good bye to all of these at some point of my life”. Yeah,I am not Shahrukh Khan in the climax of Kal Ho Na ho to make such philosophical statements when I have not even completed one fourth of a century in the world I safely assume to be living in. However, there lies the crux of the problem. As long as I consider the whole world to be safe and stable, I end up concocting interesting variety of problems in my life. After all, something has to get interesting when everything is certain. How interesting it would be to reverse this whole thing? Sounds like a good idea! How would it be, if the world were a ramshackle bus I have got into, unbeknownst when I got into, how far I would go ahead, and say good bye to my fellow travellers? Wouldn’t my journey of life then get interesting??

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