After a quiet two days at home, I finally ventured out on Sunday evening for mass. I?ve realized that I can spend days at home without evening stepping outside and not even think twice about it. Pizzas always get delivered, don?t they?

Anyway, Sunday the 4th also marked the 28th Wedding Anniversary of my parents and since Dad isn?t here I decided to take Mom out for dinner. However, she chose to order home and so be it.

Dinner was Chicken Manchurian, Prawns Masala and Chicken Fried rice. We tried a smaller new restaurant near my place instead of the regular one I ordered. While the chicken was good, the prawns was terrible. Note to myself. ?Do not order sea food from small places?.

Monday and Tuesday were normal days. Aditya was in Mumbai yesterday on placements work and dropped in after that was done. Took him to InOrbit, Malad whose sheer size had him all amazed.

Got back home, bid farewell to him and got ready for Seema?s birthday party. We were at her place gossiping and chatting till post 10.30pm before I drove back home. Had no energy to make any of the blog posts I had originally planned. Had also decided to make my way back to Pune and so needed to get some sleep.

Caught the second Volvo to Pune. The last time I was on my way back the bus tire was punctured and the driver and cleaner spent a good hour fixing that. Fortunately, today I didn?t face any such problem, though the bus that I missed by a minute broke down on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. After our driver lent a hand, we were on our way.

Reached here in the morning, met up with friends and then got down to making those blog posts. The count of unread posts in my RSS reader is slowly mounting. As is the case of my Gmail inbox which seems to be locked due to Google detecting unusual activity. Now, me not checking my email for 20 hours is characterized as unusual Hopefully, this gets unlocked by tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a long day with a lot of lectures scheduled. We also have a so called Finance paper to work on tonight.

Considering the “cheery” spirit this year, top financial consultants have composed a new Christmas carol below.

To be sung to the tune of “Santa Claus is coming to Town”

You’d better watch out
You’d better not cry
You’d better keep cash
I’m telling you why:
Recession is coming to town.

It’s hitting you once,
It’s hitting you twice
It doesn’t care if you’ve been careful and wise
Recession is coming to town

It’s worthless if you’ve got shares
It’s worthless if you’ve got bonds
It’s safe when you’ve got cash in hand
So keep cash for goodness sake, HEY

You’d better watch out
You’d better not cry
You’d better keep cash
I’m telling you why:
Recession is coming to town!

Finance products are confusing
Finance products are so vague
The banks make you bear the cost of risk
So keep out for goodness sake, OH

You’d better watch out
You’d better not cry
You’d better keep cash
I’m telling you why:
Recession is coming to town.

Yesterday was the start of our much not-awaited third semester

I haven’t had much time to get down to blogging what I have been upto in the past month. Having celebrated my birthday in Mumbai, I headed back to Pune to get on with life.

Had originally planned to come back to Mumbai on Thursday itself for Placements work. However, a thought improvement workshop interrupted these plans.

The workshop was conducted by CGN. The workshop is actually a program by The Pacific Institute. I had originally planned on going into details for the same, but I guess most of the same is copyrighted and it would not be correct. In brief, the workshop covers topics like scotomas, Reticular Activating System, Gestalt psychology. In all it was an entertaining three days. We did miss a finance test in the middle, which I would have liked to attend.

Left for Mumbai early Sunday morning and reached there by afternoon. It’s been starting to take too much time traveling to and fro between Mumbai and Pune!

My first job was to clean up the house. Took out the vacuum cleaner that I purchased oh so long back and cleaned up lots of dust from my computer primarily, and then the rest of the house.

Aditya was to stay with me for the entire week while we roamed the city visiting companies. Well, that’s exactly what we did, “roamed the city”.

The next five days were extremely exhausting, with us traveling in all directions, in buses, rickshaws, taxis and more importantly, the local trains of Mumbai. The five day first class tourist pass did not provide that much relief!

Left for Pune last Monday and took well over five hours to get back to college. The journey was extremely frustrating. Caught a volvo at about 9am, which reached Wakad around 1.30pm! I made the mistake of getting down at the Police Chowky, only to find no rickshaws. Had to climb mounds of construction work and walk a good deal to find the tumtums. Would have taken photos but I had my hands full with three heavy bags!

Walked another kilometer or so from the Hinjewadi chowk to college, wondering at every step of the way if I would make it back alive.

Reached my room only to find out that I had a class, which had already begun. Had a quick bath (it was a necessity) and rushed for the class, which was immediately followed by a test.

The rest of this week has been extremely lazy, with a good deal of electricity problems. And, it is the weekend yet again and yet again we are without power for full 48 hours!

Did I mention that in times like these I really really miss Mumbai?

After intense internal and external debates, hours spent on pondering and an equal number on (re)searching, I finally selected my electives for third semester.

So, here goes (number in brackets are number of credits):

Finance Electives

Corporate Finance – Theory and Practice (4)
Financial Statement Analysis (4)
Mergers and acquisitions (2)

Operations Electives

Supply chain analysis design and modeling (2)
Project Management (Ops) (2)

IT Electives

Software project management (4)
SAP-BIW (2)

Economics Electives

International Economics (2)

Now, I hope they prove to be a good choice, because I had a really bad experience last semester.

Lil white mouse came over last Saturday, as well as this.

It’s been a while since I had a pizza, so we ordered two pizzas from PizzaWay, which is where I normally ordered because they are tasty and cheap. This time I was told there was no deal available, but bargained my way into it. Hey! I am a regular customer when I am in town!

Went for morning mass on Sunday. It was a surprise because I normally don’t wake up in time.

Lil white mouse wanted to go shopping. I hate shoppping! But, …

Went over to her place in the afternoon. The place to shop: Bandra

Caught a bus back to Bandra. First destination was Hill Road. We roamed along the streets hunting for shoes and clothes for her. Finally zeroed in on two shops an picked up two.

We decided to visit the Reliance Trendz out there, which opened a little over a month back. The deals are amazing. I picked up a tshirt from there from just 199/- which was well worth it. I am surprised they are still giving deals like this despite running at a loss.

The week at work has been good. My work on the first project has been well appreciated so I am happy. My second project which is in the field of Operations has taken off well. It isn’t something I expected, but it helps me learn other processes at eClerx.

There have been a lot of immediate small tasks which come up on and off so the pace of my second project isn’t as good as I hoped. Have to work really fast in the next two weeks to complete it.

Elective selection is going on at SCMHRD. The entire batch is confused about what to select. I’m taking Finance and Operations subjects mainly, however am still not completely clear on which to take. Don’t want to take on too much of a load.

Foreign language also seems to be compulsory. I really wonder how I am going to manage Spanish

Yesterday and today have been quiet days at home. Lil white mouse came over yesterday. Grabbed a small lunch and then went over to Lucky’s for dinner. Decided to eat tandoori chicken and kababs. The food and the service wasn’t up to the mark yesterday. Went over to Natural Ice Cream on Hill Road

Woke up well past 10.30am this morning, and have been taking it easy at home today. Have to go for mass in the evening and have decided to head back home instead of wandering about the city

Tomorrow is Monday.

Can’t believe my last personal post was on March 4th.. Then we were just getting into the exam spirit and a lot has happened since then.

For starters, we had to get through a barrage of exams, that just didn’t seem to stop. Everyone desperately looked towards March 29th, the last day of the exams, also the day when we could all rush home.

Exams were ok, though they seem to be at some point of my distant past!

Headed to Mumbai on 29th, dropped off my bags, picked up my bike from ABJ, who has been taking good care of it.

Work began on April 7th. I got placed at eClerx. The place turned out to be in Ghatkopar, a part of the city I don’t normally frequent. It turned out that the place is just 20 minutes from my home when I ride through Powai. Also end up skipping most of the traffic.
The place is good. Was given a choice of my project and chose one which turned out to be live in the field of Finance, IT and a bit of Operations. Well, I’m glad.

The first week was spent with reading as my immediate guide was on leave, but the week after that things took off at top speed. Jobs great so far. Doing well I guess. Hope it continues that way for the next five weeks.

Also been spending a good amount of time with Lil white mouse atleast on weekends. We watched Transformers (my review) and The Spiderwick Chronicles (my review).

Had plans to catch many more movies, but for some strange reason there is absolutely no good movie running! Isn’t this summer vacation time?

That’s just about everything I have been up to, viz. work and weekends. No holidays, except for May 1, which was treated as another weekend

Had a lot of plans these two months, but have surely been out of touch with a lot. Going to take a while to get back. I’ll be back