This blog has been called lots of things: excellent, good, fun, enjoyable, and even boring, monotonous, horrendous (ok not this one). The most recent comment has been “boring”. So, why was it called boring. Because, it has been a while since I made a personal post. This blog sees two types of visitors, viz. those who visit my blog for the personal posts and those who visit my blog for the WordPress related posts, plugins and the theme. When I started ajaydsouza.com in October 2003, I had only one thing in mind, blogging about my life. In fact, even till today, most of my posts are still filed under Personal.…
Selling Books at ABC
While making my last post, it completely slipped my mind about our visit to Appa Balwant Chowk in Pune to sell our MBA books. ABC is a well known place in Pune where you can pickup second hand books for MBA, engineering and other streams. There are several raddiwalas there who buy your old books and then resell them to eager buyers who can’t afford a brand new copy. Hence, every year ABC sees a stream of students dropping in with their old books. We joined this list of students to sell the books we collected in the past 20 months. Any money is good money! So, Aditya, Akshat, Sneha…
13 days later
No, I am not talking about the movie, but just the last 20 days of my life; life that has kept me so busy that you haven’t read about any personal updates. So, here’s a quick round up of the last two weeks of my life. The week from 19th to 24th of Jan was like any other week of my life. Spent all of it blogging, reading, eating, talking and sleeping. 23rd was the first and last test of this semester. The test was on Strategic Marketing. We were given a choice between a two simple questions and a case on TESCO. IMO, education should be practical and case…
75% MBA
As I mentioned, I returned to SCMHRD, rather reluctantly I must say. Spent the entire day catching up on blogging and finally got down to finishing the synopsis for the Finance paper before retiring to bed. Realized I had forgotten one of my hard disks in Mumbai itself, which means a good amount of entertainment awaits my return. Friday was lecture day. It began with a four hour lecture (which got cut short to two) of Strategic Marketing and this was followed by an Advances in SCM lecture. Dinner on Friday night was at McDonalds when a whole bunch of us headed out there. The normally freezing AC at the…
A Week in Pune and it’s Mumbai again
After a good long party, I went off to watch The Day the Earth stood Still on Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday were relatively lighter days. Went off to McDonalds for dinner on Thursday. Was so exhausted, that I just crashed after coming back. Friday was lecture day with me attending a Strategic Marketing class. The strategic marketing class so far has been filled with cases which makes studying a pleasure. I hate subjects that require us to learn by rote and vomit it out at the exam. While theory is necessary, it is important that there are a good number of cases. The internet connection at college has been as…
After Fish Curry, it’s back to Pune
This post was scheduled for December 1st, but never ended up getting done. Met up with a friend at Gajalee in Seepz for a sea food dinner. The prices there have already been steep and after the makeover, its gone steeper. However, must admit that one dish is enough to fill two persons. Ordered a sweet corn chicken soup followed by fish tikka masala and some chapatis. Caught the 6a.m. Volvo back to Pune, which has been my routine whenever I come here to Mumbai. Attended lectures in the evening. They are so few that they don’t seem very interesting. However, we have to attend. Sneha‘s boy was down so we…
Back to Mumbai after Exams
My last post was in Mumbai. And here I am back again posting from my home city. Returned to Pune after Diwali vacation on 30th itself to make sure that we study for the Corporate Finance and Software Project Management exams on 1st. Well, study we did, but managed to mess up SPM 🙁 The rest of the week passed by with some good, some bad and some really really ugly papers. Well, January 3rd is the tentative date for the results. Had originally planned on leaving for Mumbai on 10th itself. However, I had to attend a student interaction session by the NAAC team. Symbiosis International University is currently…
Two down, Six to Go, Vacations till then
Finished off my FSA paper on 23rd and awoke early Saturday morning for some last minute preparations for the SAP-BIW paper. This turned out to be a very comfortable paper to write in 90 minutes. Had a quick breakfast and got down to packing for my journey to Mumbai. I love travelling light and infact that is what I did. Picked up my laptop and a few essentials and caught an extremely crowded 11.15am bus from college to Aundh. Was fortunate enough to get a Metrolink volvo to Dadar immediately. Ticket prices were hiked considering that everyone is rushing to Mumbai for their Diwali vacations. The bus was quick and…
Exams begin… Diwali break from tomorrow
Yesterday was the start of our much not-awaited third semester
Pain in the SAS
Have spent the last two days working on a SAS presentation that is scheduled for this evening. Our topic is Business Decision Making in FMCG industry using SAS Enterprise Miner. Everything would have been fine and hunky dory, except that we do not know anything in SAS! So, the last two days has been a desperate attempt of learning Enterprise Miner. SAS and Enterprise Miner are both extremely complicated softwares to work with without formal training. In addition to this, we had to find our own data. Are we in MBA-II or is this self-paced learning? The funniest part of the whole exercise is that his part is supposed to…