I will be busy for the next few months with finding a home and taking some mandatory exams. I will be back on my blog after that.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I moved to Mumbai in July last year. I was highly relieved and excited when I found that unlike most of my peers, I would be spending next couple of years at a place other than Bangalore. I have a terrible experience struggling with the mismanaged transport infrastructure of Bangalore during my internship time. The city lacks subways, and one can rarely cross a street without getting stranded for minutes.

I must mention that the relief I talked about was not unfounded. I visited Mumbai for 5 days in September 2003 for the Aditya Birla Scholarships interview. Though I did not get much time to roam around, that visit reinforced the cosmopolitan image of Mumbai I had my mind. While travelling from the railway station to the destination and back, the weather and the path made it feel exactly like the movie scenes where the lead is travelling in a cool town in his open jeep. The only place we visited out of our way was Gateway of India (well, not exactly “out of the way”; we stayed in The Taj). I left the city wanting to come back and have a better look around soon.

Ironically, it saddens me to realize that I now work and stay in Mumbai. Sixteen months into it, I have found that the city is nowhere near the “Mumbai” I experienced in my first trip. Well, a lot of things still attract me, and will always do. But if I leave these “fascinations” aside, I dare say that everything else about this city is screwed up. Yes, in the real sense of the word!

Picture this:

7:00 AM. Wake up. Check email. Internet not working. Bah.

7:30 AM. Wake up call from Mom. Start talking. Call gets dropped after 20 seconds. Huh.

8:00 AM. Watch news channels. Read newspaper. Someone broke something in town yesterday. Someone is doing something about it. All the same. Crib. Show me the NEWs!

9:00 AM. Get ready for office. Fortunately everything is in order in the bath. Yay!

9:35 AM. Auto-rickshaws not on strike. Relief. Hunt for an empty one.

9:40 AM. Could not find an empty one. Curse mankind for over-population. Start walking towards office.

9:45 AM. Walked nearly 1 km. Pity the godforsaken roads. Finally found an auto. Thank God. Yippee!

9:50 AM. Stuck in traffic jam. Half road blocked due to construction. Vehicles parked carelessly on the other half. Curse mankind again. Curse yourself. Curse everyone. No point. Wait and watch.

10:00 AM. Somehow manage to reach office on time. Thank God.

2:00 PM. Feel like eating outside today. Come out. Get wet – either due to heavy rain or due to sultry sun. Crib. Return. Eat random office meal.

9:00 PM. Reach home. Check mail. Net working dead slow. Try calling Mom. Network strength weak. Wait.

9:15 PM. Try calling Mom again. Connects this time. Voice breaking. Crib. Get frustrated. Bid an early good night. Have dinner.

10:00 PM. Net crawling. Takes minutes to open mail account. Curse. Curse. Curse.

To sum up, no network connectivity on Vodafone phone, crawling Tata Indicom “broadband”, broken roads, no traffic management, overcrowded local trains – all in all, a total infrastructure breakdown.

Would you want to stay in a “financial capital” that offers you this kind of a lifestyle? And, above all, costs you more than Rs. 15 thousand per month?

I have to. And many others.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

“You’re fired !! “

“You’re hired !!”

Do these phrases sound familiar? If the answer is yes, then you are most likely one of the two:

1. A fan of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.
2. Related to finance industry.

Donald Trump made these words (hired and fired) somewhat common in my life, but at the end of it all, its a competition and only one will win. So its fine – I was assured in some sense that real life is not that dynamic and risky. But, finance industry surely defies that.

As a “child”, I always thought of a full-time job as a secure, constant and satisfying source of income. I was wrong. These two words are more commonplace around me than they ever were, and I guess are for many of my friends. Unlike most of my classmates at IIT, I had opted against higher studies after my Bachelors so that I get a “feel” of the corporate world. I think I have got much more than what I was looking for!! (Yeah, trust me, I work(ed) with Lehman Brothers)

The idea of writing this post is the amazement – the words “hired” and “fired” have become so common that any emotional attachment to a financial firm is impossible. Till few months back, I used to attach immense emotion to these two phrases. But the finance industry in the last few weeks has changed all that. Perhaps, this is what they call “growing up”. Things just change too rapidly. I need not say a word about what happened on the wall street in the last month, because either it will be news, or speculation – either of which will be unnecessary. Firms having history of tens and hundreds of years collapsed in days, managements got restructured like crazy, businesses got shut, thousands went jobless, stock markets tumbled etc. Too much for a mortal to swallow.

I touched upon the emotional attachment aspect because I was involved in a big project which was used by almost every person in my team. One fine Monday morning, I find that all my work will be just a piece of code in a few days. On a personal note, I was going to part with a work on which I spent an year, and I was emotionally attached to. On a practical note, I was one of many thousands whose hard work of years was about to fall flat. Thankfully, now that Lehman’s assets have been bought by Barclays and Nomura, I am sure that my work will not go waste, even if I am no longer associated with any of these entities. Not that I do not want to, but anyway, that’s another discussion.

The post may feel incomplete, but I do not have anything else to say. Too many things going on in mind. I got to finish some critial tasks before I get to hear “You’re fired.”

You never know, it could be tomorrow !

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

But I would like to add here that the latest Google services like blogspot, and orkut(recently taken over by google) are not that impressive. The interface of blogspot is not at par with other Google services, and orkut has a silly bug which annoys you big time. If you are a regular orkutter, you must be familiar with the line : “Bad Server, No donut for you”. Once in a while is ok, but this thing has started appearing too often that it has started bugging me off.

I was just going through some technical info about Google on their site(Now that I got to intern in google, its good if I am familiar with these things )..

And without doubt, in my opinion, anyone who is learning internet starts its lesson not with A, but with G..

“G for GOOGLE”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Its a feeling hard to explain.. and harder to write! The day before the interview I was browsing Google’s site for the intern projects. And going through past internees’ experiences and their projects, and visualising myself there!
The feeling that I am one of them now, is just great.

Lets see if its Bangalore or Hyderabad..

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Everywhere you will find stuff like.. “Google spends most of its time in hiring”. Thats actually true. A company of this caliber wont and shouldnt compromise at all.. be it interns, be it jobs.. anything.

I have had 75 minutes of telephonic interviewing with Google in 2 days. And if I had to describe Google in one word, I would say “interesting”. Though I have little experience interacting with other companies but Google has something different. Thats what I felt.

The first interview, started with the discussion of some project work, and then there came a really really unexpected and interesting question. That was about Google News.

The question : How will you choose the two stories to be displayed on Google News homepage?

The second and more interesting question : After you decide the stories to be displayed, what about its title? A news item has got to have a title No? That was even more interesting to answer. The guy seemed impressed.

That essentially was in all the first interview. The second one started on a similar note. Though the interviewer (this time a Ma’am) seemed more interested in my projects. She chose some projects that appealed to her and asked me to explain in detail about the projects and my contribution in them.

Then came some algorithm questions.

1) How will you implement a C++ STL Vector in C?
2) Given a text file, containing a URL in each line, you have to find out the top 1000 domain names which have the maximum URLs under them.

Interesting questions.. arent they? Well your opinion may differ but it was real nice talking to Googlers..

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.