The Red Swimming Pool with Succubus/Incubus

“Isn’t the water a bit reddish?” I tried to break the awkward silence between Mahesh and me. However, the next moment surprised me when I turned my head and wasn’t able to locate Mahesh who was sitting alongside me near that swimming pool.
I rushed to look for him and...

“Where did you vanish?” I swivelled him through his shoulder to discover that the person was not Mahesh but an old man who looked young from his back.
“What do you want son?” the old man asked me.
“Mahesh” I mumbled.
“What?”
“No, nothing” I tried to avoid his eagerness to poke into my matters. He looked like an ordinary grandfather-like figure but his voice and eyes were full of energy which was hard to not notice.
“Today you’ll meet SHEEEE, Miss. X and meet a severe accident” the man left me stunned. He knew about SHEEEE and Miss. X! But... How?
“Don’t think too much, I read your blogs” the old man amused me with his reply; I was pleased to discover that my blogs have become so popular.

I was framing a line in my mind to start a conversation with my blog reader, and Mahesh disturbed me and as I turn towards the old man he was nowhere.

“Mahesh! You good for nothing clown where did you go?” I tried to sound very angry over his non-sense act.

--> ...
We were walking through the corridor of our coaching institute when I convinced Mahesh to go to CCD. When we were sitting there the old man’s line started haunting me, how did that person know that I’d meet SHEEEE and Miss. X? And most importantly accident?
When I was trying to decipher the line a boy rushed towards me madly and spills over his coke on my shirt. I went to the bathroom to wash it off.
There I met that old man again.
“Hey! How do you know about my meeting with SHEEEE, Miss. X and accident? Are you God?” I fired these questions at him
He answered casually in a low tone, “maybe!” and started walking, I followed him but the crowd didn’t allow me to chase him. I tried to look for him after manoeuvring my way out of the CCD.

...

I again reached the “swimming-pool” and this time the red colour was too obvious and I couldn’t take my eyes off the pool.



After few minutes I found myself in the swimming pool, and I discovered that the red colour was because of something highly suspicious. I immediately came out of it and ran towards the CCD...

In CCD, I met a girl sitting just opposite to me and smiling at me. I almost jumped with joy to see SHEEEE; I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to propose her today. We chatted for around 30 minutes and I felt that as the world has been paused and we are the only people living in this illusionary world with a proper time-frame. So, just as when I thought of proposing SHEEEE, I remembered how I was rejected by Miss. X when I proposed her in an awful manner.

I started thinking about that day; somebody invaded my thoughts, I saw myself in a street with a beggar asking for alms in “English” in India! Then a man well groomed asks me “what do you want moth##$$^^&^?”
...
Then, I was again back at the table with SHEEEE opposite to me, smiling with her braces. I bent in my knees, held her hand and she started blushing. Just as when I was supposed to say that “Romeo-Juliet-line”, I was interrupted by guess whom?
Yes, Miss. X!
She was standing behind SHEEEE at a distance of few meters from us. I decided to meet her first, I coursed my way towards her but she started looking anguished. When I reached before her eyes, she was staring me with a “you-desperate-looser” look.
...
After few minutes of staring each other, I was in front of SHEEEE and Miss. X, trying to make myself believe the impossible. They came forward, and pushed me in unison from the CCD-at the 8th floor.
To my good luck, I fell in a swimming pool, and yes that was the red swimming pool.
Wait!

That was not a swimming pool, which was something else, two monstrous-looking persons came towards me with some sword-like thing, I tried to swim out of the pool, but the water didn’t help my cause. I forgot swimming; there was a flow of water towards the direction of those guys. I began shouting.
Help, Help, Help!

And, my wing-mate woke me up!



Yeah that was a dream, what did you think?
Those incoherent creepy things only happens in dreams, and that too when you sleep when the world around you is all awake. I can’t call it a nightmare; I might call it “daymare” or a futile attack of Succubus or incubus, whatever you like to name it.


PS: This is 55% true.
PS: I saw "Omkara" today, an awesome movie, loved the use of expletives.
PS: I'm really peace-marofying during my mid-semester exams by watching movies, blogging and sleeping like never before, God Help me!
PS: Peace... LOL

Rashmi bansal: Hungry and Foolish Experience

“Sunil Handa can convince you to jump from the top of a 3-storeyed building” says Rashmi Bansal at a guest lecture organised by the Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur. Yes, she was here!

It felt as if Rashmi bansal took it from where Sunil handa ended when he paid a visit to IIT Kharagpur earlier this month.
Rashmi bansal’s book “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” has crossed the 100,000 copies mark in just 9 months of its release.



She gathered the attention of the full-capacity audience by disapproving the concept of an MBA-degree for being an entrepreneur.
“What we learn in MBA is all common-sense and any graduate from a reputed college/university really doesn’t need to spend two more years with formal college system. As a matter of fact, most of the successful entrepreneurs don’t have MBA-degree rather many of them are college-dropouts. The scene is that most of the MBA degree holders work for big MNC’s in posh parts of the world. The very concept of “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” was to cover 25 IIM-A graduates who chose to tread the path of their own dreams and in process became successful entrepreneurs. The book just tries to defy the myth that an MBA can’t be an entrepreneur.”

She talked about the “Naukri.com” founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani. Bikhchandani’s idea saw the daylight when once he visited an expo and it immediately striked to him that the “Internet” can be used to commercially exploit the “job-seeker market”. However, this idea didn’t materialize in just few days or months. It took him 3-4 years to get funding; he had this idea of a “Job-advertisement business model” from the days he used to discuss the various openings of “Business India’s Job Ads” with his colleagues.

Rashmi gradually moved to the important aspect of patience and perseverance with entrepreneurship; it may take more than 2-3 years to taste the fruits of success but the hard work should never be ceased. The point is “your idea might be best for you” but you also need to convince the consumer to whom you would be selling that your product is unique and can make their lives better. Something related to alternative energy might not be a hot-selling product but gradually it is bound to get acceptance and approval so have patience and have a “10 year target”; project your growth strategy for 10 years and work efficiently towards it.

After your “start-up” gets across the initial barrier of “doing good business” it can either become a big venture or a small enterprise but we all need to compromise with few things and as it goes “Small is beautiful”. Happiness and money are not always interrelated. If you are lucky you might end up being the other “Narendra Madhusudhan Murkumbi (Shree Renuka Sugars)”. Rashmi Bansal also threw some light on the “Murkumbi-billionaire story”, which is not about any new IT innovation but a result of smart business strategy. Her words echoed my thoughts “Innovation is not about doing something new but doing the same thing in a new and efficient manner.” Every Idea is a good idea till you give your commitment and have smart ways to tackle and manoeuvre your way out of troubles in your entrepreneurial path.

The “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” author also discussed about an IIT-Guwahati guy who convinced private car owners to carry advertisements on their valuable asset for anything between 25 Paise to 1 Rupee. He used an orkut community for his initial research while he was studying at IIT. This example of this entrepreneur gives us a strong message that online presence though necessary should be used primarily for advertisement, marketing and market research rather than creating a web-portal and following the cliché-path.

Even after all this valuable experiences and “entrepreneurship-gyan”, you may fail to achieve what you aspired for but you shouldn’t lose your enthusiasm and stop your entrepreneurial pursuit just because of fear; fear of failing. And as the famous saying goes, “The fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself”.
Most business failures are a result of interpersonal problems between partners. This leads us to a very important aspect of entrepreneurship, the “choice of partner”. Ideally partners should complement each other and drive the venture forward.

She talked about the importance of career counselling by citing her experience. Later, she started shifting her focus towards personality development and “listening to our inner call”.

“Many people have no idea whatsoever about what and why they are doing. We should fall in love with our business-idea and try to be an expert in that.” Now, she plunges into her personal experiences and says how she used to write a lot about various careers and eventually joined TOI for 2 years. Daughter of a scientist, Rashmi bansal completed her graduation in economics from Sophia College, Mumbai and further studied at IIM- Ahmedabad.

After working for TOI, she started JAM- youth magazine attributed to her childhood interests of reading a book daily and sending articles for the editorial section of newspapers when she was a college student. JAM was started with a modest "50,000 Rupees" capital investment in the servant room with the purchase of a computer. She along with few other people designed a dummy 16 page magazine and tried to strike deals with companies for advertisement spaces in JAM-magazine. Pepe was the first sponsor. The lesson learnt by Rashmi was that you do not need to have a venture capitalist funding your innovation but constraint of resources takes out the best from a person. She has learnt everything from “0”. Success should have a personal definition.



She knew that writing is her passion and after “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” she realizes that her purpose in life was writing this book.

FYI, Rashmi Bansal's next book is coming in next 2 months.





She bid adieu to us by saying that we must and are capable of doing few crazy things in our life so why not be an entrepreneur and “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”?

Sunil Handa : "Are You Just a Bloody Employee?"

Now, you are in an engineering college or some professional course or you might end up with one pretty soon. What next?
“A decent satisfying lucrative job in an MNC.”
“An MBA degree just after graduation”
“Some more professional courses which could get you a job”

The question I need to ask you is, “are you born just to be a bloody employee?”
By the time you have read till here, you would be cursing me as “just another IIT undergraduate student giving a sermon on entrepreneurship”.
However, these words are not mine. I’m just paraphrasing “Prof. Sunil Handa” from IIM Ahmedabad.



Sunil Handa came to IIT Kharagpur today and took the renowned Laboratory for Entrepreneurial Motivation (LEM) class with much fervour and filled us with motivation to become successful entrepreneurs.
I also don’t want to be a mere employee for the rest of my life and it got resonated with Sunil Handa’s words. He reaffirmed my belief that multi-national companies just exploit our talent and most important phase of our life (20-35 years); and are detrimental to the personality of a gifted person.
The question you need to ask yourself is “will you be happy with a boring, glorified, clerical job throughout your life?”

“Keep questioning, keep improving”

After reading this far, I hope you must have either got a feeling of “stop-reading-this-shit” or if not then proceed.

He threw light on various aspects of entrepreneurship. He told his own story as how he managed to persuade his father for his business aspirations. He laid a lot of stress in the choice of partner and the number of co-founders. Ideally 2-3 is the best. Though, partnership comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Partnership helps you to achieve 100 times more than what you are capable of; the synergic effect.
However, partnerships are bound to break some day or the other. You should be ready to face this reality. The choice of business partner still remains as important and pivotal as choice of a compatible spouse.
The most hindering stone in the path of entrepreneurship is “acceptance”. Acceptance by society; acceptance by family, acceptance by friends and the list never ends.
However, acceptance comes with time and success, as parents in most of the cases are not very specific about your choice of career; they only want your happiness.


He talked about how he saved millions of rupees by just having a proper outlook of the world.
He also validated the need of an MBA degree from a top college; it improves one’s personality by leaps and bounds.
To sum it up, “I don’t want to be a bloody employee!”
Do you?

If you are an IIT-KGP student, just don’t miss the tomorrow’s part. Sunil Handa is going to talk about “Consultancy” as a viable and lucrative career option to start with.
Are you attending it?



BTW, did I tell you about bindeshwar pathak (founder of Sulabh International), do check out about him from here.


Read my satirical take on entrepreneurship from here

PS: Going home tomorrow for two days. Yipeee!

Barack Obama shares his Birthday with me!

I’m not 21 years old but...
...................................
........... (You better complete it!).





These are few screenshots of Google search suggestions. I know it’s lame but it is successful in tickling my dormant sense of humour.
So I turned 21 on 4th August, 2009. It’s not a milestone, I know it!

Few things noteworthy about my birthday:

1. I share my birthday with Barack Obama, Kishore kumar, Arbaaz Khan ... follow this Wikipedia page to learn more.

2. I realised that I’m really lucky. I escaped the birthday bumps rather the “GPL” as they say it in KGP for the 3rd consecutive time; I must be among the very few KGPians who has never been “GPL”ed. If you happen to be my friend here at IIT, please don’t give me GPL for the rest of my stay here at IIT.

3. A very special person became the first one to wish me on my birthday, she set an alarm so as to wake up at 12:00 AM and wish me. How sweet!!! Know about her from here

Birthday anecdote:

It was my birthday; 21st to be exact. I went to the temple for praying that at least I get a girlfriend this year. Just look at my condition, I’ve wasted my 21 most important years without any girlfriend.
"God! Are you listening to me?
Are you there?
I’ll assume that you are listening to me. Why this place called “KGP” devoid of “hot girls”? Don’t you think that we also have controlled our hormonal urges to bury ourselves under books for more than 2-3 years as to get into this place? I really need some pretty faces to be motivated for the rest of my IIT life. I need a hot chick now. Yes, I’m pretty much angry with you."

Just as I opened my eyes after saying these lines, I saw a beautiful girl standing beside me. Her eyes were closed; I thanked God for fulfilling my wish so soon. I began to wonder whether she is from IIT or not. I tried to fake her by closing my eyes again and after 30 seconds when I opened my eyes again, there was nobody beside me. I turned around and saw her going out of the temple. I followed her. Finally, I came in front of her and...

Me: I’m Ashish.

(Suddenly a guy appears from nowhere, and kisses the girl on her head and shatters my heart.)

Hot chick: hmm...What?

Me: No nothing... sorry I thought you were someone else.

I hate you God, you fooled me again.

Lesson learnt: All hot girls have boyfriends... how unfortunate....

My Only letter: Confession...

Hello readers,
I’m Nilesh. I was born to a self-sufficient middle class family. I’m the only offspring of my parents. I want to confess something, I know this is a blog but I don’t have any other medium to express my emotions and feelings. Please forgive me and the blog-owner if I don’t give you any literary pleasure of sorts or if ... you’ll get to know it after reading.
From Childhood days, I was pampered a lot and I still remember that I never would ask for any toys, gifts or chocolates. It’s not that I didn’t like to ask for it or I was a saint but I’d so many relatives who loved me that I was happy and satisfied with them.
During my summer and winter holidays, I used to visit my maternal Grandfather’s place and there I’d meet my other two cousins. We used to have a great time during those 2-3 months and our uncles and aunties would be really annoyed by our irritating behaviour. I can go on describing about my cousins but I’ve shared a special bond with them which they don’t comprehend so better leave it to them.
My mother is the best person I’ve ever met in my life. I truly think that there is no other relationship in this world which I’ve experienced is as self-less as this one. I know this would be rephrased by many sons and daughters for their mothers but that also can’t fulfil the debts of her on us.
After 10 years of continuous pampering, I can easily describe myself as a spoiled brat. My mother used to do assist me in each and every thing. I couldn’t even eat with my own hands, she used to feed me. My School bag was arranged by her and all...
My mother had a severe accident and she became almost incapable to do even her basic things; just around the same time my father had a great loss in his small business and we were forced to discontinue our studies for two months. Nobody came forward to help us. When after much hard work my father’s economic condition got stabilised, my uncle advised my father to take my mother to abroad. My father had lost all his hope so he followed his advice but he forgot that my mom had an incurable ailment. All his money got drained in USA and he had to come India alone with news that we have lost our mother. He broke down; his business was slyly taken over by my uncle and he had no money in his account to do anything. Our uncle disowned us and we were forced to move into a slum. Our father took a job of labourer at one of his friends shop. I had to wash cars and with the little savings we could only afford a government school that too till class 10. After my matriculation I’d to become a driver because my father was diagnosed with blood cancer and we didn’t have much savings to continue his treatment. After few months I lost my father too.
I continued my driving but the big void created in my life was a continuous cause of worry. I began to contemplate the purpose of my insignificant life. Then, I met urvashi. I always used to wonder why god suddenly brought her to my life when I had lost every meaning to live. She was educated and was rich but didn’t mind dating an uneducated driver.
After a lot of drama, urvashi was engaged to me. I was the happiest person in my slum locality. One day from nowhere my uncle appeared in front of me and told to forget urvashi. I was shocked. The most disturbing thing was that urvashi accompanied him and opened my eyes.
Urvashi and Uncle had tricked me. I still don’t know the reason why these many things happened to my life. Why Urvashi did that to me? Why my uncle did that to my father and me? Perhaps the world never liked the happiness we had and was jealous with my father and mother.
So, today I took a knife and slit my wrist. This is my last and the only letter I’ve written.



Mom, I’m sorry but I couldn’t fulfil your dreams and I also couldn’t save my father.
I’m coming mummy and papa, I’m coming!

Disclaimer:This story is a work of fiction with some real life inspirations.

This story is inspired from the rise in the number of Suicide cases in my college campus.