2012....

Now that finishing of the exam was done, the next challenge had come up...
General Management and Communication Skills (GMCS)...

The compulsory 15 day training program...
For me the program was scheduled to happen in Trichur/Thrissur, the place where i was born. The place from where my mother is. The place always meant a lot to me. Going back few years, it was a place where i always enjoyed going as the place always had people called cousins and cousins meant fun...

This time, going there meant classes... Classes meant new people... New people = New friends... So all was set, trains booked and left for Thrissur on Jan 22nd... Stay there was at my uncles place...

I had instructions from people who had attended GMCS before. The main one was that tying a tie was compulsory. I never had tied a tie before. So before starting to Thrissur, a special coaching was conducted by my dad on how to tie it. I always wondered why the tie was compulsory. Till now i haven't found the answer to it...

We started of as total strangers but those 15 days more than enough to bring about a bonding between us... In those 15 days we learned things... Public speaking, time management, case study discussion... We played.. A modified version of rock paper scissors, a skit... And then there was the most fun filled part... We were able to give company to a set of people who only had god for company... We spent a day with them...

But the feather in the cap of the 15 day training program was the boys only tour to Nelliyampathi in Palakkad... Since it was a boys only tour, there was no do's and dont's. There were only do's. A full day trip and lots of walking and photographs.... That day was fun...

In between this training program is when the great job hunt began.Registration for campus placement had began and i registered myself for the job fair with the hope of getting a job... Like all good/bad things must come to an end, the program came to an end and it was time to say goodbye... But we knew we would be seeing each other often from now...

So it was bye bye to thrissur with the hope that i wud get a job through the campus placements....

(To Be Continued) 

2012...

This blog is dedicated to all those people who spared even a second of their time for me in the past year...

The past year was one of great learning for me....
Every day is fresh... every day is a new beginning...
365 days of experience is what last year gave me...

When the year began many people had the belief that it might be the last new year we might see... But, we are still here catching up with each other...

For a few of us, it was not the world ending which mattered... We had SATSANG, a regional conference of Calicut Branch of Southern India Chartered Accountant Students Association, coming up... Some of us were busy running behind organising the program. The program went off well...

Once the program was done, the dates of my CA final results had come... Then it was this date which i had to look forward to... I still remember the day of the result... January 19th... Painting going on at my house... Parents at home... Results expected 8 AM... Sitting in front of the system from morning 6 ..Refreshing the page every 15 seconds... At around 7.30 we got the news it has been postponed to 2 PM... So break for 2 hours and back to refreshing around 11.00 AM... Dad had a call at office at around 12.00 PM... So refreshing stopped again and went out to drop him...

By the time i came back and refreshed it showed CA Final - Results declared... Time was around 12.30 PM... Time to check... Entered my roll number... I got a message 1st saying invalid roll number... Thats when i realized i had forgotten my number... Second try... Number went through... Result failed... That is when i checked the name to find that it was someone elses... I called up a friend who had wriiten with me...
I could see the tension on my mothers face...

Yes... this time the number did go through and it was my result... Some of you know me... so you already know the result... some of you dont... for those who dont know me, the number of CA's in our family had just been increased...

 (To be continued)

Calicut: A queen by herself

In the past 6 months, ever since i moved to Chennai, i have been travelling a lot between Calicut and Chennai. The railway station at Calicut never seemed so beautiful until i moved 660 kilometers away from her. Added to the distance it was the wait for one month and a journey of 12 hours in the 3rd class compartment of the Mangalore Mail, in which cockroaches where the smallest animals you could find. 

As each day passed, the beauty of the queen so far away seemed to increase. As the train entered the station, the board having the words Kozhikode in English, Hindi and Malayalam was a sight by itself. Early morning 4'o clock, a city still wide awake. I could see those shops and tea stalls still running their business. People who are driving about within the city, the lorries that pass by occasionally. By 5 half the city was up and heading for the prayers. While on one side, i could hear the devotional songs from the temples, and on the other the prayer from the mosque. 

In which other place do you have a very old temple and a mosque on two ends of a single road hardly 200 meters apart, a single project that was implemented to preserve both these monuments... 

Whenever i travel to Calicut from Chennai, whatever be the means of transport, even if the 3rd class mentioned above, or the journey with Gokul where we got the back seat in a bus and got fully drenched (inside the bus), never seemed a struggle. But it was always a pleasant journey. But the return journey, bidding adieu to Calicut and coming back to Chennai, even if its in the 1st class compartment, has always been a struggle.

But i still find it strange that Calicut still is not famous like Chennai or Delhi or Mumbai or Kolkata inspite of the fact that she was the first city in India which gave a passage to the English into India. She was the one who changed direction in which India was headed. Of course she didn't welcome the invaders with her hands open. 

I know when i write these words, wherever i may be, i'm still a person from Calicut and if i settle down, it will be at Calicut. If you ask the question why, the answer is simple... i'm in love with that place...

The Era where Man is with Machine

The pace at which technology has grown is something very interesting and this is something which has been discussed quiet a lot too... If we take a normal day in our life and see how much machines we use, it is so high that if we were to go back to stage where these were not there, we would find it hard to even get through a single day.

Now that i work in a BPO, i find it strange to see people in my office looking at the computer screens from morning 7 to about evening 8-9 etc. I look at it from morning 7 to maybe 5 on a daily basis and occasionally up to 8. But after coming back to my room, i  switch on the lap or the smart phone that i use and am back to staring at a screen.

Thanks to the technology again, i'm able to talk over phone to my friends and family back home. Thanks to technology, i can shop, bank or do anything online. But, when i go back home to my friends and family i don't have anything to speak. The human touch that was there to shopping, banking - the hello or the wish you get - when you go to shop or bank is no longer there. People are so reluctant even look at you smile nowadays. We have moved from being social to being E-Social.

i find it even more odd in the 1st class or 2nd class compartments in trains, where as soon as people enter, they switch on there laptops or tablets and are back working. Are people so busy these days???

Not very far down the line, we will get a time where there will be no hand shakes and everything will be electronic. From that day on we will be E-Humans...

Have a good E-Day people...

A Come Back

I have been wanting to get back into writing for sometime now. But for some reason i haven't been able to get back into it. The first excuse which comes to my mind when i ask myself, why i didn't write for so long is "I was busy and had no time". Was i so busy for these many days that i couldn't spare half an hour or an hours time to write???

i have had lot of free time these many days that if you were to take count of the time that i have wasted, it would run into months. So what prevented me from writing??? Next excuse which comes up is "No topic". In this world where everything you see nowadays is a subject of study, does the excuse no topic to study have any relevance??? 

Humans have this unique ability of coming out with excuses. But the beauty of excuses is that, at some point of time, after some filtering, we reach a certain point where the excuse might be the genuine reason and the funniest part is that, that genuine reason is the one which have a big problem accepting.

I have been lazy these last few days and have wasted my time on facebook that i didn't want to move out from there to come into here to write. An article a day is going to be my aim from today. Look forward your support and feedback...

been long since i wrote something...
i have always wanted to get back into blogging...
but i kept on putting it off...
and now that i have written about 100 pages in the last one week (my b com xam) i believe this is the right time to make a re entry...

PWD: Poor Works Department

I seriously dont understand the logic of what the Kerala PWD is doing.
Hero of this blog: of course the Mini By Pass road in Calicut.

Well.. some people say it was named by pass only because there are two hospitals on that road which perform the by pass surgery.
has it served the purpose????
when the came up with the idea of this road, it was to make sure the traffic in other main roads within the town remain controlled... i seriously doubt if this road has served the purpose... This has been one of the roads in Calicut which has been subjected to huge amount of tortures starting with the 'JAPAN KUDIVELLA PADHATHI' and now to 'THE CLOSED CONCRETE CHAL PADHATHI'.

The road has been impossible to travel even for two wheelers let alone those big buses. There has been a project going on for approximately the last three months. Now into the last phase, tarring the roads. I felt happy a few days back when i saw that it was being tarred. As the old saying goes, joy is always short lived. They finished tarring of one side and moved on to the other and what do you get, there is some other department who have started digging the already tarred side.

why is it that there is this mis-communication or no communication between to government departments???
it looks as though they have taken an oath they will not let people drive smoothly.

well whatever they do with the road, do the regular commuters have an option???

well, afterall, the show must go on

and ya one thing that i noticed was, the workers doing this project are so punctual that they do the work only from 10 to 5....
cool right???