Of cabbages and kings .... [Stuthi V.]

from the back of beyond bus rides in east andheri to the hip and happening east village, its been quite a ride.

spent a very quick 6 mths with nambi in cadburys, where i largely remember us drowning our sorrows in drink and being amused by him missing yet another flight or train. a quick run through advertising, ibm and a marriage, left me fleeing the country to the wondrous city of pittsburgh. before i knew it i was riding the economic downturn in New York City, living out of a suitcase, dedicating my body and soul at the altar of mckinsey. a great time though, since it taught me a lot about what i really valued in life, let me spend 7 gorgeous months in tanzania and crystallized my interest in international development.

after a short stint in a non profit consulting startup with some ex-mckinsey folk, sold right back to the corporate sector last year. work as as senior director of corporate strategy at lexisnexis (and i swear i cant get u discounts on the cars), one of two people looking after global strategy reporting to the CEO. well in reality, completely being the CEOs bitch as he figures out what his thought for the day is ! and this is when i confess that i work on m&a deals for the company, and for anyone who ever saw me in a fin class...shhh....

spend a lot of time working with non profits, providing planning support to two very interesting ones in India (GiveIndia and Parliamentary Research Services) that I would love to get on my soap box to anyone who is interested. also work on a couple of boards in NYC specifically dealing with dance and domestic violence..

on the personal front, its been a blast, will have to leave it at "what happens in NYC stays in NYC :)"

the numbers that matters
hiking 2/7 summits, (the easiest ones) kilimanjaro and mt.mckinley
travelling to 30+ countries on 5 continents
living on 250 bucks a mth for 7 mths in tanzania
speaking 2 more languages than i used to (spanish and swahili)
having 19 yr olds look at me like i am really old, teaching marketing classes at wharton and nyu
650 muscles that hurt after taking up odissi 15 yrs after my last dance class

heres hoping the next 10 yrs will bring
work with/ start an innovative intl devlpt venture
take a round the world trip for a yr or two or more..
find and buy a beach shack i can escape to every weekend

...and whether pigs have wings?

Rashmi Das

Hi,

Its great to have this forum and really fun to read all the postings...just to recap on the last 10 yrs of my life...

am in Jersey, near Princeton, and have been here for the last 6 years...i got married in '98 - pretty much an "arranged" marriage to Thiyagarajan..(he goes by Raj) and lived in mumbai for 2 years working with IBM before I decided to put my accent to good use and move to the US :-)) (according to Viggy, i now have a very Tamilian accent in US compared to the American accent that i used to have in India !!)

both of us came with jobs and really lousy timing to be in the US in 2000 when the economy crashed...then had a baby in 2001 - Thriaksh Rajan (who is now 5 years old) ...9/11 happened ...and pretty much roughed it out for the next few years...

we had our 2nd boy - shreshth rajan in 2004 ...bought a house in 2005 near princeton,NJ ....and life has been a roller coaster ride ....lots of fun and lots of hard work....done some fun stuff like the typical US family travelling domestically to vegas, disney, sea world, Hawaii, smokey mountains etc...Make atleast 2 trips to india every year , either on work or personal.....its really good to have some of the batchmates nearby whom we try and meet often like sumi/kush, suneetha and kanja....

am currently with Genpact in a BD role and am hoping to see some of you on my next trip to India which should be in the next couple of months....

cheers

rash.

Its been a while.....[V Kaul]

Awesome job on the reunion - given all the enthusiasm it has generated (though I think the number of posts are still lower than the discussion on the whiskey-rajma issue). Congrats to Kapil, Kalpana and everyone else who made this possible.

Its been 10 years since graduation (since I joined ABN AMRO, thanks to some awesome work by Karthik) and in some sense, I have recently come a full circle - recently joining another European bank (DB), though having cycled through a MBA at NYU and a few years each at UBS and Merrill (seems like my next stop will have to be ICICI because there aren't too many other banks left).

I graduated in 2001 from business school and joined telecom investment banking at UBS (that has to take the cake in terms of bad timing). Moved to Merrill in 2004 to improve my transaction experience after a few dry years and moved to DB when Merrill gave me too much transaction experience.

Very surprisingly, all the exciting stuff I did has been before starting work here - proposing to my fiancee' (now wife) in running shorts/40F weather after running the Chicago marathon, going to the UK to watch cricket in the summers (incl an England/Aussie women game where I was prob 1 of 100 spectators at Lords), running a marathon near the arctic circle at midnight, watching an entire season of 24 in a day non-stop etc.

Still no kids (and no car, not sure what people might find more important). Live in Jersey and work in NYC (and hence try to pass myself off as being a New Yorker, even though I am not).

Have attached a pic of my wife (Sonia) and myself. She was born in Kanpur and I was taking her on a "reunion" trip to Agra and Kanpur (not a good idea to go to Kanpur).

Two wise observations at this stage - there is no point of having a plan in life and Chakra's predictions based on reading my hand have been way too accurate (Chakra - there is still time to extract your fair market share from Ajmeri Baba).

Cheers

P.S. As I write this England is getting crushed, SL is toying with NZ and we are all praying for Tendulkar against SA

A decade under the influence.....[B Karthik, aka Karthik Reddy]

Hello

As promised, and as reminded by M.Singh, I shall launch the recap section.

I did what the rest of the bachelors did in Mumbai from 1996-99 - trudged along the locals from Andheri to C'gate, hopped onto share-a-cabs to N.Point and slogged my butt off for somewhere between 2-4 lakh rupees (different matter that the headlines in pink dailies today scream out salaries of 2 lakh $). All three years were diligently spent at American Express Bank (my campus offer). KD and Charnail were my partners-in-crime but I consider myself fortunate to be in Mumbai as opposed to their far off postings! :-)

Somewhere in 1998, I wanted to get out to S'pore/HK - to get moving on structuring and trading fancy derivatives - what my job in Mumbai introduced me to but never delivered on. The Asian crisis had other ideas for me and left me itching to get out and see the world - the tech route was not an option and, thus, began the 2nd-MBA exodus. I was in the first group that did it in '99 along with Kaul, Papa and Harini (though the latter two were for a nobler Ph.D). [That was also the last time I was on campus - to get recos from Sundi]. I think 10 others followed to the US and Europe. 2 years at U.Penn (Wharton). More importantly, I met my wife - Aditi - at the U.Penn campus. She was there for the same 2 years completing her Masters in Fine Arts (easier to spell out - in every conversation that I mention it, they hear it as a 'Masters in FINANCE'!!!! Imagine that). Well, she's an artist i.e. paints and draws, professionally (her studio is now in Mumbai - moved back to India with me after 12-13 yrs in the US). She's working towards her shows in the next year and if there are shows in cities where batchmates are, I'll be sure to send invites.

(btw, no kids....yet...and the glam photo above is from my brother's wedding this August)

Graduated in the Mother-of-all-Bust years - 2001 (some contend that '02 was worse in the US). Moved to San Francisco to ABN AMRO Tech Banking. The division was let go months after 9/11. Moved back east to DC - 6 months at a start-up - and finally to my home of 3+ years - New York - in late 2002. Bumped into many batchmates here. All of that time was spent in Proj Mgmt and Biz Dev at Instinet (a Reuters co that was spliced and diced by a PE shop and sold to NASDAQ and Nomura). I had been contemplating moving back to India to pursue media/telecom opportunities for a year by then and the sale provided the catalyst. 6 months later - media jobs didn't work out - but came back to run Media/Telecom at SSKI I-Banking in Mar '06. Got hired by one of my clients as recently as last month - Deccan Chronicle (www.deccan.com) - and will continue to work here in Mumbai. My card says SVP - Strategic Planning - and who better than MBA's to know what that really means ;-)

Anything more interesting? Hmmm....well, I've bungy-jumped in Bali, started an indie film streaming site and put it on the back-burner (for now), have seen the Alhambra in Granada (its magical at night), snorkelled in Jamaica and Mauritius, wooed my wife over La Boheme (the opera) in Philly, had season tix to the Philharmonic, proposed to her in her studio, got married in Lucknow over 4th sem spring break, had a sword as an accompaniment (imagine this Chennai-bred, Andhra-born dude doing the Rajput thingey) to my wedding attire, trekked in the Lake District in England, walked the entire Left bank of Paris........hope the next 10 years are more fun.

Love to hear more interesting stories.

Pic from a small reunion in Singapore 4 years back [M.Singh]

Hi,

The blog is a good idea and I am waiting for Karthik to start the catch-up series.

Meanwhile, I decided to post - yeah, it took me 4 years to do so - a picture of a mini re-union of the folks in Singapore who got together when we were travelling through the city - Rambolls, Bokker, Popli and family, Apu, Sonic and I.

Cheers

Manish

btw, in the photo.....

There were a few people who couldn't make it to the photo shoot....and we'll just have to wait for the official photo (which will be bigger and better) - in the interim, here's the who's who of the photo (click on the photo on the blog page - it enlarges fairly well)

Kneeling/Sitting (L to R, or some approximation of it): Manoj Navalkar, Srini, Doc (Suman Ghose), Prabal, Pervez, Atish, Kalpana, Roli, Jolly, Veeru (Virmani)

Standing (L to R, or some approximation of it): Birdie, Nuj, Rajnish Prasad, Kapil, Alok, Bhabhe, Milind, Susanta, Maggu (Manish Gupta), Satish Jain, Jarvis (only hair), Anurag Bhatnagar, Bhatta, Charnalia, Batra, Pavan Sachdeva, Harsh Raut, Akshay Kapoor, N.Shanx, Saraff, Ritesh, Muthu, Aruna, Mathrani, Ramballs, Bhatwadekar, Dibba (Divya Sehgal), Uncleji (Rohit Mohindra), Karthik, D.Singh, R.Shankar, Puro (with large forehead, expounding wisdom), Punde, Ashu Garg, Sammy Nair, Sabu Gopinath, Vyas, Pankaj Bagri, Sathya, Vivekanand, Atul Nath.

Someone wrote back that he found junta unrecognizable (though I think he was mistaken) - hope this helps.

Introducing the batch blog

To everyone in the IIMB Batch of '96:

I know that the newsgroups is an effective medium for everyone in the batch to communicate on specific issues and events. Over the reunion, it was quite clear though that a blog would complete the experience....of the reunion, of events, of issues, of personal lives, of the moments that every person feels like sharing with the rest of the batch - A means of announcing something and not having to engage in a dialogue, a means of staying in touch though one hasn't seen the other for 10 years (...and counting, in some cases).

As Kapil pointed out and as Smiley and I discussed, there were many questions on persons missing at the event, many spouses and children absent amongst several attendees and I would encourage everyone in the batch to share these details with the rest of the batch. It would bring a sense of completeness to this past 10-year reunion and people could keep posting on every event around themselves or a batchmate (e.g. Hitesh's success with Naukri going public - which only validated an already successful personal journey for him).

This would've been a perfect momentum-builder for the reunion. There was an attempt as well I think. Someone created the blog - but it was followed by silence. As for me doing this, my excuse was that I was between jobs, just 6 months after relocating to India...let's say things were a little crazy. As you can see, I have some spare time now before it gets crazy with the new job in Jan.

Blog authors are restricted to the batch and the blog can be viewed by the public - for now. Blog access can be restricted to authors but that makes it cumbersome for spouses etc. to sign on everytime. Obviously, everyone will exercise restraint while posting and stick to relevance and decency.

At the least, I would encourage a photo of each person's little family - whether you're single (yes - still 10 bachelors or so in the batch!!) or a family of 4 (most recent one pls.) - and some details of what one's done with their last 10 years. While some of this was achieved on 24th evening, there are obviously gaps with guys and gals who didn't attend.

I'll probably start the thread, by example, and I hope to see 150 entries in a few days. That would be fascinating, won't it! I would invite Ramballs (for much required humor) and some of the more eloquent and passionate reunion attendees to start penning their 2-day experiences - the rest of the batch is dying to know what we 70+ batchmates did (and THOUGHT!)

Cheers
Karthik