Arbit Scratchpad

If he can play, why can't I? He has the world as his playground, I have my little life! And my emotions. Let me dedicate my life to his game! He builds and destroys at will; I cannot be as versatile, but can't I try? He accepts and rejects my desires and wishes. Likewise I play on: synthesize and rip apart! Outrage yes I play with outrage! Suprise myself and others. Like source, like channel! Follow in his footsteps! There are good players and better players! All that you come across are your playthings. Sometimes you get bruised, injured, sometimes you team up; Sometimes you compete, rules change as do his seasons! Emulate him. Game on! As he plays with us, join in! Earn points, karma whatever. Dive Deep. Or play at the surface if you wish to! Play and see, there is nothing to lose. Nothing to win. It is all a game and Serious or frivolous - all the same. It is all in the game! Life as it were, would m...

A chill descends on the streets ... Invaded by bursts of radiant lights, The night beckons with a cold touch! Diwali's cousin 'Winter' whispers: "Here I come". As the cracker-sounds Drown out the whispers; The change in intensity is Unmistakable! A mild shiver, a longing for warmth That these fireworks conjure up!

Never ever underestimate anybody, treat them as equals - - I AM OK, YOU ARE OK!! Everyone has hidden within themselves the greatest of potentials!! When we underestimate or over-estimate someone, we lose the balance and that can have a cascading effect. Trace back to any of the inter-personal conflicts, problems - it will always be a superiority or inferiority issue/thought/action/mindset. Most dangerous is when we feel I AM NOT OK and YOU ARE NOT OK that is the death-knell and you start falling downwards headlong ... !!

If you have an idea or a dream that is irrational it can be brought to fruition by following reason. The high impact, disruptive and big ideas are always going to be based on feelings, emotions and desire!!! They are best that way and should be that way by definition. However implementation needs a dogged, determined pursuit. Dreams need not be curtailed and must remain. Build castles in the air then build the foundation underneath... It is like a funnel, the lowest level the tactics or the implementation is achieved through reasonable steps that are much simpler. But as you go towards the top of the funnel things become complex and can be unreasonable, unpredictable and plain crazy when viewed in isolation. Like the cells which in turn make up the organs of a human being, bricks make up a complex architecture! Each component structure is a simple entity with basic functionality. What we often try to do is try to understand what those simple steps are and identify a...

The BMTC bus lurches to the right, missing the road divider by an inch. It crosses over to the wrong side of the road; the traffic on this side should be coming towards our end. Instead the bus continues to move ahead on the stretch, as it is now completely empty. It zooms forward as the traffic on the left side is at a complete standstill. The bus driver looks at the left side of the road with glee. The cars, bikes, and other vehicles stand motionless, bumper to bumper. He has beaten them all and has come to the front of the road blockade. The road is blocked as there is a railway crossing and a train is to pass by any moment now. After a while a train chugs along and the barriers lift and the vehicles start moving on either end of the road. The bus I am sitting in had crossed all others thanks to the driver’s ingenuity! Ingenuity? Ok, then should I say he was smart! Smart? Or did he break the rules as all others followed the rules and were stuck. This bus driver at the nick of time...

'Ambar tak yehi naad goonjegaa' - brilliant song by Kailash Kher. This Janlokpal movement is bringing out the best in people, especially the youth - the good, the creative, the activism, the energy so essential for nation building after years of the 'cancer of corruption and its stench in the form of apathy and complacency and even the horror of mute acceptance '. The anger will cleanse the system without violence like in the Naxal movement, the corrupt can no longer sit on top - the pyramid will be inverted! As Chetan Bhagat was mentioning the true nature of humans is basically good - that cannot be curbed for long within a system that requires embracing corruption for anyone to thrive and as a form of repentance for the insensitivity towards the country, the support for Anna is swelling! Respect Kejriwal, Hazare, Kiran Bedi, Prashant Bhushan and many others like Paranjoy Guha Thakurta for spearheading the movement with tacit or explicit support/leading...

It was a fitting finale to Day 1 of Eximius 2011 @ IIM Bangalore. I am referring to the keynote lecture by Harish Hande, MD Selco Solar. His thrust on helping asset generation for the rural poor rather than just selling to them struck me as crucial. Starting on a humorous note with ‎"At IIT Kharagpur I ragged Saurav (Prof Saurav Mukherjee), Arvind Kejriwal ragged me and now he is ragging the country ... " Harish Hande, Magsaysay Award winner went on to highlight the areas SELCO works on and how his journey started. He focused on the importance of market linkages, technology and financial products for the rural or urban poor. "I told him straight on his face that the concept was exploitative. You take money from the poorest at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) and pass it on to the wealthy top of the pyramid without enabling any asset creation at the BOP", Harish Hande referring to his conversation with Prof C K Prahalad on Fortune at the BOP. A ...

Both flowers wilted before they could bloom! One 27, another 28 - too soon ... One a close friend, One an international celebrity! One suffering from pain, Another's pain self-inflicted! The spreading affliction out of control for one, The over-powering addiction out of control for the other! Gutsy, Vibrant, Spirited, Friendly she was! And Gifted, Talented, Inspiring was she ... Words I dedicate for both of them! We can only remember and feel for them. Through their words, memories or music; The void they have created in this world, Irreplaceable all the same! May their souls rest in eternal peace.

Had a great week having joined IBM India Pvt Ltd (Global Marketing Center) as a Competitive Marketing Manager, a role that will involve product marketing and competitive marketing. A great company to be a part of - feels good. Also it was quite a pleasant surprise to get questions, comments and queries from students on the case handed out to the 'Consumer Behavior' electives class at IIMB. The Application exercise has the Ivey ' Dhonuk case ' assigned to a few folks!! Looking forward to some good analysis 2009 and 2010 IIMB PGSEM students!! Analyze well ... :) And totally loved the energy and talent and the atmosphere at Pehel 2011 (new PGSEM batch cultural program). Some very spontaneous/talented performers - actors and musicians in the new batch!!

'AGNT22643001-AGNT22643200 - FLYBACK. 19:56 HRS. MOSQ06052025-ASSAULT-OP-OVERANDOUT. STAT: TRGT ELIM' flashed on the screen. It was June 2025. An unusually humid evening among the shrubs in an arid, parched land. The Al Quaeda mastermind Bin Saleh sat holed in, in his well hidden balcony. The walls in front of him were 12 feet tall, he was hidden from anybody's view from the outside. He heard a few buzzing mosquitoes. One or two landed on his neck. Before he could squash them he collapsed on the floor and lay there motionless! That evening news spread on all major news channels that Saleh had been terminated. The year was 2025, 2001 seemed like the distant past. The scale of the attack in 2021 had been much larger. It was called Flame Down - actually The Statue of Liberty had been hit. The new mastermind was being hunted for, like the olden days. In 2011 when Osama had been at Abottabad there had been a radar evading Apache helicopter based operation. With a few dozen Na...

Our research paper (which I wrote along with Prof B Shekar of IIM Bangalore) has been accepted in the 'Autonomy' track of the Third International Conference on Advanced Cognitive Technologies and Applications - COGNITIVE 2011, Rome, Italy! COGNITIVE 2011 www.iaria.org The research paper submission being accepted itself comes as a great positive feedback. Now it is the rest of the processes that are quite complex!

Imagine a scenario where,  as most often is the case, the entire team of India Against Corruption is in one place - Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, Shanti Bhushan, Santosh Hegde, Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh and others.  My fear is the initiative he has launched is going to threaten many high profile people not only in politics but also in the underworld and the corporate world with substantial clout and the will to stoop to any level - overt or covert. And seeing what happened to one of the people who spoke against A Raja - Mr Bachha who's suicide note was not very convincing! Imagine now one of the parties (not political) threatened by the IAC movement plots a very unique way of eliminating the members in one stroke!  Or in the garb of a terrorist strike.  From what I observed this entire IAC group moves around without too much security cover. And to reiterate they (the IAC team) are all mostly together ... and they do not have the necessary...

Signing the INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR ASSIGNMENT with Richard Ivey School of Business Foundation, at Richard Ivey School of Business, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario for the www.dhonuk.com business case study and related teaching notes!!

EPILOGUE: Uttarakhand Diary Have you ever felt that eruption of a crush? As if someone has just squeezed your heart and all the blood has reached your head! You start floating around in space even though you are standing right there on the ground. It is nothing but an anticipatory chemical surge. You got to blame the chemical dopamine. So what? I say! It feels real and it is – we can define real later on! The bus for Rishikesh had started moving when there were voices heard, someone was yelling from outside. The conductor asked the driver to stop for a minute. Two women came into the bus and seated themselves and the bus started off again with a lurch - the dusty landscape soon giving way to narrow, congested roads. She was now sitting in the bus with her mother. She would have been around twenty five or so, well endowed and taller than her mother; as she sat there she wiped the sweat beads off her dusky forehead with her dupatta ! Princess is what her mother called her (the t...

Photos Courtesy: Sounak Sinha. 08 May 2011, Sunday - On the eve of the 150th birth anniversary of Nobel laureate and poet Rabindranath Tagore, Dr H K Kejriwal the renowned art collector and philanthropist inaugurated the Tagore Hall at the premises of the Jayamahal Sarbajanin Durga Charitable Samiti. The hall is decorated with visual copies from H K Kejriwal's collections of Tagore's letters and paintings along with a few artworks from the Bengal School (Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jamini Ray, Nandalal Bose). The event was initiated with recitation by Dr Kejriwal of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry and was followed by a talk on Tagore by Debasish Banerjee and Rabindra Sangeet by Shamit Bagchi, Debolina Dutta, Srila Banerjee and a few other artistes. The Jayamahal Samiti Presidents B K Pal and Bijan Majumdar were present and addressed the gathering at this joyous occasion. The artifact collection/decoration was conceived and executed by Tapan Dutta, Shamit ...

An article I had written earlier. An analysis of creativity can be done from two different perspectives. One is from the angle of the marketer in alignment with the ad maker. In this case the inducement of trial or an increase in propensity to buy the product or buy in the message is the ultimate dream of the ad maker/marketer. However from the perspective of the user most important is the emotional connect. For high involvement products too TV ads show that the quirk in the ad has to ultimately connect. For the user if this does not happen then it will never translate to sales or a brand embrace. Creative effectiveness can be depicted as a 3 phase analogical process: The first one is the creative blitzkrieg or the clutter breaking usage of drama, the heightened use of extreme/odds and maybe even a slow narrative (the first 30 seconds in a TV ad). Customer’s attention is drawn at this stage. It is not a sequence but more like what happens in the mind of the viewer as h...

Sometimes we are kept away from certain people, places, ways and things in life as if by some invisible hands because we need to be taking/exploring exactly the other paths which we are almost forced traversing ... Call it destiny - but it can be very positively energizing and fortuitous! It helps us discover what we are made for!!

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself - Charlie Chaplin And when you make a fool of yourself, the joy that you get by seeing faces all around you light up in laughter: a tonic relief from all pains of life, is just addictive. Well, yes it is all part of a selfish act! - Shamit Bagchi

So if emotions are bad and utility everything, then ideally I should be a robot who executes tasks with zero distraction, I should have perfect control over all parts of my mind and should operate at near optimal efficiency - is that the intent for any human being? The key question remains - what am I trying to achieve - and why am I doing all the tasks that I am doing and with what purpose? Rationality is mere cause and effect and we get bound in myopia if we take that as the only arbiter. Am I an automaton performing tasks, duties and responsibilities earmarked for me and is that the end of it? I think not! Emotions act as triggers, lubricants and contemplation is what leads you to the next level perhaps providing that shift into the next big thing on the path of evolution - individually and as a group activity! Or is it supposed to be a balance as per the autonomous decisions of an individual - what part is rational and cognitive and what part is emotional, sensory, contemplative.

A numb feeling, Like perhaps what a mother feels; A day after the baby has left the womb? Postpartum depression ... Not that I would not come here again But this odd sense of woolly headed, blurred lights. As the taxi whizzed past the dark shapes of trees. For a moment I started humming a tune No, actually a raaga that I had discovered They say the emotion of a raaga is most important If somehow one can get the raaga purely based on emotions! That is greater than technically learning music. It is like picking out the strains from the substratum of aural fabric Generated from the mind - intuition driven, Instead of being learnt through analysis - bit by bit. I dont know if I had discovered a raaga for late evening Or one for an emotional state evoked by my alma mater! "Alma Mater - Nourishing Mother" - Intellectual. In thought and openness of ideas... Fed for close to three years. Now I felt drained and yet euphoric. Comfort in ambiguity, Of the life ahea...

Selflessness, creative thinking and commitment reads the 'Certificate of Appreciation' from IIMB towards PGSEM Student Affairs' Council initiatives... ! I am honored!

Oh! Whom shall I trust in? Ain't it a wretched world? "Trust yourself first!", came a voice from within or without I know not! "And wretched it shall no longer be."

The puffed rice seller was tall and gaunt, with a wispy stubble on his chin. He was aged roughly about forty five. He’d sing as he went about the neighborhood with his sack! And the song he would always sing was ‘Hawaa Hawaa Aye Hawaa’, a Pakistani song, quite a hit during those times in India. His name was Amjad. Bool Sheet was then in his early teens and he along with his friends would play gully cricket on the streets or lagori – a game involving a tower of stones and throwing a ball around hitting each other with the ball and all that junk. It was a welcome distraction as Amjad passed by always singing! The year was 1996 and it was the month of December, Bool Sheet and his friends would as usual get back from school and then the games would begin on the streets in the evening, loud noise and shouts rang in the air. It was routine and yet it was fun and around 5:30 in the evening regularly the sound of the song ‘Hawaa Hawaa’ would come floating in. Bool Sheet and his friends would ...

by Shamit Bagchi I wanted to sing but no one would listen, Or there was no occasion except a few! So I now use Muziboo - www.muziboo.com I wanted to act but no theatre group that I ever joined And longingly I sat looking at the actors on stage. So now I play different parts: of victim, expert and joker on Facebook - www.facebook.com I wanted to write and I did And then one day the urge died! But I still blog at http://shamitb.blogspot.com/ I wanted to read but the books strained my eye. So I now use audio books man - WTF! I wanted to travel around the world - the mountains, the seas... But it was too costly and I was too comfortably seated to move! So I now have virtual tours on the net and read Lonely Planet/ Watch Discovery/NatGeo/TLC I wanted to help but ... Now you can use kiva - www.kiva.com And I wanted to draw/paint, create art and wanted people to appreciate it! So I created Dhonuk - www.dhonuk.com

I wanted to sing but no one would listen, Or there was no occasion except a few! I wanted to act but no theatre group that I ever joined And longingly I sat looking at the actors on stage. I wanted to write and I did And then one day the urge died! I wanted to read but the books strained my eye. I wanted to travel around the world - the mountains, the seas... But it was too costly and I was too comfortably seated to move! I wanted to help but ... But sing I will in the bathroom or my house! No occasion needed all right. Act I shall everyday - action!! Lights, camera or not. And I write... what the f*** do you think I am doing now? Read I will have to - the voracious reader demands and yells within! Travel I will some day... Right now I am traversing my mental landscape! The will is weak, the perception vivid. Imagination at a peak, but inertia gets us frigid. So finally I have acted! And here, I give you a poem. In the name of whatever. A help and a thought, ...

My mind was very disturbed yesterday at the time I went to sleep. Late at night around 3 AM or so I woke up for some reason and then tried meditation as I lay down. Focusing on my breath as I meditated - I went into a deep peaceful state within 10 minutes and as if all the impressions from the day were washed out... Later I slept peacefully too! 

This is like the most fantastic movie I have ever seen, mind-blowing stuff, no exaggerations. Period. Oh! Well, I have to write some bit about it, I have to. Natalie Portman deserved the Oscar like no one else ever did. I am shocked and in awe of what I just saw as the movie concluded. She has been able to perform in the movie Black Swan to perfection. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. The docile ballerina, a perfectionist whom the company's choreographer keeps taunting by saying, you are too weak and frigid and you need to let go, it is not about perfection and control etc etc. The transformation from the White Swan to the Black Swan is what the movie is about. In this process she takes another person as her imagined arch enemy and to reach that ultimate perfection on stage you get to see what happens to her personal life. Even if I have spoilers from the movie here it does not matter –you would have to see it to believe it. You would not believe what you see in that movie though. T...

Daa Adbhentures Obh Bool Sheet - The Keeck

Daa Adbhentures obh Bool Sheet: ‘Getting Out, Getting in’ or Prof Ongko & Telepathy “It is like this”, Professor Ongko Bannujjay, was showing it, waving his hand to show the n-dimensions. Then he started moving both his hands like an orchestra player.  Prof O we will call him - the mathematical wizard or just O. Bool raised his hand, his skinny arm didn’t even register in O’s  n-dimensional far sight of a vision. He continued on drawing 3 matrices simultaneously on the board, bored the students started jotting down the tableaux. “Taabloo”, yelled O suddenly animated and then went on to blabber more. “Do you get it? The fact that multiple such planes intersect and each of them are convex, yes what?”, he asked Bool in between repeating his previous point. He had spotted Bool – his arm intersecting one of his imaginary planes – and interrupting his train of thoughts - disgusting. Bool felt trepidation and the area around his bladder tightened, constricting any chance of l...

Dedicated to all my PGSEM'08 brethren giving exams this weekend!! Especially the bongs will understand it best! :) Bool Sheet always liked to imagine he was the most creative and never followed the crowd. He liked to look down upon the Jom Bees - The Fiery Bee, The Fighter Bee, The Queen Bee, The Sloppy Bee, The SharpAss bee, The SharpTongue Bee, The Shy Bee and all the other future IIM Bees. So one day Bool Sheet thought why attend the Saza-e-xams like all the sleepy and studious Jom Bees instead he struck upon a plan to go and destroy the evil Jom's Palace. At the Jom Err Daar - the massive gateway he was stopped by Jom's guards Mosh and Rouhs! He wanted to capture the core of the power center - the mighty palace itself, kill Jom and have all the Jom Bees under his control.They gave him a Saar-Bhey an ancient weapon of mass destruction - and told him to feel it. As soon as Bool held the Saar-Bhey it started to emit powerful green Likert rays! And then Bool slumped to t...