Biological Magnetic Compass?

For those of you who have followed my blog long enough know that I have this something (called respect) for cows. Yeah, cows for me are those benign creatures who just go around "ruminating" and posing for photographs for silly strangers on highways. They provide milk, cow-dung (mind you, no bull-shit) and directions!

Directions? Yeah, on the highway you just walk up to a friendly-neighborhood cow and ask her for directions. Its as easy as that! Don't believe me? Read this article. Yeah technically they are just magnetic compasses (as of now!). So all cows in this world tend to point north :) !! Which means, if you are lost at night, you no longer need to look up to the north star. Just search for the nearest cow and see where she is looking at. Life is easy!!

Now we just wait till Google acquires some cows and comes up with a Google-maps mashup on them. Once Google has acquired them, you just walk up to any cow and say "I am feeling lucky". The cow will give you exact directions and also the time required to reach there. I know my imagination is running wild, but then .. I am sleep deprived :( !!!

Email subscription available

So I figured that there are some people in this big bad world that rely on their email inboxes to get news and other worthless information (like my blog :) !!). So to be of service to them, starting today, I have enabled Email subscription to my blog. That means, if you want, every time that I post a rant over here, you will get an email containing the same blog post in your inbox. No more fumbling around with an RSS reader and all. You can subscribe by email here.

I don't have an official privacy policy, but am not gonna spam your inbox. So relax and subscribe. For those of you who use RSS readers, ignore this post cause my RSS feed remains alive and kicking.

And finally, those of you who do not understand what RSS is .. see this amazing video by Common Craft that explains the concept ...

Cultural Ambassadors

Indians in foreign countries become cultural ambassadors of their country per se. So if an Indian does something weird, then it is assumed that "all Indians" do that and its an Indian cultural thing. Its funny how things get generalized to Indians. Some of the funniest assumptions about Indians that I have come across are:

1. Indians are vegetarians - If I take the ratio of number of veggie to non-veggie Indians I know it will be 1:8 (remember, statistics are always made up on the spot)
2. Indians are non-alcoholics - The less said the better
3. Indians are aggressive - Look at me, am so naive and laid back
4. Indians are good at math - Err.. am I really Indian?
5. Indians are poor - Go check the Forbes list of richest people in 2008 we have 47 billionaires too :)

If you come to think of it .. not all of us eat the same food, speak the same language, follow the same religion or have the same festivals. Not all of us are dark/fair, short/tall, fat/lean, rich/poor, funny or crazy.

I think its time we tell the world that our languages, cultures, traditions, food habits and everything else is absolutely diverse, and there is nothing in common between two randomly chosen Indians out of a population of 1.13 billion, other than the passport of course :) !!

Decisions

Yeah, so for those of you who have not figured it out yet, I have enrolled myself up in an MBA course. First 3 weeks of my program already over and here is an *executive summary* ;) of my learning:

Put 5 MBA students in a room to come up with a decision and after 3 hours you will still have them contemplating and arguing. I had read somewhere that the maximum learning in an MBA course happens from your colleagues. And I figured that people from all countries and all backgrounds can argue on any silly topic as much as I can :) !! We all are one ... we all are equally crazy ...

And I have been trying to play catch up with all the pre-reads, post-reads, case studies and presentations that I have to make. Figured that some subjects just *sound* good. When you actually open the text books to read, they are instant sleep inducers. Also figured that having a nice campus with amazing sporting facilities is a major distraction. For all you MBA aspirants .. choose a school that just has a library and the hostel ....