2008

A new year is around the corner and I am all dreamy eyed. A new year is like a promise, a clean slate. For as long as I can remember, I have always carried this optimism and hope with me. Personally, 2007 has been a great year. I think God with all my heart for that. I made good, solid progress on all fronts. My brother got married in January and the trip home was really nice. Although we had to travel a lot, I have very fond memories from this trip.

In June I was able to take advantage of the respite offered by the USCIS and file for the final state of my GC. It would go a long way in giving me the freedom I need to grow professionally. It is strange how my perspective has changed in this regard. I am not sure how or when this happened, but I had come to seek and love a life that was scripted and had no surprises. So I lived the past few years of my life in a monotony that needed to be broken. 2007 was a start. I hope that 2008 will bring in more change.

Finally in November I applied for the MBA program. At the time when I decided I did not realize how life changing that decision would be. I started off by concentrating on the GMAT and it was only after started working on the personal essays that I realized how little thought I had given to my career, and my life in general.

The monotony in my professional experience became clear to me when I started working on my essays. I don't think of this as a drawback though. I was in phase where I needed the stability. Now that I have untangled all the webs I can move ahead.

A few dreams from 2007 remain unfulfilled.

1. I was not able to read as much I would liked.
2. I could not achieve the fitness goals I had set for myself.
3. My network of friends is still limited.

I will work on these in the new year. I wish all my near & dear ones joy, peace and fulfillment in 2008.

Run for your life

After many years I am running again. Before this current streak I had tried a number of times to get back on the treadmill but somehow it never stuck. This time it looks like I might be able to sustain it. This month I have run more than 30 miles and the amazing thing is that I am able to do 3mi runs. I know that because of my weight I should not run at more than 5 miles/hour (my father-in-law told me that). However I am able to compensate for that by running for 40mins.

Here is the plan for Dec:

- Run 4 days a week.
- 3 runs of 40 mins
- 1 run of 45 mins
- > 45 miles distance

I read somewhere that in order to lose 1 lb you need to burn 3500 calories. Depending on which machine I run on, my 3 mi run burns 350 - 500 calories (yes, it's that different, and why I prefer to run on the Nordic Track machine). So in order to lose a pound I need 7 - 10 runs. I can hope to lose maybe 2 pounds per month. But that should be good enough. My immediate plan is to see myself below the 180 lb pound mark.

A new plan...

A new plan is taking shape in my brain. It goes like this: as much as I love my company, I am unlikely to see any career progression here. I have do the 'Z' move. The idea behind this move is to move laterally into a role that is close to your target position. After being in this position for some time, say a year or so, move to another company, negotiating a higher position. The reason why this move makes sense is that a lateral move allows you to step back, sort of dis-engage, from your work and gain experience in another area. The experience is important because your target is really a position at another company, a position at a higher level than what you have. Your current employer is unlikely to promote you within a year. However hard work and solid experience will allow you to get identified by other companies.

My plan is to execute 3 'Z' moves in the next 6 years. So far, my employment has been very steady and so at the end of this plan, I would have worked for 5 companies in 16 years which is not bad at all. Unfortunately this strategy requires me to focus on my target position rather than the one I currently have, but I think I can manage to make it a fair balance.

In order to complete this mission I need an EAD. My plan is to file this next week, i.e. 11/12/2007.

Beautiful minds

A friend of mine who is doing his MBA from The Rotman School of Business came down from Toronto last weekend. We have a bunch of us batchmates from IT BHU here in NorCal and we decided to get together for dinner. Six of us turned up. Another friend who is in the GSB Chicago MBA program was there.

At the dinner the conversation between the two MBA students was both brilliant and intriguing.

It was brilliant because they were talking about their experiences from the MBA programs. Give or take a few minor details their experiences were mostly the same. They were both very excited and very aware of things. Their conversation was replete with MBA jargon. It was really a pleasure to watch them. We all agree that life had become monotonous. Yet here were these two guys who seemed recharged.

But the conversation was also intriguing. Although these guys were excited and energized, they weren't really sure what they wanted to do with their new found knowledge. They seemed like little kids, excited with every new toy they got. Every semester there was a new subject, a new experience, a new toy.

There was also some conversation about why one should do an MBA. There were two us, including me, who are applying this year. There was a guy who had recently bought a house and so cannot afford an MBA and another who is finding it hard to come up with a reason for why he needs an MBA.

I am going through the motions of an application process. One thing I realized talking to the MBA guys is that MBA is not really the launch, rather its a launching pad. The real work starts after the MBA finishes. However MBAs have an intense coursework and one needs to compromise on a number of things. People talk about sleepless nights etc. but I think what gets hit the hardest is the family. Its all the more difficult if you have a kid and more so if your spouse is working or studying. Whether full time or part time, MBA will keep you away from your family. Like I said, that's just the beginning. If you really want to crank it up, the action starts after the MBA. But most families have an expectation that its a matter of 2 or 3 years before their beloved will be back with them.

The point I am trying to make is that to me makes sense to think of life and career long term. Its like running a marathon. If you run hard at the start you will tire yourself out and perhaps lose. This is one reason why I am not considering a full time MBA, nor any program that requires me to fly out on Fridays and miss spending that evening with my family. While in the MBA program I don't want to drift too far away from my family.

I saw that my friends are facing this problem. Family always comes first. If I went to the best MBA program and missed spending time with my son, whom I love beyond words, it would be worth nothing to me. That's who I am.

Hats off to a star

Yesterday I came across the music of Saawariya. This is the new movie by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. I had read on many forums that the music was good, so I wanted to give it a listen. It is a habit of mine to try and identify the singer while listening to a song for the first time. I am able to recognize a lot of voices. Perhaps a small gift I have :-) Anyway, the first song I heard was "Jab Se Tere Naina" sung by Shaan. Hands down this is my favorite song in this compilation.

Then I moved on to the title track, "Saawariya". I could not recognize the voice, though it sounded very familiar. I looked up the album, and it said Shail Hada. I could not believe my eyes. My friend, my brother Shailendra Singh Hada had made it big. I am so so happy for him, I just can't find the right collection of words to describe how I feel. We grew up together in Kota. We went to the same school, St. Paul's, Kota. I often went to his house to hear him sing. We spent a lot of time together.

I went on to engineering college and he moved to Mumbai to find his place in Bollywood-land. When I started working in Mumbai I met him again. He was living with his brother. Seeing him survive in a "chawl", struggling to find work, made my heart ache. I could not see him that way. I have always known that he has a magic voice. I still have the album he compiled specially for me. But I tried to get him to join college and take studies seriously. In an industry where work comes with connections, I worried for him.

After I came to the US I lost touch with him. As God is my witness, I tried looking him up on the internet a number of times. He had told me that he was going to change his name to Kumar Shail. Anyhow, I am ecstatic that he has found success. All those glowing comments he has received for his rendition are all well deserved. And no doubt that he will now find more work, and more success.

I guess a lot of people will now surface that will claim to be his friends. I would really like to get in touch with him, if only once, to tell him how unbelievably happy I am. Regardless of whether I get that chance or not hats off to a star.

Why we need friends

Why do we need friends? Why indeed. So much has changed in me that it might be surprising to a few that I am even asking this question. See, I used to live for friends. If God were to ever need a person to represent His creation, "the social animal", I would be as good a choice as any.

But so much has changed in the last 5 years. After marriage, and after my son was born I just can't seem to find the time for anything. I see people after months, the same people I met almost daily. No, I'm not saying that my family such that they like to keep me at home all the time. Not at all. However there is just so much stuff going on that either I just don't have the time or I am all spent.

Amongst all this I have lost almost all my friends. To be true, all of them are in this state too. I think of this song by The Who:

No time left for you
On my way to better things
No time left for you
I found myself some wings
No time left for you
Distant roads are calling me
No time left for you

This post is a banner that I'm putting up to remind me that I still need my friends. Sometimes our mind is a blender in puree mode. Everything inside is just like a formless paste. And there is just one release: talking. Yes, one could talk to oneself, or to the ether that the internet is. But why not ring up a friend, pick up a cup coffee and let it all flush itself out. Just remember to be there when your friend needs to do the same.

MBA or not

For some time I have been thinking of where my career should be headed next. I have a B.Tech. in electronics engineering and since 1997 I have been working in the software industry. But I find writing code incredibly boring these days. In fact I don't get much zing from design either. The only thing that does interest me is debugging. But I feel I'm stifling myself in my office. I'm at my best when I am talking to people, out on the turf. I talk to people, get to know them and am able to talk freely in front of a crowd.

A friend recently suggest that I think about a career in sales. Around the same time, actually a bit before, I decided to get an MBA. My argument for an MBA really is that I feel that I am a natural leader, but lack management skills. The MBA will give me the skills and exposure I need to take on business management challenges. I got a lot of clarity in this regard from Prof. John Kotter's book, A Force For Change. I believed that leadership is nothing but management taken to the next level. But that is not the case. Leadership is primarily concerned with getting people to believe. The idea could be a plan, a vision or anything else. Whatever it is, the leader, with his experience and credibility is able to convince the audience of the correctness and feasibility of the vision. A manager on the other hand makes sure that the plans are executed correctly and on time. This involves financial and business analysis. This is the skill set that I want from the MBA.

I started preparing for the GMAT from mid June. I wrote the exam in the first week of August. I got a score of 770 with a score of 45 in verbal, which I am very pleased with. As an applicant in the male/indian/sw engineer applicant pool, I really need all the differentiation I can muster. This score will surely help. Right now I am working on the essays.

A tale of 2 books..

Last night I finished "The curious incident of the dog in the night time", penned by Mark Haddon. It is very nicely written book, a simple story narrated with such ease that it flows smoothly. Over the years I have come to appreciate simplicity. A long time ago I read a number of books by Gabrial Garcia Marquez, and though I read them all from cover to cover, sometimes all I had were words. I could not picture the images painted by those words. And I thought that perhaps I wasn't ready yet for such sophisticated reading. Perhaps that is still true.

This book wasn't like that at all. I could picture Christopher, alone in his world, wanting to be left alone with his math books and simple reasoning. All around him are grown ups, supposedly mature, yet unable to find content and happiness. It is, to me, a tale of this irony. The more sophisticated we get, the more unhappy and alone we are. So I yearn to be simple.

Along with this book, I was also reading "The echo maker" by Richard Powers and this book, like the books by Garcia Marquez, got unbearable towards the end. I do understand the theme of this book, cognitive disorders, is complex per se. But the writing is just exhausting, sullen and sometimes, just plain boring. Fortunately for me a lot of people on Amazon.com seem to agree with me.

If you chance upon this posting, please do suggest some good books. So far all I have is Amazon's listmania!!

Data Warehousing

I am reading this article.

Being in the storage industry, I am trying to understand how companies store and use data. Data warehouses are huge silos of data and are used for Business Intelligence (BI).

The technical definition is something like this:

"A database designed to support decision making in an organization. Data from the production databases are copied to the data warehouse so that queries can be performed without disturbing the performance or the stability of the production systems. Data warehouses can become enormous with hundreds of gigabytes of transactions. As a result, subsets, known as "data marts," are often created for just one department or product line. The data warehouse is structured to support a variety of analyses, including elaborate queries on large amounts of data that can require extensive searching. When databases are set up for queries on daily transactions, they are often called "operational data stores" rather than data warehouses."

This suggests that these databases are point in time snapshots of the production database. This would allow BI software to track changes in things like inventory size. At some point data in the depot becomes old and irrelevant and is perhaps deleted.