Back online!
After 4 days of grueling mid terms, tomorrow is a Sunday and I have very little reading to do... That feels so good! Besides, I had tasty dinner today, thanks to Utkarsh Palnitkar and family. Utkarsh is a partner at E&Y. His is part of the Aikya initiative @ ISB.
Aikya, the brainchild of the dean Vijay Mahajan, and implemented very nicely by one of our alums, Niraj Gelli, involves some well known families in Hyderabad. Dean Vijay believes that the Hyderabad community has given a lot to ISB and wants the students to interact with families here to develop a network with this community that we can carry with us forever. Students have been divided into groups and each group has a host family which adopts us. I can tell you that we have been enjoying this experience. My friends have had dinner with the Reddys of DRL fame, enjoyed 5 star luxury whenever they wanted to thanks to their host family being stakeholders in the Taj hotels in Hyd, got free passes to the new IMAX theatre in hyd (Have to visit this one soon!) and what not!
We visited Utkarsh for the first time today. We met his wife and his kids, cute little twins, very sweet and pleasantly well behaved, compared to the uncontrollable brat that I was when I was their age ;)
Karthik, one of the groupmates, was with the tax practice in E&Y before coming to ISB. His wife Divya was also with Anderson before graduating with the founding batch at ISB. They had a lot to talk about E&Y, Anderson, the merger etc. Aneesha, another one of our groupmates lives in Bombay and Utkarsh, who is from Bombay slipped into his memories of Mumbai and his college days. We talked about everything from E&Y and its biotech practice to vada pav and bhel in mumbai to the E&Y entrepreneur award to cricket. Besides, Utkarsh's wife spread out a very nice and tasty meal for us. The gluttons inside us woke up to the opportunity and the monotonous feeling about food we had built up thanks to Sarovar's consistency was murdered mercilessly... at least for the moment. It was a very nice evening, thanks to the wonderful hospitality. Even before we could realize, we spent nearly 4 hours of the evening. We were beginning to feel so comfortable that I noticed Karthik relaxing and putting his feet up ;) We decided to plan a picnic sometime soon.
Just as I finish this, the global economics course TA has sent out the solutions for the mid term exam. Think I got all of them right. Global economics has been a very interesting course and Prof Ravi Bansal from Duke has been simply amazing. I have no words to describe how much I have enjoyed his classes and his authority over macroeconomics. Im afraid this is going to sound like a sales pitch for ISB here, but sincerely, this course has been more than my money's worth.
