The Goa trip that went South & then went YEEEHAAA!

This is an amazing trip, which got me broke to rich and helped me fulfil my childhood dream!

It all started on Saturday morning with me having Rs 1500(Thank you Subbu, Moorthy and Vasu for the contributions) in my pocket and 3 tickets:One from Nizamuddin to Madgaon and 2 tickets for consecutive days from Madgaon to Trivandrum. The idea was this: My team - The great Maa II, consisting of Mayank, Atanu and Me(with a good deal of support from Akanksha) had sent an entry for Revving Up!!! - The Case Study competition at GIM, Goa and I was to present the case if our team got selected, but then we weren't sure if we would get selected. I was sure, but Maa wasn't :). So we had tickets for me to directly go home or stay back 1 day and present if we got selected.

Fortunately we got selected and the 35 hour long train journey went well and then I reached Goa, only to find that I was BROKE :(. Now that got me thinking what is the reason for my constantly bad financial condition. I'm in constant debt and can't find a way out of this situation even when I've won a good number of events/quizzes this year(2011). But I guess if I start on that then it'll be another blog post completely. Main issue for the day was I was left with Rs 120 at the start of the day when the event was happening. I had to get back to the railway station at night to catch my train back to Trivandrum and it's a sweet 40 km ride from GIM till Madgaon station, which comes to 600-650 in a cab. Basically I was begging around in Facebook/Gtalk and all other possible means to beg.

The day started well with me getting up ahead of time and getting ready by 9 AM and reaching the hall to find it quite empty. I like all the CONFIDENT MBA's started to look up the slides and added some finishing touches here n there. Then frankly I did get nervous waiting for the PPT to start, so I started chatting with the other teams and had a good time till I was called for the PPT. I was the only TEAM with just 1 guy here and with more than 80 odd pairs of eye balls pointed towards the slides and alternating between me and the slides I started. Initially it all went really well and I was fortunate to have a good panel which didn't interrupt and blocked my flow. That got me going and I was at one of the best presentations of my life I would say!

I finished with the judges quite impressed and asking the very first question which got me really happy, the question was "How many of your team mates worked in Automobile industry?" and when I said none of us, he was even more impressed. After a few questions more he was satisfied about the work we had done and then I got back to my seat waiting patiently for the other teams to finish up their ppt's and went about on a Hyper Facebooking spree. Some 20 comments and 2 updates later the time for the final announcement came. By this time I had 1900 in my SBI A/c. Thanks Sriram and Ajay Aliyan :)

It was a proud moment for me and I could say a very happy achievement for my team when the whole crowd said "IIFT...IIFT...IIFT" when the judges asked "So who do you think is the winner...". I was having the best smile of my life and the smile widened when I got the winners cheque and the three Nano shaped pen drives as special gifts :). It was literally like the cadbury's ad where "dil mein laddo phoot rahe the", the Rs 20000 cheque was just the icing on the cake :)

The glee wasn't contained in me when the HR told me that I have got a spot-offer and asked me to consider joining India's largest automobile company. It was a dream come true for me, a dream that had been in place in my head since I was 4 years old and got onto the hood of a Tata Truck during one of the 1st trips to my dad's workshop at Air Force Station, Avadi. A dream that made me pursue Mechanical Engineering, but wasn't fulfilled at my BTech stage. Even though I got into Tata Steel during my internship and then got a PPO, the happiness that I've now is much greater because this is a dream for me to follow what my father did for 21 years of his life and make it bigger and better :)

Thank you Mayank, Akanksha and Atanu for giving me a chance to fulfil that dream, thank you GIM for giving me a platform to present our ideas and most importantly to IIFT for giving me this awesome chance. Now I really feel my MBA did add a lot to my life :)

PS: 1st job of any Marketing guy is to promote his company; so here goes - Kindly visit www.tatamotors.com The site is updated very recently and hope you'll like the changes :)

PPS: This can also mean that CGPA doesn't stop anyone from getting their dream jobs in an MBA :)

I Am Number Four Review

Its been a long time since I blogged and I thought I shall do it on a movie review that I saw yesterday. I had been waiting a long time to see an action movie and had gone to watch "I Am Number Four".

It is Directed by D.J. Caruso and it is Starring Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer. I had huge hopes on the script and direction, because it came from the guy who directed Eagle Eye & Disturbia. Both weren't what one would call has blockbusters, but still I liked these two movies and Disturbia was quite an awesome movie. I had thought he might bring in the next Shia LaBeouf, because I feel he is the guy who got him fame and name. But Alex Pettyfer was no Shia LaBeouf. He was more of a Robert Pattinson from Twilight. The script also at times did have familiar theme like Twilight.

The trailer, which I had posted some days ago had a lot of action and I was drawn to watch the movie based upon that trailer. The Trailer:

The  trailer did make an interesting watch and had a good gripping effect. The movie did have some effects like those and the climax had an awesome edge of seat action sequence lasting more than 10 minutes. The movie being produced by Micheal Bay had some similarities to transponders in the form of a character which reminded me of Bumble Bee, had a great character in Timothy Olyphant which was quite like Optimus. The movie was more like some mush from Twilight mixed with Transformers.

The movie is basically the story of John Smith (Alex Pettyfer) who is an alien who is being protected by a father figure Henri (Timothy Olyphant). The story is of 9 alien kids who escape the planet Lorien while it is being attacked by an evil species The ruthless Mogadorians, a rival race of tattooed aliens with gills on their faces and Big black shoes on their feet. They're also experts in the killing business, and they're on the trail of Lorien's nine special kids -- known as Number One through Number Nine -- whom they can kill only in chronological order. The movie starts with Number 3 being killed and Number 4 getting a signal for the same. Each time this happens Number 4 and his protector change identities and change the city of their residence.

The move after Number 3's murder is the same reason John and Henri move to tiny Paradise, Ohio, and set up a new life there. But although John is an alien, he's also a teenage alien, and he's not immune to typical adolescent turmoil: the pangs of romance, the trouble fitting in, the feelings of, well, of alienation. Visually, it's a great movie - the effects are very well done and especially all the light effects are very well done

The movie at times was quite slow with John walking Sarah (Dianna Agron) home and they smooching out and I also felt the villians were a bit too outrageous in their powers and at times the script became a bit cliched with certain sequences right out of Star Trek and Star Wars and the kind of space warrior movies. There are entertaining moments along the way, and some likeable characters. (One wonderfully truthful line, uttered by the class nerd about the school's quarterback/bully: "He's in the third year of the best four years of his life.")

The climax was really one big fight and there was an awesome fight scene with Number 6 (Teresa Palmer) kicking the ass of the Mogadorians with some fancy stunts and an entire High School becoming the fighting ground of the good guys vs the bad guys and in the end the good guys win with chest thumping action. The evil Mogadorian Commander played by Kevin Durand of 'Lost' fame does enough snarling to be enjoyable.

Still, you've got to believe its chances of repeating the runaway success of Stephenie Meyer's series are slim. Catching that kind of lightning in a bottle twice ranks right up there with the likelihood of convincing a sparking vampire not to just devour Kristen Stewart and be done with it. Likewise, you can't blame audiences if they don't get hot and bothered this movie.

It kept me entertained. I was hoping the movie would dig deeper into what happened on the home planet and who and where the remaining 9 were. Can't understand why it took the baddies so long to locate the first three. I see a strong potential for a sequel if not on the big screen then as a Mini-Series.

Snapshot: A teen sci-fi soap opera about a mysterious 15-year-old -- being pursued by lethal enemies -- who discovers powerful new abilities while trying to lay low in a tiny Ohio town. If you liked Transformers you'll most certainly like this one too.

I give the movie a 7/10 because of the acting, the effects, the pretty sweet action scenes, the dudes with fins on their cheeks and because it was able to raise a weird rage inside of me when the main bully was shaking up the nerd... I don't know why, but any kind of emotional effect is a success I guess.

It is a good watch for the 1 hour 50 minutes with the last action sequence really worth a one time watch.