The thing about life getting back to normal …

This happened the last time – and I bet it will happen again once the dust and smoke settles down.
Last time, people commended – how life went back to normal and the resilient nature of the people of Mumbai India.

It is actually sad that people approve of how life gets back to normal.
It should not! Lessons need to be learnt and things need to be changed …

We Indians are probably one of the most tolerant and laid back group of people in the world.
It’s time to get a little bit angry and a little paranoid …

It’s not too late to have a plan. Terrorism is upon all of us now – not only in J&K.
Time to stop covering our eyes and prepare to deal with these guys as and when the situation arises …

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Startup hiring …

Yes we’re hiring …

There are millions of blogs out there on startup hiring which preach on the dos and don’ts of startup hiring.
I’m not trying to preach anything here – just sharing my experience with the first batch of hiring activities that we’ve been upto …

Hiring they say – is difficult – even more so with a startup.
We guys keep getting a decent amount of resumes every week which we religiously archive. So when we decided to get a couple of people, thats where we decided to look in first. We’ve had a multitude of resumes from various different segments (all computer related of course) – quite a few freshers and people with a year of experience and looking to change a job and some even with 2, 3, 4 and 5 years of experience. (Yes. We were shocked ourselves when we found out that people with so much experience want to ride the uncertain-startup-waves). But its definitely a good sign to see people wanting to not work in a multinational company, take a little bit of risk and do something extremely exciting at work.

The first thing that I personally check for is the to field of the email.
All people interested in joining ThinkingSpace, need to mail in their resumes at careers [at] thinkingspace.in.

It is unbelievable how many people bulk send their resumes to various companies and put all those addresses in the to field. C’mon people! Give me a break. If you cannot take the trouble of personally emailing a company you’re looking to join (something you will be investing the next 2 – 3 years of your life in) then I am not going to bother calling you for the interview – no matter how impressive your resume is.

As a matter of fact, the resumes of such people are not that great anyways – so this is a good quick filter.

The smarter ones bulk email putting you in the bcc field – better – but I still know you are bulk mailing. So out goes your resume. Learn how to use a mail merge next time.
Bulk mailing also indicates how desperate you’re to get a job and that you’re not particularly interested in the company you wish to join.

So far, we have been calling people directly for an interview – which works out decently well for us.
Except that some people are unprofessional enough not to show up and not inform you. Then they email you and tell you something to the effect of – I have my certification exam – can I come back next week. Yeah right!

The first inteview we do, we generally try to check whether the guy is right for a startup and whether a startup (particularly our startup) is right for them. So far, all the people we interviewed knew what a startup was like and gave decently convincing reasons as to why they wanted to join one.

After this is over, we generally start the technical process – which involves a few coding challenges and a rapid fire technical interview. I know we are doing this in the reverse order (first HR and then technical) – but it works for us.

There is no sense in spending time, money and effort in doing a technical – getting a good person and then finding that they didn’t even know what a startup was and what will be required of them.

The technical round is another shocker. It is amazing how many people over rate themselves.
The question – “On a scale of 1-10 (1 being the lowest) – where do you rate yourself in XXX” always gives an excellent picture of where the guy actually is.

The good ones generally tend to rate themselves much, much lower than the bad ones.
Its also shocking to see how many people with their basic computer fundas all mixed up think they can code well. I’m guessing this trend has something to do with the larger companies (read Infosys, Wipro, TechM) picking up large number of people with no coding skills and then training them.
People have become complacent knowing that if they have decent aptitude skills, they will make it.

Unfortunately for them, a larger number of companies don’t have thre resources nor the time to teach people the basics of OOPs or whether private constructors are allowed by the compiler and what happens when you define a constructor to be private. Four years of an engineering degree ought to have taught you atleast these things …

It also pays to be sincere and honest I feel.
Atleast for startups. You could know a lot of things, but when you don’t – you must have the heart to admit it and the drive to figure it out yourself.

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Blogging again …

I think I am finally in that place, where I can start blogging again …

The past couple of months have been pretty hectic – and everytime I thought I’d start writing, I would realise I had something better to do …

As you can expect, some important stuff happened since the last time I wrote …
A small recap is the order of the day I guess …

I will dedicate a blog each to all of these things …

1. I have switched to wordpress. It was waiting to happen. Blogger has been extremely awesome – and I will miss a lot of things there, but it was time that I took up the hosting of my blog on my own server.
   (As of writing, this blog is actually on wordpress.com – but I will be moving it soon to another personal server)
   Wordpress has tonnes of more features too which I just loooove … so the move was just waiting to happen…
   More about this in another post …
2. We finally registered our own company – ThinkingSpace Technologies.
   Technically, we’re 4 months old already – but the registration happened of late – and I am still basking in that sense of achievement.
   We’re just three classmates from college, don’t have posh offices (yet) but are poised to get there extremely soon!
   Watch this space for more …
   And yes, we also do useful things (see next point)
   http://www.thinkingspace.in
3. We took ActiveCiti to Public Beta.
   ActiveCiti – our first product, entered into its public beta phase (after a month of being in stealth private beta) and the response has been good so far.
   If you don’t know what it is — ActiveCiti is this extremely cool event management application — with which you can create, plan and organise your events very, very easily.
   From inviting friends, adding other organisers, polling people to what they’d prefer, sending automatic emails about changes to the original plan — ActiveCiti does it all.
   You can check it out at: http://www.activeciti.comIf you are wondering, this is not quite the same application we did for our final year project a year ago.
   It has been completely written from scratch – and does tonnes of things the previous version did not …
   Please do check it out and we’d love to hear your comments and feedback on this.

Hmm …
So, these are the things that have happened to me so far – and which have consumed the bulk of my time.
Will update this list if I think of anything else …

And please do update your bookmarks / blogroll to: http://blog.saurabhj.com for my blog.
Even if the base platform changes, my blog will always be accessible from this URL.
(Now why didn’t I think of this before !!!)

Anyways, feels really good to be back.
Thank you for being so patient and coming back and reading what I write.

[ Min number of posts to go till Mar 17, 2008 : 82.]

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Atlas Shrugged …

This is to inform all you people who doubted me – I finally finished Atlas Shrugged!
Woohoo !!!

Okay, I shamelessly took 2 years and 2 attempts (the first time I gave up mid way at the John Galt speech) to finish it, but I finally did it last week and just wanted to pat my back a bit for the achievement …

Honestly, Atlas Shrugged is not a page turner per se …
It requires a good amount of dedicated reading and a lot of effort to get through some pages sometimes.
But saying that, its an awesome, awesome book – and a definite read if you had read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and liked it.

I am not going to do a book review here (because I am pretty sure I’ll suck at it) but if you have sometime to spare and want to get into the entire philosophical reading mode (without reading absolutely boring theoretical stuff), I suggest this book would be a good read.

The scope of the book is quite far fetched and exaggerated – and yet you wish such things could happen. You wish one person could stand up and stop the functioning of the world.

The name comes from the question about Atlas.
Atlas is shown carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders … What would happen to the world if he shrugged?

One of the most powerful lines from the book and my favourite (which is kinda clichéd) is by John Galt – the main protagonist of the book. It goes like this:

“I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

[ Min number of posts to go till Mar 17, 2008 : 83.]

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Goodbye college …

Today, unfortunately (for some) or fortunately (for most), was our Engineering College Farewell to all the final year students … Something to explicitly tell us – that its now officially over – end of student life for the most of us …

Most of us who have been placed, have to join by the first week of July – so its a big step, moving onto a job and whole new world …

Anyways, as I turned up for the farewell at 6:30 – there was the usual, the boring principal speech and the yada yada … Something which nobody enjoys …

As the evening progressed, the motley crowd of students that we are – some were enjoying it thoroughly while others were getting bored …

After the speeches that were given by members of the staff, there were some contests organised by the juniors … of which some were fun, and some weird …

I was dragged into taking part in two contests – one which involved recognising a junior student and being able to give out his full name – these guys brought in front of me, a guy – whom I had never seen before – and thus guessing his name was way out of the question – much to the embarrasment of both of us.

The only solace was that the best anybody got was one guy guessing the last name of his junior.

The second contest which I was dragged into – which I would never have gone into – on my own free will was the Mr. College Contest …

Here things got a bit awry …
The guys who got called up (there were about 12 of us there initially) did not like the fact that the compere was dictating rules very sternly to the participants …

The contest was supposed to be a fun contest – nothing was at stake and the rules could be bent a little.

Added to the fact, that the Final Year students of our college (and a good percentage of people on the stage at that time) are NOT the most affable, the guys decided to screw up the event.
So one common line was thought, and everybody introduced themselves as : “Hi ! My name is so and so … and I’d like to be known as XXXX” (XXXX being a common joke that we have amongst us)
So, basically – the Mr and Ms. College Contest got completely ruined

Anyways, what struck me at that time was that farewells are pretty difficult to organise … especially in colleges like ours where there is not much interaction between the juniors and the seniors at other times of the year.

The thing that screwed up the last Mr. and Ms. College contest was that people thought that they were being dictated rules – rules to a party which was being thrown for them.
This is the difficult part in organising such a thing …

I have organised a couple of things, but never a farewell of such sorts – nor have I thought about how I’d do it …
The difficulty comes in drawing the line between doing it well and over doing it a bit … and mostly in catering to the people whom the party is for, making the rules – and at the same time pulling it off without making the people think that they are being bossed over.

Then again, we have a pretty rowdy crowd – which makes it even more difficult to organise such an event. But at the end of it, it was fun nevertheless and people should probably be grateful to the organisers for atleast taking the initiative to hold such a thing.

Anyways, so long MESCOE … sort of mixed reactions for me …
Technically, still a long way to college “officially” being over – there are submissions, and exams and projects to demonstrate – so shall write an “official college over post” once all those things are taken care off …

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Life comes a full circle …

For all those who wanted to know, we didn’t make it to National Finals of the Imagine Cup this year.

Now, unfortunately (or fortunately) the BE Project that we guys were doing and our IC submission was one and the same thing (for the sake of our sanities) – so atleast we will be seeing this thing through (hopefully)

Our theme and ideas were kept somewhat hushed up (which feels kinda stupid now) but anyways, will be letting the cat out of the bag soon enough.

In other news, came back from an awesome two day picnic to Nagaon (which is about 8 odd kms from Alibaug) and it was awesome fun. Will be posting pictures of the trip soon.

Perhaps the last with the guys from college – everything went off nicely and everybody had loads of fun.

For starters, here are a couple of images that I took on the beach …

Low tide at the Alibaug beach at sunset – small kid with his dad

A family of four moving towards the Alibaug fort which is accessible by foot during low tides

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Life on track …

I haven’t been blogging of late – have not had much time.

The last couple of weeks have gone in a blur actually. I was actively involved in organising our inter collegiate festival – and it was a mad rush of things …

One thing that I learnt after the event got over was – to never organise anything like this ever again. Its very very painful.

However, the event went off decently well – and most of the people were happy at the end of it.

However, this saturday – the last day of the event, all our sponsor banners disappeared from the parking in broad daylight – due to which, this event hasn’t gotten over – yet.

These things just never end.
Anyways, now that most of the thing is over and I have more free time, will be blogging more often.

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The Pune International Film Festival

The 4th Pune International Film Festival is going around in town.
About 4 venues, with 6 screens are participating this time and they are showing about 100 movies.
The halls participating are: Gold Adlabs, E-Square, Citypride Kothrud and NFAI (National Film Archive Institute)

I, along with all the rest of my college crowd, went and got the delegate pass for 300 bucks (if you are not a student, it will cost you 500 bucks)
However, the benefit of a delegate pass is that you can walk into any movie without having to purchase any tickets at all.

Anyways, the general opinion is that if the pass costs 300 bucks, you should see 6 movies atleast to cover up for it.

Its a funny feeling actually, the all you can eat feeling.
However, I came up with my own rating – after having see a couple of really sidey movies.

My approach to this entire thing is, to pick and choose carefully which movies to watch – after which I decide an amount which I could spend to watch the movie, which would justify the movie.

If at the end of 7 days, I have made up the 300 bucks, I would be more than happy.
Anyways, got the opportunity to see some really awesome (and some really pathetic films).

Here is the story so far ( in the descending order of awesomeness)

1. Hotel Rwanda (English)
The movie is set in Rwanda (as the name suggests) and depicts the very violent struggle between the two different sects of people from Rwanda – the Hutus and the Tutsis.
The film has some very powerful performances and was nominated for 3 oscars.
A very hard hitting film.

My review on the film.
How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 200

2. Dombivli Fast (Marathi)
This was my second good movie of the day (yesterday) and was pretty well made.
Told the story of a person – Madhav Apte – and what happens when you’re driven up the wall (kinda). You flip.
Again, contains some really powerful performances and some awesome screenplay.
Last I heard, it won the Hero Honda Screen Award for Best Direction and the Best Actor (Sandeep Kulkarni) in leading role.

My review on this film
How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 150

3. Lemming (French)
Not all french films are good. But this one was very well done. Extremely well done.
The movie had a very Alfred Hitchcockish kind of feel to it with the entire 2 hours 10 mins of it being very intense and gripping.
Though the entire film is mostly shot in one house – indoors – and was subtitled, it was fun to watch. The subtitles were very easy to follow and I really enjoyed the roller coaster ride that the movie took me on.

My review on this film (yet to come)
How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 80

4. While it rains hard (Malyalam)
This movie was pretty decently made and it was worth my time sitting for it.
It talks about 2 families from South India (don’t remember the exact place now) – one muslim and the other hindu.
Both the husbands are working in the Gulf.
Somehow, one manages to kill the other (in the Gulf) and surrenders and faces sure death penalty – unless the wife of the deceased decides to forgive him.
What I really liked about the movie was the “Malgudi Days” touch that it had – and the beautiful portrayal of South India – which transported you directly to the villages there.

How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 35

5. My Nikofor (Polish)
Honestly, while it was playing, this movie was unbelievably slow.
Though the acting and direction were decently good, there were lots of editing flaws which caused a lot of confusion.
The movie is a story about Nikifor – a 85 year old Polish painter from the 1960s – who was a genius, but was living on the streets.
He also suffers from tubercolosis – and is shunned by everybody.
A 35 year old man takes care of him, and he himself is shunned by his family and friends.

How much I would pay for this movie : Rs. 20

6. A Real Man (French)
And they say, Indians make crappy movies.
After seeing this movie, I developed a phobia of entering movie halls, which, luckily for me lasted only one night.
This was the second movie that I saw, and in one word, it was pathetic.
The plot was paper thin and the movie was pretty badly made.
Though the cast acted decently well, the stupid story and untolerable songs (yes – they had songs equivalent to a Hindi movie) made the movie a definite no no.

How much I would pay for this movie : (minus) – Rs. 40

4 days still left to go … will update you as we go along …

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The event update …

I haven’t been getting time of late to blog … been extremely busy – painting the town red – everyday, going around for sponsors and then later for project.

The funny thing is that I HATE to get out of the house and roam around.
Part of this reason being that to go anyplace worthwhile, I have to go quite a distance.

So, in the vacations, when many of my friends just hung out the entire day, I would wonder why do they do it.
I rarely ever did it, and now I think, have compensated for it in this vacation … maybe even for the rest of my life …

Anyways, as per the event, we’ve made some progress from the last time the post came about, but we are falling drastically short as of now … unless some miracle happens soon, we don’t know whats going to come of it.

The event’s gonna be on the 30th of Jan, and we need to get some amount of sponsorship, by the 10th of this month. Then only, we’ll be going ahead with additional expenditure, like poster printing, advertising and the works.

I guess, by this Monday, we’ll have a much clearer picture.
Either we do a full fledged event as planned (decently possible), a more cut down event – with lesser prize money and stuff (pretty likely), or we’ll be scrapping the event altogether (equally likely).

Lets see …

One more thing that you come across while doing an event is that the various people who you work with, all, have an event which they love.
Now, when the axe is about to fall on a particular event, these people will try and defend the event till the very last.
It is difficult to be stern, coz firstly, very few people are working anyways, so you don’t want to upset them, and secondly, coz you generally don’t want to upset people.

The other kind of people, which I hate completely are the ones, who come up with their own damn, neat, ideas for contests or additions to the events – last minute – months after everything was planned and months after people have slogged their asses to get to this position.
Whats more worse is, that these people, take the liberty of talking to people and start organizing things for “their” new additions and contests without consulting the others.
Very annoying.

But I guess, these are the typicals.
During this entire month and a half, I’ve met many not-so-typical people, but I’ll leave them for another post.

Lets just wait and watch and see where this all goes.

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The long march ahead …

As I stepped out of the corridors of the college, into the sunset and the open fields, the Gladiator Movie theme (the one with Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerald) started playing somewhere in the background.

Was I imagining things?

No.
It was really playing.

As my other fellow mates slowly trickled out outside, squinting their eyes at the sight of the sun (or whatever of it remained at this time of the day), I slowly made my way to the fields.

The music was still playing in the distance, but I could hear it clearly.
I walked up to the more sandy parts of the field and stood there for a while.
Then, I dug a hole in the ground with my bear hands … and taking the five sheets of papers from my bag, buried them in the hole which I had dug and covered them up with the mud.

I stood up (the music still playing), looked up at the setting sun and said “Now we’re free”

I had just finished writing my last exam paper for the semester, and the five papers that I had buried, were the tragic question papers – ones which had killed many of my fellow mates and would kill even more (including me) once the results are announced.

However, the time had passed.
We were all free to live whatever life we had left.
As I walked across to my bike, the feeling of relief and jubilation set it in …

The music in the background had gradually stopped and it was now replaced with a soft sort of ringing, which had gradually grown louder and louder.

Till I realised it was my alarm !

I woke up. It was 6:30 am – and I was in my bed with still one paper to go !
I cursed, got out of my bed, when …

I heard a thud.
It was me falled off the bed.
I was dreaming about the alarm and was actually having a recursive dream (dream in dream) like the picture in picture feature of many TVs.

Just to be sure, I dug out my cell phone and read the date.
It said, 16th Dec 2005, 3:34 am

Exams got over yesterday.
Phew, what a nightmare !

— NOTE —
Just came from watching King Kong as a post exam treat.
Wrote a review on it, which you can check out by clicking here.

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