Weekly roundup

I didn't realize that its been a week since i wrote something on this space. A friend of mine who reads this space regularly had to remind me of that. He did ask me whether it was because of work. my frank answer is - is definitely because i have been trying hard to find work in the last one week.

ever since Sivaji happened, i have following up quite regularly on the movie. a whopping budget of 90 crore (international readers please excuse me for using crore) indian rupees - can you believe that. and i also heard that the superstar got 17 crore as salary, which is the fixed component and then a variable pay that would come from distribution revenues. mba stuff happening here too.

anyway, during the last week, i hardly went for work. on monday i was in bangalore attending a wedding and catching up with few friends from b-school. then on wednesday, mr.manjeri(the coimby man on my blog's main page) and i left to tirupati to attend another wedding. during this time, my manager decided to get me into a new project. all this while i was supposed to work for a chicago based bank's projects. not that i had started work on that. just that the allocation had been done and the people in that team were doing some knowledge transfer - very much like the gyaan sessions at ISB. too many PPTs and stuff like that. on friday i was introduced to the new project and i said yes. although its 90 percent confirmed that i will start work on this one from monday, anything can happen. bottomline: i still dont have work.

another funny incident happened at office on friday - a friend of mine entered the office lobby wearing sandals and the security guard stopped him. he wanted my friend to get permission from the HR because there was a slight violation of the dress code. i was furious. this is a place where people walk in like a herd of cattle especially between 9 and 10 am. nobody checks a shit you could walk in with a detonator and that silly guy wouldn't know a thing. with such a security lapse uncared for, this guy demands a dress code authorization. extraordinarily funny.

every IT consulting company in india is preparing to start a full fledged technology consulting arm. and we are also seeing whats happening with the dollar. azim premji had once said that it would take 36 yrs for the rupee to be at par with the dollar, but i kinda feel that it might happen in like 10 years. suddenly all firms are aggressively looking at revenues from europe. and i got to hear that Infosys is trying to get something from Cap Gemini. Thats actually a very good strategy. CG is headquartered in Paris and a large portion of its revenues is from Europe. They always say - quicker the better and this is also some kind of first mover advantage. companies want to pay less and thats why a lot of them are moving out of india as well. today, we are in a different game. the cost advantage is no longer with us. we need a new and radical strategy.