Of Sheikh Chilli and.... me!

I got the call from IIMB yesterday night, reminding me to set up a blog for Numero Uno. Writing about my life on a public forum usually would have ranked in my list of things-to-do-before-i-die, right between getting bitten by rattle-snakes and being stranded on an African island with the last known cannibal tribes. (ok. Not quite that bad but this is definitely something I am apprehensive about) I have tried dabbling some thoughts and ideas on paper at times. But this was the first time that I was going to experiment with a blog. As I see myself faced with the daunting task of penning down stuff about myself, I can’t help but feel like an animated story teller as I try to glamorize my dreary MBA life. The feeling prompted me to change my blog name from the boring arjunbathla.blogspot.com to sheikh-chilli.blogspot.com. Sheikh Chilli, for the uninitiated is a not-so-famous Indian raconteur best known for his humorous dreamy story telling style (think Mungeri Lal). With the blog title finally changed to something more interesting than my name, I’ll begin the talk about myself.

I was born in Chandigarh in an Air Force family and travelled a lot in the early part of my life. Transfers are common in the IAF and I moved from school to school. Of course there were benefits of this nomadic existence. I met a lot of new people from different cultures and got an opportunity to see various locations. This included a stay in a missile base with SAM’s being test fired every weekend which is undoubtedly the coolest thing to have happened in my life. (There. I’ve managed expectations for the rest of the blog. I’m an MBA student after all. Remember?) I was exposed to the discipline, work ethics, and of course the parties that are associated with the defence forces in India and grew up in their beautiful campuses. My childhood introduced me to different perspectives and helped me develop into a more confident and adaptable person.

Education and sports were the two things considered very important in the family and as I grew, I remained heavily involved in sports activities including football, cricket, tennis, swimming, tae-kwon-do (Yes. You heard me right) and golf. A run-down Pentium that broke down every fortnight was probably the reason why I got interested in Engineering in class 9th. The other reason being my love for Maths. I gave the JEE and qualified for Electrical Engineering in IIT Madras.

Chennai was an interesting experience. It was my first time living away from home and the exposure to new cultures and to people from varying backgrounds in those four years taught me what no book probably can. Though I had travelled earlier due to my father’s profession, IIT days were quite different. There was no common underlying “Air Force way of life” here as earlier and this made the sea of people all the more colourful and the experience all the more captivating. Sports remained my first love on campus and it took a lot to pry me away from my beloved Wilson tennis racquet or my soccer shoes. My love for computers persisted, though it manifested itself in the more degenerate form of video games like Quake 3 and AOM. It remained one of the major reasons for me wanting to join Oracle as an Applications Engineer and move to Hyderabad in 2005.

I worked at Oracle for about two years during one of the most exciting times at the company. Oracle was on an acquisition spree at the time and over 10 smaller companies were acquired during my stint there. It was also trying out new stuff like selling an operating system and what-not. Oracle exposed me to a multinational corporate culture, but the developments in the company made me aware of a macro picture that I was not aware of till then and prompted me to decide to do an MBA. In this time, I was also involved with a technology start-up company and coincidentally, was (re)introduced to various friends and friends of friends who were graduating from MBA colleges or leaving their jobs with an entrepreneurial mindset and looking to start a business (One of them being the founder of the popular Bangalore coffee shop – Brewhaha). The combination of these experiences went a long way in setting my life in brownian motion again. In the winter of 2006, I gave CAT and was selected to join IIMA for the 2007-09 batch.

MBA schools probably have one thing in common. And that is a culture of hard work and intense competition. Long assignments, working till the wee hours of the morning, 100% attendance requirements, CV preparation. The great thing about it all is that it taught us to stretch ourselves to limits we never thought we could take. We started off with earthly pleasures like sports and movies being few and far between and us cocooned in the IIM scheme of things – pre-reads, cases, surprise quizzes and other such radical forces. But as time progressed, we found ourselves reducing our sleep time to accommodate all of these. The one hobby I could not keep up with though, is watching the idiot box. And for that, I blame our dorm senior (I hope he is not reading this) and his attempt to fix the picture quality that resulted in our poor TV taking a fall from 4 feet above the ground (ouch!) :-(. I manage to keep myself updated on all the sitcoms through my beloved laptop though.

My summer internship was with Goldman Sachs in Singapore with their private equity team and the frenzied MBA first year suddenly felt like a walk along Marina Beach. This was my first time working abroad and these two months were by far, the fastest two months of my life. 100 hour work weeks, sleeping till 5 in the evening on Sundays, taking the taxi back from work at 4 in the morning, getting up again at 7, playing tennis and football, 25 km bicycle trips, and of course, my first time with the Wii!!!.. whew! They were also amongst the most enriching two months. There was simply so much to learn from the city and from the work.

Now, the age of fossilization for my MBA days has begun with age and time creeping up. The studies are more relaxed, but the other activities keep the pace up. Writing a blog, of course, being one of them.