Disclaimer: Arbit (not that everything else i write is not. This one is specially more so)

I am in the plant, although i am not in the mood for work i have to be here because i have a meeting with a hard-to-catch-holdof architect at 4:30 here. Ive been doing sundays now for as long as i can remember. In Madurai, in any case, theres nothing else to do at home really. Either work or read or sleep.

And oh, i am working on atleast 2 new websites now related to work, also doing up a lot of hardware installation / due diligence for the plant and now theres tons of work making appointments, Getting carry-along-stuff-ready for the Diwali week in Madrid (for CPhi, of course)

This time i ve paid for couple of very interesting pre-show seminars conducted by Guys from Teva and Dr. Reddys - and if theres sufficient progress made with the plant prep for our first big audit starting 26 October - i'l probably extend the stay in Spain to spend a day or two sightseeing.

Possible highlight of the coming week : Potential trip (alone, of course) to a movie (QGM maybe) at the Garuda Mall on MG Road on Tuesday night in Bangalore (Is pretty close to my hotel)

Will possibly also hit a bookstore (i'l googlemapify up shortly) looking for more Stephen Fry, The much recommended India: A History (John Keay) and of course Mcdonough / Braungart's legendary "Cradle to Cradle" (Which is proving to be surprisingly hard-to-find. If all fails in the next fortnight or so, i guess, i have to resort to using my, much depleted*, card at flipkart or landmarkonline)

*Karcha part of recent card-binge include: a) 2 domains, wordpress deployment on one of them. About 100 dollars total b) 500 Euro seminar entry fee c) About 200 Euros for online Pharmacopoeia access until Dec 2010

Back to attempting to work now. *sigh*

Gyaan (Excruciatingly boring, i know)

Another short note before i scoot off to bed.

The old man & I had a bit of meeting at around 8 pm, just before leaving the plant to come back home.

Just as we were leaving he mentioned about how bad he felt about making me resort to such a 'boring, monotonous, joyless' (all his words) lifestyle* so early in life etc.

While it does not matter how things turn out eventually his funda is that parents always try hard to make sure that their kids do not have to work as hard as them or suffer through particularly bad things that they, without having the choice, had to endure.

(*For the last fortnight ive skipped gym most days, up early doing emails until 8:30 then scooting off to plant and not coming back until atleast 8 pm. Ive worked every sunday, as far as i can remember when in Madurai. Tedious visitors mostly. I am glad he noticed :x)

The old man of course does not realize how selfish his offspring can be - and what probably makes me tolerate such a regimen is self interest, more than anything else. No larger truths or other sentiments.

Now to the point:

There IS something that peeves me. Day in day out.

I must, with maniacal obsession, make sure that all this skull-fucking drudgery (no less, i assure you) pays back in the end. I will NEVER work with chickenshit customers, not make arse numbing commodity products or waste time talking to/about projects without potential.

I should frame this up (expletives removed, of course) and hang it at the workspot.

News

I have near finalized my general concept of structuring all outside work i do (outside of the work i do at my core job that is) into something meaningful, formal - mostly with the intent of making it that much of a serious gig.

Here goes..

Now that i have built up a small bit of capital myself - we'll be starting a company (Yet to be named*) which will, broadly, do the following things:

a) For the first few years continue pursuing investment opportunities / with clearly defined short/medium term exit strategy - in publicly listed companies.

b) Such companies will mostly be from the Pharmaceutical, Healthcare sector to utilize insights of our key person(s) involved (they already do a lot of work in this sector and believe to have a better-than-average grasp of key basic business pointers.)

c) There might a fair bit of work involving some basic derivative instruments and work involving shares, securities from other sectors subject to the key person'(s) level of comfort - on a case to case basis.

d) The fundamental philosophy of this enterprise is to preserve the original capital and attempt to grow / compound it by pursuing, thoroughly researched & logical investment opportunities.

e) In the long term, we expect this firm to assume a larger role - to complement key stakeholder interest in the Pharmaceutical / Chemical manufacturing sector and to possibly act as a form of venture capital firm / Holding company specializing in this field - to fund & thereby participate financially and operationally in interesting ventures.

f) Eventually the company should provide an ideal platform for me to participate on full owned / partial stake basis or on a consulting basis - in newer, exciting ventures in the above mentioned business segments - without any hangoever because of the association with the existing core business, which is, um, independently capitalized.

There now has to be a name (for which there is now a long list open), some basic paperwork (in the pipeline already) and of course a studly website (basic workup on already)

So there.

More info around this development will keep coming up sporadically until the website is good enough to go public. This should happen in a few months max or as soon as some of the recent mind boggling intensity from the day job cools a little.

(*I am building a long list. But as i am not too rushed or clear in the head most of these days, i am not really too keen about obsessing about a name for a while. Suggestions welcome, of course)

Um. Rant

Was at JP & My's wedding reception here in Madurai early this evening. Both, batchmates in college. This probably looks like No.1 of 2 cases of batchmates getting married to each other (MK & Sherlie being the other jodi - as MK informed me today). Not bad, i guess. no ?

I in fact met most of the guys who were present after the entire four and half year gap - some have paunches, most have lost a lot of hair and some even have interesting core chemE jobs.

But it was mostly a lot of awkward hugs, awkwarder pauses, louder than usual laughter, sillier than usual jokes and a mind-boggling number of far-from-sincere commitments to stay in touch.

The wedding is tomorrow morningish, but i have visitors to take to the plant - there was this extremely interesting looking babe* from amongst My's gaggle of girlfriends in attendance & with nothing better to do after packing my visitors off to the Airport post lunch - i guess i ought to get there and get on with it.

(*And i thought only i had a thing for shortish, giggly girls with ponytails and flowy, embroidered skirts - JP tells me that nearly half the crowd - even juniors and all - were hitting on her like mad)

Have you ever felt like you know EXACTLY what is to be done to make this deal work, to make this bit of code to run, when to buy this out of the money call, when to sell Bhartitele, when to go through FDC's balance sheet again, when to send the sample, when to invite Sanofi-Aventis for an audit, When to fill the visa form to avoid the customary last minute scramble, when to wake up for Gym etc ..

The end result after a sustained period of consistently reacting on a timely basis to these feelings & getting these jobs ticked off - one by one - is that you are rich, successful, happy and fit.

Off late, i have this weird affliction where inspite of knowing about everything - what to do - when to do - i am still procrastinating - for no reason - not concentrating, just idling away, quite bored with it all. This is sometimes leading to significant loss of quality of work, loss of opportunities and worse, making me needlessly defending / inventing theories to justify - what actually is just needless procrastination.

Heck, i made a 40,000 dollar sale today and i normally tend to feel nice afterward - today i am like numb. No feeling.

One remedy has been just throwing myself at physical, line-managerial work which basically involves solving one minor problem after another at site - one problem sorted - another gets thrown at you - there isnt time to idle -

The main problem with this approach is that I am not working a regular job - no one tells me what to do and what not to do - consistent procrastination results in direct loss of momentum in the numerous projects i work on - probably are very important to me - and significant amount of work at is 'soft' work which invariably get dumped in the back burner.

I guess it is kind of hormonal, sort of like a Quarter Life crisis - my parents seem to understand it too - they're constantly asking me to go on trips to visit friends or vacations.

Ive always been used to doing a lot of work, keeping busy and not feeling lost like this - and this is driving me crazy.

Book Reviews

Disclaimer: Boring. Dont tell me that i did not warn you beforehand. People in need of more entertaining stuff please go forth and read Bharadwaj Rangan's nice review of 'Luck'

The entire week or so has gone through in a sort of haze - the rest of the year will now go through really quickly with the travel season approaching.

Got through two really good books this week - Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers' and Atul Gawande's 'Complications' - Both, interestingly, I started last month - and although i found them engaging - had to drop them off within a few sections because of travel related breakup of routine.

I have in the past struggled to get through Gladwell's 'Blink' and 'Tipping point' - starting them multiple number of times - always losing grip after a session or two - In hindsight probably because, although they were both excellently written - they did not deal with a broad subject that i could identify with at that point of time (still, in fact)- and repeated attempts to read through only made me mentally tired. (A bit like reading this after a hard day's labor, heh)

In one decisive, well-executed stroke - 'Outliers' - Gladwell is back in business with me.

'Outliers' - is a book about people who've gone on to achieve extraordinary things - outstanding things - and Gladwell, in his regular thorough & extremely lucid style runs through various casestudies in sequence to illustrate one funda after another - stuff which he believes actually made them 'outliers'

- The book is split into Part I : Opportunity and Part II : Legacy - through which Gladwell illustrates why certain people - because of a combination of a host of 'opportunity' related, 'legacy' related, 'overall cumulative external influence' related factors tend to perform better.

While there are some parts of the book that are slightly tedious and - in my humble opinion - a little too needlessly long winded (The Pilots/ Colombian planecrash section for eg.) - its still overall a great read.

If one is still wary of Gladwell - I strongly recommend a quick read (possibly even at a bookstore) of the 10 odd pages of Gladwell's own story (which is like a sort of an epilogue in the book's narrative sequence) - about his mother Joyce & the circumstances of her education, combination of opportunity & Legacy that eventually made her go to college, meet Gladwell's dad, emigrate to the US and all.

Now to the other book - Gawande's Complications : Notes from the life of a young surgeon

Im sure youve heard of Dr. Atul Gawande - Hes apparently Gladwell's friend - they're both staff writers on the New Yorker - Gawande's articles of course appear frequently on the 'Annals of medicine' section.

Complications is a light, extremely engrossing collection of Gawande's own memoirs during his time spent as a surgical intern, collection of articles on various themes around Medicine & more specifically as a surgeon (Which were published in the New Yorker and The Slate).

Contrary to what one might think at first sight - the book is extremely lucid & written with non-medical people in mind.

Gawande - with surprising amount of candidness - explores (In Gawande's own words) 'about how things go wrong as how things go right' and i dont think there are too many other similar writers in existence especially as 'Doctors and hospitals are usually suspicious of efforts to discuss these matters in public' (again his words).

The book - actually sort of split into 3 parts - actually has the first few chapters dedicated to notes from his specialization as a surgeon - in terms of experiences with procedures etc. - the other parts of the books have really interesting chapters on grey areas of medicine / treatment like pain, nausea, eating disorders - a doctor's thought process regarding offering treatment for such cases and so on..

I have to say one thing though - both Gladwell & Gawande are superlatively gifted - through 'Outliers' and 'Complications' respectively - they display this amazing, (majorly jealously inducing, if i might add*) flair to sift through a large volume of relevant academic research related to their respective subjects and present their cases via extremely enjoyable, instructive narrative.

* P.S: Question : Have you ever read someone's work and went "Aww. How wickedly brilliant ! I'd give an arm or a leg to be able to do that" (and NO he does not count. Who doesnt want to be him :). I am referring to the serious ones)

My answer: These two probably come pretty high up on this list **

** P.P.S: I guess every1 went through a juvenile phase of trying to write like Salinger, and like me, only got the swearwords part right - Heh. So that does not count as well.

Heartbreak

Well, WTF, im officially heartbroken today

Might write it up as a post later on. But then, mostly not. WTF, does not matter either way, does it ?

Thats two WTFs in 2 lines.

But then ive always been delusional, and it is quite a nasty state of mind to be in. Heh, WTF

I wont waste any space attempting half-witted intros for this one. But i cant help but feel one thing after going through a lot of her stuff - The rest of us are all total talentless hacks. TOTAL. ZERO.

Link 1

Link 2 via this

And of course this (DO NOT miss this )

Whew!