I am off to this beautiful island called Mallorca and my wife is off to Londres. I wish you all a "buen fin de semana".

Well! the exams of the second semester were over on Friday. It was a relief to be done with the exams. The final exam for Section A turned out to be really stressful. It was a Managerial Accounting exam. Even those who were renowned to finish the exam in half the time were in the classroom until the end of the exam. It was a very number crunching exam with a lot of time pressure, I felt like I was taking a GMAT again, especially comparing the time pressure.

One of the nice things about IESE is the bar in the school offers beers and wines. No sooner the exams were over, the majority of the first years were out in the sun enjoying the lovely weather with a bottle of beer with them. A picture speaks for itself:

Komal, Carl and Bein were no exceptions:
Our popular Mexican friend Rafa even brought a set of speakers with him to listen to music and enjoy the beer when the exams were over. Here he is with Gustavo:

I got a chance to see this funny video making fun of a German speaker who pronounces "thinking" as "sinking". You will understand what I am talking about by watching the video from here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1630845885840625774

My wife and I were going through our pictures and I came across this one where I wanted to ask my classmates in the photo: What are you "sinking" about?

Finals for this second semester are coming up next week. Many of the hard working IESE students are busy valuating bonds (Capital Markets), playing with supply and demand curves(Market and Managers), calculating transfer prices (Managerial Accounting), finding bottlenecks and managing queues (Operations Management) this weekend. With just a weekend off, our third semester is starting on Mar 27.

I think I am saying I should get back to my books!

See you soon!

"Doing Good Doing Well" conference took place 2 weeks back in IESE. Because I was a lazy blogger, I never got a chance to write about this event which rocked. The event really widened my horizon on what some nice people have been doing for the overall good of the community while at the same time making money. It was interesting to listen to Ms. Kresse Wesling from Canada who talked about how she has convinced businesses that they would indeed save money by using recyclable materials and in doing so, doing well in here business. She started her business in HongKong and and she has now expanded her business to UK.

It was also inspiring to listen to Madhura Chatrapathy from India whose organization ASCENT has helped shoemakers in India run a sustainable business by creating a collaborative called ToeHold Artisans Collaborative. The shoes, some popular ones like Kohalpuri, manufactured by the collaborative have already entered the international market and are in hot demand by international fashion houses. The collaborative has the artisans as the shareholders. The artisans then share the profit among them according to the number and quality of the shoes they make over a period. This has also helped them feel proud in what they do. My wife and I took this photo with her along with some friends. Top row: Kapil, My wife Srijana, Madhura from ASCENT, Anil, Oriol
Bottom Row: Aalok, myself, Anjanay Borwankar (IESE alumnus and founder of Adopt-a-Business)

There were also some IESE alumni among the speakers. One of them was Emma Coles of FreePlay, whose company was making self-rechargable radios available in the African markets for people who didn't have electricity or couldn't buy batteries easily.

More on it can be read at
http://www.iese.edu/aplicaciones/news/view.asp?id=829&lang=en

Thank you Responsible Business Club for organizing such a great conference.

Last semester, the first years were invited by the second years "randomly" for a dinner. This semester it was our turn on Mar 9. Kris Wiljanen, Alex Recoder, Damien Perillat, Dasha Smirnova, Marc Rodriguez and Billi Desai were our guests. Srijana, Kapil and I were the cooks.
This was the killer moment when I was adding chili powder to the chicken: I realized later I added more chili powder than I should have added. The chicken curry was extremely hot, even to myself. Dasha, from Russia, had tears in her eyes.

As I said in the caption of the photograph, the chicken curry, which I cooked, turned out to be really hot. But the funny thing was it was the first thing to be finished during the dinner. Except for the hot chicken curry, we had a good time chatting about Exchange program and things in general. With our 2nd year guests, Kris from US, Dasha from Russia, Billi from US, Damian from France, Alex from Spain, Marc from Spain, myself, Srijana and Kapil from India(behind Marc and I)

After some hiding, I am back with lots of energy (not as much as I want to as I think I am getting sick).

Last weekend, I flew to Boston for my sister's wedding. It was great to meet my sister Pushpa, brother-in-law Yogya, my parents, cousins, bhaujoo (sister-in-law), niece and Yogya's parents and relatives. It was also great to meet my friends from Boston who I had missed a lot. I don't have their pictures yet. This was the first time I was there after I left Boston in Oct 2003.

(from left to right, top row) My cousin Ananda, Yogya's brother-in-law, dad, sister Pushpa, brother-in-law Yogya, myself, mom, Yogya's dad, Yogya's mom and Yogya's sister
(from left to right, bottom row) My niece Niti, sister-in-law Sarmila, and cousin Deepak
(photo credit: Expert Arnico Panday, a genius PhD from MIT)

Today, we went to SEAT car assembly plant located near Barcelona. The factory visit was part of our Operations Management class. It was amazing to see a new car being produced every five minutes or so. I saw advanced robots in actions for the first time in my life. We couldn't take pictures inside. But here is the one I took inside the bus we took.


Coincidentally, today's Financial Times carried an exclusive coverage on the car industry. It mentioned about SEAT as well. I was enjoying reading FT this afternoon after the visit as the weather was gorgeous.

In the evening, my wife had a dance practice in Komal's place for the multicultural night thats taking place tomorrow. She is dancing on 2 songs. I was kicked out from Bhangra dance because I didn't practise as I was in the US during the weekend. Pobre me!!