The Starry Night

I recently heard this beautiful song Vincent (Starry Starry Night) by Don Mclean. It is a tribute to the 19th century painter Vincent Van Gogh.

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colours on the snowy linen landStarry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds and violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue
Colours changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artists’ loving handFor they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will…

Needle in a haystack

No, make it a yellow needle swallowed by a jaundiced mangoose hiding inside a ripe-yellow haystack!

I had used the last copy of my photograph for the CAT application form. And now, the IIMs want me to use the same snap for the interview forms. Further, I have misplaced the receipts for those snaps, which means I can’t reorder them. Crumbs!

So, I end up in the photo studio, requesting them to lookup my photo by name. I have narrowed the search down to one month (May). There are 3 ladies across the counter, and each of them takes turn to hear my case, and then say “mission impossible”. They have about 300 customers a day, and they don’t store photographs by name.

A wise old man, who is standing nearby, quietly advises me to contact the studio upstairs.  So I sneak inside the studio, and request them to search for my photo. They are surprisingly obliging.

One of the operators is busy touching up the wrinkles on a pretty face in Adobe Photoshop, while another is readying photos for print. The latter finishes his quota, and finds the CDs corresponding to May. There are 2 of them. Each CD contains about 15 days worth of photos, each day having about 300 photos.
The CD-ROM drive rotates at a gruelling 4x speed, and one by one the thumbnails start appearing. It is a tiresome process, and the poor chap had to click “next” to go to the next photo. But, he is like “Obavva” with a mouse. He doesn’t give up, and patiently wades through the entire set for about an hour. Once, we find Rahul Dravid’s photo, and then another which looks very much like Narayan Karthikeyan’s.

At the end of an hour, no luck. My photos are missing from their CDs. Somebody out there is trying to erase my identity. Somebody out there is hatching a conspiracy…

And probably, that somebody is me.

A date with the IIMs

Wheee!

I got interview calls from 5/6 IIMs. All except IIM-B want to interview me. Probably, IIM-B knows too many things about me already

The calls start as early as Feb 6. The days are numbered, and I have to crank myself up. The next few days promise to be the most exciting days in my life. I will have to think up some profound and philosophic answers (or witty ones) for some of the common questions.

a) Why did you decide to do MBA?

b) Why do you think we should chose you?

Or the interview might turn factual: What was the scandal that erupted during the ONGC IPO. Huh!? That was a sample question from a real-life story. I don’t even know when this IPO happened. La La La Tum Tum Deee Dum.

And then there’s the GD. I have to learn to be attentive; to listen to what other’s are speaking, before quipping my own stuff. Ofcourse, it is difficult to listen while pulling your foot out of your intestine. (I have a long history of the foot-in-mouth syndrome.) I have joined two institutes for GD/PI coaching.

Gee! So many things to do! I feel a bit happy, a bit apprehensive, a bit terrified and a lot lot excited.