2014

 
Unemployed

   The highlight of the year 2014 was that I quit my job all of a sudden and became unemployed voluntarily in the month of July. The plan was this - I was going to put my "best efforts" to crack CAT and make it to IIMs. No, not for making money as an investment banker. It was primarily because in the place where I worked for close to 3 years, whatever we were working on made no sense to me although according to my manager, I was a valuable employee. My first plan was to look for a new job and I did manage to clear a couple of interviews. However, when I looked around at the kind of work my friends were put into in other IT companies, I had genuine doubts on whether I would enjoy my new job at another firm. Since I knew that I wanted to get into social sector eventually, I thought that a post graduation from a decent B-school will help me understand Business, Economics, Entrepreneurship and Management in general  all of which will broaden the scope to get into my field of interest later, without having to worry too much about the risks involved. I wrote CAT in November and the result wasn't good enough for me to make it to IIMs. Contrary to what I believed initially, the results didn't  disappoint me too much! This was the second most surprising thing. The first one was that it wasn't too boring when I was out of job. I'm figuring out what to do now, while running out of money pretty fast.

Reading

  I haven't read too many books in 2014 but here are the ones I loved -

1. The Good Boatman - Rajmohan Gandhi
2. The Flaming Feet - D.R Nagaraj
3. Ooru Keri (Part 1 and 2) - Siddalingaiah
4. Chomana Dudi - K Shivarama Karantha
5. Hayavadana - Girish Karnad

The books "Flaming Feet" and "Ooru Keri" deserve separate blog posts.

Travelling

  I made a  resolution a couple of years back to go on at least one solo trip a year. Sadly, I broke that resolution in 2014 but hopefully, I will make up for it this year. A couple of nice places I visited in 2014 deserves mention -

1. Ganeshgudi - The "Old Magazine House" at Ganeshgudi in the western ghats is a place worth staying at in monsoons if you don't mind walking around in heavy rains. Apparently, if you like to do some bird-watching, December is the best time to visit this place.

2. Galibore - This is a well known weekend getaway place for Bangaloreans. Worth a visit.

Politics

   As a keen observer of Indian politics, I found 2014 very exciting. Some of the noteworthy happenings were - The emergence of the AAP in Delhi - a ray of hope for people who desperately wanted to witness and get involved in clean politics, their political blunders that followed, their surprising success in Punjab in general elections, the bhakts' never-ending trolling on twitter in the beginning of the year because of the rise of AAP and then the celebration of their man's astounding victory by some more trolling, the sad and probably irreversible-in-the-near-future fall of the Congress and most importantly, the way in which the educated urban middle class around me fell cheaply to brilliant marketing by today's"strong PM", without asking the right questions. Having said that, looking at the alternatives we had, I do believe the voters have made the right choice for now. While it's too early to judge whether the new government is a better one functionally, it has definitely been more entertaining than the previous one, thanks specially to some of the folks in saffron and of course the Swamys, the Iranis and so on.