Rocket, Cat and Cricket

Had the pleasure of watching Rocket Singh : Salesman of the year today, and my verdict is - it was worth the 70 Rs. that Big Cinemas charged me for it; a really pleasant and benign film amongst the multitude of senseless video junk that is being dumped in the market in the name of entertainment. The story of Harpreet Singh Bedi, a naive and scrupulous young commerce graduate who gets exposed to the wicked and malignant practices of the sales and services business, was very credible and fresh. The film enlightens us to the fact that if one has a magnanimous and benevolent heart and uses it along with brains in one’s professional life, it is only then that one can make warm relationships with other people and achieve success – to coin a phrase from the idea, ‘People before Profits’. And perhaps this is a valuable lesson for all of us who are about to enter the professional world. Ranbir Kapoor has done very well as an actor, much better than his previous films. He looks quite natural and convincing. Thumbs up!

Electronic media reports that the faculty of IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata are of the opinion that online CAT 2009 should be scrapped, and I am in agreement with this view. Several of the aspirants have faced an assortment of difficulties due to mismanagement of the exam this time and this is surely going to affect the quality of the incoming batch. Some of them were given faulty systems which hung during the exam, some of them had people crying behind their backs while their timer clocks were counting down, some pressed the ‘deadly’ quit button placed between back and next accidently, some were just utterly confused with the chaos. To sum up, this was not a fair test and a formal apology does not count as justice to the 300 thousand candidates. I am strongly in favour of a conventional written test for this year. I am not against CAT going online, but not in this manner. I have 4 points to make in this regard. One, IIMs should sit down with BITS and understand how they conduct a completely error-free exam for 150 thousand applicants every year. Two, the set of questions for online CAT should be enlarged multi-fold so that repetition of questions does not occur. Three, details such as the paper’s marking and evaluation scheme should be clearly notified before the commencement of the test. Four, for heaven’s sake hire some well-informed staff for helping the candidate in case some predicament does occur.

India is going to play the 1^st ODI tomorrow against Sri Lanka and I am very much animated. Sehwag and Gambhir are in terrific top form and so is Sachin. Yuvraj’s breathtaking shots in the last T20 have renewed the nation’s respect for the hero. However, fielding and bowling still remain areas of worry. The kind of butter-laden hand work shown at Mohali and Nagpur completely disparages the No. 1 title that we are so pompously flaunting around. And I would also not condone the exceedingly poor running between the wickets. Improvement in these 2 areas can considerably brighten up our chances to score victories in this series as well. Let’s all hope everything goes great.