rakoFi.com code base acquired

Well its been a long time since I have blogged, but believe me I spend a lot more time on blogger.com than would be visible. I was actually spending time on other aspects of blogger.com that might interest the developers. Anyways, this post is not for that. I just wanted to let you guys know that my side project with friends from undergrad - rakoFi.com - a web based college market place service has sparked some interest among the start up/entrepreneurial/VC circles here in the Bay Area. One of the founders of studyplaces.com expressed interest in buying us (our code base) out. And after some amount of thinking, we thought that our baby would be nurtured and brought up in a better way in a bigger company. Hence, we signed the papers and off went rakoFi.com into the studyplaces.com.

Anyways, its encouraging to see that something we create was actually of value to someone else. That's the good part about being in the bay area. As I have always mentioned, networking is everything. The people responsible for bringing us and studyplaces.com together were Tekriti Ltd. - my previous work place in Gurgaon. Thanks Gaurav!

Anyways, we are onto bigger and hopefully better things. So keep watching this space closely!

Hello, world!

I am on the intarweb!

Hello, world!

I am on the intarweb!

Hello, world!

I am on the intarweb!

College Crush

So actually it turns out I am really getting addicted to blogging. I mean who the hell blogs on his way to Vegas. Me and a few of my friends are right now on our way to Vegas - we are driving down US-101 currently and vegas is still 8 hours away. And one of the songs that is playing now reminds me always of a really crazy thing I once did back when I was in undergrad at IIIT-Allahabad.

So back in undergrad I had this thing for a girl in college. She was nice, dark brown complexion, great hair, nice height and she had many other talents which were displayed aptly at Effervescence. So now the thing was that I had really little excuse for talking to this person as she was not in my batch. And of course i had to talk to her, or get paly or whatever. I mean I just had to, but I could find no way to do this. After a month or two of trying hard, I was getting no where. And my frustu-pana was soon approaching its limit. So I can up with an ingenious plan! At least I thought it was ingenious.

I knew that person was taking an economics course, like I had the previous year. Also, I had a thing for economics myself. So I thought why not give a talk in an area of economics which is not covered in class!! Crazy! I know - I was kinda getting interested in game theory and its economics implications and so thought why not take this route to learn GT better and at the same time get a good first impression on her. So I walked up to the professor and told her about my plan (sans the girl motivation behind it!). She couldnt have been more delighted at my proactive-ness, in fact she invited me to give an additional lecture to the MBA class. I was like - WOW! She is a real nice person and really liked the fact that I was interested in economics, not something you see in an engineering school often and also the area was something she was only tangentially covering in her class, so a more detailed lecture would really go a long way - she thought.

So i studied my ass off for the next 3 days and at the end of it - i had a ppt ready for both the MBA class and the BTech class. The class for the MBAs was not something to write home about, but the professor was really supportive and backed me up at places I was exactly crystal clear.

In the class for the BTech guys, I was really excited. Things were going according to plan, and of course she was there! Suchit was accompanying me - sitting at the back - a source of constant support. The whole lecture was over before I could say John Nash - but I thought it could have done the trick and so I was happy with myself.

We sort of got talking from that onward, but I guess it never really clicked between the two of us. And anyways, with time I was beginning to live more of GT. At the end, I ended up using the lecture gig as a whole paragraph in my SOP. That person graduated successfully and of course we are still in touch, but I guess this one was not meant to be! But I smile every time I hear that song - which song - I would prefer not to tell so as to avoid making things so obvious!

Do you still eat your dinner on a leaf?

Ok so been a long time since i blogged last, mostly because I have been lazy but also because i have been running around a lot. So anyways, has it ever happened to you that you are outside your country (India) and some one who is not from India (and who has really the IQ of a frog) comes up to you and says - "hey so do you guys in India still eat on leaves?" What do you do with such a person? I actually start out by laughing at them, on their face. And then go on to have this debate with myself whether i should start by punching them in the eye or in the stomach. Not really! But I mean for the past few days I have been meeting people who are so ignorant of the minor details and are so stuck in time and still hold on to idiotic stereotypes about us. And what is funny is that when you try to correct them - they feel they are right and we are just bullshitting them. And this is especially true of the Europeans.

Actually I guess its us who are part of the problem. I mean of course we have problems in our country, but that doesn't mean a person from Romania should come to me and ask me how in the world does your country have enough money to buy fighter jets. My reply to him would have been that not only can we buy fighter jets, we make'em and sell them also and not to stop there, we can buy your country as well which is smaller than our smaller states.

I mean i think we should start being a bit more aggressive in asserting that we dont take things sitting down anymore, not that we did this before but we had a lot more to be humble about few years ago than we have today. People of our country are working hard to make a mark for ourselves in the global arena and also for our country. We are racing ahead in terms of economic growth and prosperity. I mean you all know how well we are doing, I dont want this post to turn out like another India Shining Ad but just want to ask people out there who are abroad to start standing up against any bullshit thrown at us by people who owe a lot of their economic development to the plunder their ancestors committed in our land and people who are ignorant enough to think that we still use elephants to get to work.

And even if we do use elephants to get to work, we create a lot less pollution and keep things clean, unlike those guys who are possibly single handedly responsible for making earth a worse place to live and are bringing us closer to the brink of environment doom. Call it the brown man's burden, but today not only do we have to work to reach the level of development reached by the G-7 or something but we have to do it in a clean and green way coz the white man messed things up. (Ok, i think this is way too much criticism - i respect my american collegues a lot and dont mean any disrespect - i am sorta echoing the thoughts of Thomas Friedman when he lectured on similar issues at Stanford).