The Angrez / The English

'The Angrez' Disclaimer: The movie / just like this posting may not make sense to you if you haven't lived in Hyderabad or you don't appreciate the hyderabadi lingo.


you still with me !!!, go ahead ,chill out
I actually watched loads of interesting movies over the long dasara weekend and one movie i strongly recommend is "The Angrez" , literally means "The English" Not to worry , it's not another movie against the british empire. This one is a low budget movie ( 7 million Rs budget i was told) , set in hyderabad
The movie shows the clash between the two worlds - NRI and Old City
NRIs (referred to as angrez ) and a small time gang from old city form the main two groups and then there is another group of kidnappers to add to the fun ...
the movie is absolute yummy , esp if you love the taste of hyderabadi hindi,life,food etc

Hyderabadi hindi ??? - A fantastic mix of Hindi, Urdu and Telugu spoken, of course, in and around Hyderabad Hyderabadi lifestyle??? - a chill out life as I call it , one of the character in the movies puts it perfectly "in Hyderabad 10 minutes means 40 minutes"
the movie even got a rap solo called Hyderabad biryani , by a Nigerian singer ,on Hyderabad
pretty interesting lyrics like:
“Check out a Telugu movie to see the heroine,
figure out a pub where I can zero in,
DJ cold rocks the joint and everybody's hearty...
but cops already at the door and wanna stop the party... "

Nikkil the director says he had spent two full years doing the rounds of the old city gallies in search of the Hyderabadi humour. "Film's dialogues took shape during these trips — in an Irani hotel, at the bus station, in the sabzi mandi. Even those who acted in the film are true blue Hyderabadis and never forayed into films before." http://www.hindu.com/2005/12/07/stories/2005120718480200.htm

I was desperately searching for 'angrez' VCDs in mumbai last month and could'nt get them there.
now that internship brings me to Hyd,i could get the CD finally
Many of you must have seen "Hyderabad Blues" , and Angrez is another chota-budget movie on the same theme ,what else , Hyderabad ,but a lot better and closer to the hyderabadi dhadkan.
While Blues takes an NRI view of Hyderabad , Angrez takes a Hyderabadi view of NRIs and i must admit i just loved "Angrez"
The movie is basically about clash of two worlds - the old hyderabad or the old city as we know and the new Hyderabad (call centres ,discos , NRIs ... etc ) The old-city gang of salim ,ismail etc steal the show with their slang,attitude to life ,..
To me, it reminded me of my school days (All Saints High School ) at abids, ( arguably ) the heart of hyderabad as we used to believe, some may claim its charminar !
and the dialogoues feature best of hyderabadi hindi
others in bollywood like mehmood and govinda did try a bit of hyderabadi hindi in their movies ,but it never felt authentic - and any hyderabadi will tell you that
just watch this movie for a glimpse into the lives of hyderabadis

Gentlemen and Ladies , a true blue Hyderabadi movie !!

Large company Smaller Profile vs Small company Larger Profile

A friend of mine , a freshly minted MBA ,mailed this to me last week, "What strikes me about #xyz inc# is that one can actually feel the size of the organization in everything that happens there. Security guards at every door, people don't take interest in others, crowd too large for that, long queues everywhere from cafeteria to SodexHo coupon counters. People work for a decade and are still new faces to so many in the organization...."

If you are about to finish your MBA and you are at that cross road ,called the placement season, you should ask yourself - "Large company Smaller Profile or Small company Larger Profile ?"

Off late, this one question worries me more than anything else
In fact, to the extent that i envy all those batchmates who are pretty clear (apparently! )
that they want to get into big companies - MNC or Indian or Hybrid(that would be CTS etc )
Ok, to simplify,let us consider the davids to goliaths of IT world alone
On one hand , we have the Wipros,IBMs and Cognizant's ...
and then the medium sized firms like ,say,Kanbay,Mindtree,Tech Mahindra etc
so whom do you pick ?

Am kind of at that cross road right now and the way i see it

Large company Smaller Profile gives you
Learrrning - mentors to learn from ,excellent past projects and experiences,functional experts - the real gurus of domains ...
Established process ( Assumption # 1 )
Brand name to sell to clients,potential employees (and potential employers ! )
What if its a large but a growing company - more clients and more projects and hopefully better profile 4 u

David and the Goliath - All the discussions on the imminent consolidation of Indian IT space and how a handful of big 4 to 5 may survive !

Lost in the crowd !

Job security - probably applies to some Indian companies

Small company Larger Profile gives you

No learning curve / Deep Sea diving from Day 1

Process - what's that ?

Lose out on Brand name ( generally yes )

Riches in Niches - there will always be niches for medium companies to grow

Career growth - the greatest attraction , do well and hope that the company also does well

Risk - Definitely on the higher side

Lesser job security

Visbility - You are not lost in the crowd

Visibility of success/failure is huge in a small firm

Risk premium - premium on pay for accepting the offer

The eternal question remains - small-big ? or big-small ? :(((

If i can trust my Inbox

• I win a lottery every other day ,usually EuroLottery
• Some Nigerian prince offers equity in oil blocks almost every other week
• Cameroon diaz sends mails every other fortnight
• Discounts on Encyclopedia and CDs (while am happy with wiki and google )
• and then there are the SPAM mails on preventing SPAM !!
• Promises from plastic surgeons .. xxxxxxxxx

that's just a sample of mails in my inbox

and loads of mails , censored stuff, i just cant blog about here
I must say yahoo mail does a tidy job of redirecting junk mail to junk box , where it rightfully belongs
while gmail has a long way to catch up and rediffmail is totally hopeless

( you must have noticed the bullet points ,now that's a peculiar habit commonly found among bschoolers like me )

Autumns '06 - SPJIMR strikes the winning goal yet again!!!

Here's the official word on Autumns/Project placements for 2006.Although ,i must say, am a bit surprised that some big names (In My Humble Opinion) who were there for autumns ,are missing from the official announcement. Here's part of the text published on our website. Hope , some of you find the info useful.


................. the Italian spirit found its challenger in SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, India's premier B-school, as the Institute struck the winning goal yet again and concluded its Autumns Process for the Class of 2007 with overwhelming success.

The anxiety and euphoria during the autumn's process was palpable but the outcome spelt celebrations and cheers galore. History was created yet again by the Institute as 326 offers were made to a batch of 140 students within hours of commencement of the process. If you thought that was a stupendous goal, think again for the cherry on the cake had yet to come. With more than 80% of the students bagging 2 offers or more almost every student had the luxury of choosing the project they wished to undertake. The wish-list of SPJIMR students was not limited to projects in the country alone and they managed to bag foreign offers from Singapore and Egypt as well.

The two days of the autumns process, witnessed all the big names from the Industry, be it HLL, P&G, Cadbury from FMCG, Citibank, HSBC, ICICI from BFSI and Microsoft, CTS, I-Flex from IT , TAS, KPMG to name a few. SPJIMR played host to 69 companies on campus and in the spirit of rewriting history; a record 22 companies participated in the autumn's process for the first time. Information management specialization shared the biggest piece of the offer pie with whopping 106 offers, Finance and Marketing were close at 79 and 74 respectively and operations not too far behind at 67 offers. Big Brands, multiple offers, dream companies,...................
SPJIMR, the torchbearer of innovative pedagogy believes that learning experience must result in the enhancement of the practical capabilitities of the Individual. The autumn's process is a spark of this innovative pedagogy of the institute. When most B-School students jostle for their summer projects, students at SPJIMR learn social responsibility through DOCC projects. DOCC is another innovative pedagogy in SPJIMR wherein the students are encouraged to take up social projects with NGO's ........

The Autumn Project is undertaken at SPJIMR in the second year of the PGDBM program ..............This is very well received by the Industry as the organization can derive the benefit of a student rich in maturity and experience gained from exposure to challenging, undermanaged and unstructured working environments during his/her DOCC project in summer, over and above the conceptual input............
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After a l........ong break

Never took such a long break away from blogging.
Guess it was the project placments and loads of work combined with a touch of laziness

Well, we had some fabulous autumns / project placments
Fin guys ,esp,considering the ibanks and pvt equity firms that were on prowl
Marketing guys had the usual suspects
Ops guys again had some good Ops consulting companies and the regular joes
(as u guys can see ,am writing the most generic blog possible without mentioning any company name ,becoz the official report from institute is yet to be released )
Info Mgmt guys again had some newer IT firms in campus, in addtion to regulars,some preferred user companies,some went to boutique / niche consulting firms ,some Indian,some MNCs ,some large ,some small,some very small ....

As the telugu quote goes - "jihva ko ruchi purre ko budhi"
And the translation goes - "each tongue has it's own taste,and each brain , it's own idea"

As for me , i picked Virtusa for internship ,a medium sized firm that has offshore units in Hyderabd,Chennai,Colombo,and clients primarily in US & UK. Gives me a chance to work in a mid-sized firm. It was a tough tough decision to opt for a mid-sized firm,so let's see how the internship goes. fingers crossed ... :))