Sir,
This mail may come as a surprise to you and may also conclude that this mail is a bringer of time wastage,but helping the needy is always a good deed.And no sir there is no question that i ask for a job here! Actually i found you address while searching for information on the Simonschool's website,and thought i'll ask you for help.I am an officer inthe merchant navy for the past one year,and have sailed on tanker vessels.I plan to leave the sea after a little while and pursue an MBA degree.
The hearsay has it that one should start the engines of research on theB-Schools very early to be in a good position while applying.So, i didexactly that and have landed myself in a mental soup.The classprofiles of any college that i have seen,reveals that majority ofpeople come from a business related background like consulting,financeetc.Now i am just a sailor,who sees his ship being battered by thehigh waves every now and then.I have no understanding of these termslike consulting etc....the only consulting i can think of is career consultants.
While applying the essays ask you what your future career goals are?Now i know it in my heart that i want to be an MBA....why you ask?Because i like to see men well dressed while working,the neatly tailoredsuit,the polished shoe,the corner office with a view and the latehours which in a way seem kinda adventurous.But the problem is thathowever much i want to but i cant write these things in my essays.
Sir,i need help here.And a person of yourstature,who's "been there-done that" can possibly help.Can you give mean idea of what an MBA in General Management is all about?Howdifferent is it from consulting,finance?What kinds of traits orqualities should one have to excel at this kind of a life?How did youdecide that you had to do an MBA?
If you're looking at someone as a prospectiveemployee of your company,then what do you look for?Right,i know this has been a mail which is termed out of the blue,but am hoping that you'll take out some time and practise random acts of kindness!
Thanking you,
Gaurav
Monday, March 9, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Coming home - Vibrations
From the "no vibrations" environment of the office, the manning office chaps send you the e-ticket for the flight to the ship,so starts the affair with vibrations.It starts with the auto rickshaw ride to the airport,the vibrations of the engine crying out when the rickshaw hits the andheri road to the airport is a prelude to the more of them to come in the future.
Reach the airport,check in,sip on a coffee,make last minute calls to people cared for.Smoke the last of the ciggarettes before a 10 hr flight in cafe,board the flight.Settle in your economy class seat,let the plane take off.Feel the vibrations of the jet engine as the captain revs it up before take off.Still wonder why in this modern age an airplane can make such a racket and produce such vibrations while taking off.Order the alcohol to drive out the boredom in a long flight.Have 2 beers,watch a movie before dozing off in a restless sleep.Wake up in the middle of the flight time to find everyone sleeping like babies,and curse yourself for the alcohol drank.The familiar vibrations of the aircraft still luring you to sleep again.Settle down in the seat again,curse the concept of economy class and sleep off.
Reach the destination leaving behind the aircraft and its vibrations.Get met by the agent responsible to take you to the hotel.Reach the hotel,spend a night chasing away the jet lag and start wondering what kinda people are to be encountered on the ship.Surprisingly praise the kind of gentry one was with on the last ship,atleast one knew their habits.This time it would be like running into a wall blind.
Wake up in the morning to the sound of the phone ringing.Agent meeting you in half an hour to take you to the ship.Curse some more and get ready.A happy looking agent makes you curse the profession itself.Get to the service boat,step on it to find it vibrating with the powerful engine revving up to head towards the ship.Step onboard the deck of the ship,greeted by complete strangers giving you the best of their smiles since you are their reliefs for whom they had been waiting for 2 months or more probably after a lot of rejected names from office.
Head towards the accomodation,settle in your cabin with all the luggage.Smoke a ciggarette and feel the ship move ahead after captain's order of full ahead on engines.Feel the vibrations of the 30000bhp engine just about crying to take a vlcc forward in the sea water.
Voyage..?..Persian Gulf to USA...makes it a 35 day trip one side with a 5 day stopover for loading or dischargin ,basically telling you that your bond with vibrations is gonna be strong this trip!..2 months into the assignment,and once you get up in the middle of the night,startled,wondering if something's wrong.Look around,feel yourself,look in the mirror conclude bodily everything's fine.Look out the porthole and see the deck of the ship lit up,telling you the ship is not moving but anchored.So the engines are off...which makes you realise what the hitch in a good sleep is.No vibrations of the engine.Smoke a ciggarette,wonder if you're going nuts,go back to sleep.
Get up one morning,go down to engine room,come up for coffee and hear the captain telling you that a relief is lined up for the next port.The affair of the smile starts from then on.Reach the port,meet a complete stranger standing at the gangway with a 1000 watt smile,while a look to his face makes you wonder if youre the monster of the bilges.Get off the gangway and leave behind the vibrations of the vlcc engine for the vibrations of the service boat.
Reach the hotel,get on the flight,feel the vibrations in the middle of the night after 8 beers,curse the alcohol,cant smoke so curse again.Go back to sleep,wake up at Indira Gandhi Airport arrivals.Get through imigrations in 2 minutes and for the first time praise the indian government.Get to the exit,smoke a ciggarette.Meet the people you have been longing for.Go home sleep,and wake up in the middle of the night,startled!..Wonder whats wrong..after careful inspection realise that there are no vibrations to make you sleep...Smoke again..go off to sleep..!
Wake up in the morning
Reach the airport,check in,sip on a coffee,make last minute calls to people cared for.Smoke the last of the ciggarettes before a 10 hr flight in cafe,board the flight.Settle in your economy class seat,let the plane take off.Feel the vibrations of the jet engine as the captain revs it up before take off.Still wonder why in this modern age an airplane can make such a racket and produce such vibrations while taking off.Order the alcohol to drive out the boredom in a long flight.Have 2 beers,watch a movie before dozing off in a restless sleep.Wake up in the middle of the flight time to find everyone sleeping like babies,and curse yourself for the alcohol drank.The familiar vibrations of the aircraft still luring you to sleep again.Settle down in the seat again,curse the concept of economy class and sleep off.
Reach the destination leaving behind the aircraft and its vibrations.Get met by the agent responsible to take you to the hotel.Reach the hotel,spend a night chasing away the jet lag and start wondering what kinda people are to be encountered on the ship.Surprisingly praise the kind of gentry one was with on the last ship,atleast one knew their habits.This time it would be like running into a wall blind.
Wake up in the morning to the sound of the phone ringing.Agent meeting you in half an hour to take you to the ship.Curse some more and get ready.A happy looking agent makes you curse the profession itself.Get to the service boat,step on it to find it vibrating with the powerful engine revving up to head towards the ship.Step onboard the deck of the ship,greeted by complete strangers giving you the best of their smiles since you are their reliefs for whom they had been waiting for 2 months or more probably after a lot of rejected names from office.
Head towards the accomodation,settle in your cabin with all the luggage.Smoke a ciggarette and feel the ship move ahead after captain's order of full ahead on engines.Feel the vibrations of the 30000bhp engine just about crying to take a vlcc forward in the sea water.
Voyage..?..Persian Gulf to USA...makes it a 35 day trip one side with a 5 day stopover for loading or dischargin ,basically telling you that your bond with vibrations is gonna be strong this trip!..2 months into the assignment,and once you get up in the middle of the night,startled,wondering if something's wrong.Look around,feel yourself,look in the mirror conclude bodily everything's fine.Look out the porthole and see the deck of the ship lit up,telling you the ship is not moving but anchored.So the engines are off...which makes you realise what the hitch in a good sleep is.No vibrations of the engine.Smoke a ciggarette,wonder if you're going nuts,go back to sleep.
Get up one morning,go down to engine room,come up for coffee and hear the captain telling you that a relief is lined up for the next port.The affair of the smile starts from then on.Reach the port,meet a complete stranger standing at the gangway with a 1000 watt smile,while a look to his face makes you wonder if youre the monster of the bilges.Get off the gangway and leave behind the vibrations of the vlcc engine for the vibrations of the service boat.
Reach the hotel,get on the flight,feel the vibrations in the middle of the night after 8 beers,curse the alcohol,cant smoke so curse again.Go back to sleep,wake up at Indira Gandhi Airport arrivals.Get through imigrations in 2 minutes and for the first time praise the indian government.Get to the exit,smoke a ciggarette.Meet the people you have been longing for.Go home sleep,and wake up in the middle of the night,startled!..Wonder whats wrong..after careful inspection realise that there are no vibrations to make you sleep...Smoke again..go off to sleep..!
Wake up in the morning
Land of Kebabs..!
Gheesa" was a poor boy in an indian village whose father,if given a kilo of gold,would find it safest to hide in the walls of his hut,made of cowdung.As a story in our 10th std hindi book said.
Lucknow's paan-spitting people,gun slinging politicians,extortions.Crooked one-man wide streets stuffed with more rickshaws than people.Landmarks of red cakes of dried paan spit in the city.People on roads outnumbering the people in offices.More road side politicians than politicians themselves.Old time lucknow has only "gallies",with banners of the local corporator welcoming you in them.Rickshaws make walking like a jigsaw.Thats cowdung.
Journey to your favourite place of worship takes planning.Rickshaws,people,dogs and smells being the patience testers, you turn a blind eye and thicken your skin to the worldy distractions.Make your way to the above mentioned kinda street in Aminabaad's tunde galli.Get to the seating place which is below the ground level.See the pictures of Shahrukh Khan and other celebrities taken with the bald man sitting in a corner and acting as a cashier.Feel important.Feel the heat.Smell the smoke of kebabs.Order 2 bada kebabs and a pepsi to counter the oil.Eat a morsel,feel blessed.Eat another and reach climax.Wash hands,eat saunff,pay money to cashier while matching his face to the photos on the walls.Head out to RBI building while on the way back.Eat meetha-paan,and smoke while eating it.Go home and dont get up till 12.Thats gold.
Lucknow's paan-spitting people,gun slinging politicians,extortions.Crooked one-man wide streets stuffed with more rickshaws than people.Landmarks of red cakes of dried paan spit in the city.People on roads outnumbering the people in offices.More road side politicians than politicians themselves.Old time lucknow has only "gallies",with banners of the local corporator welcoming you in them.Rickshaws make walking like a jigsaw.Thats cowdung.
Journey to your favourite place of worship takes planning.Rickshaws,people,dogs and smells being the patience testers, you turn a blind eye and thicken your skin to the worldy distractions.Make your way to the above mentioned kinda street in Aminabaad's tunde galli.Get to the seating place which is below the ground level.See the pictures of Shahrukh Khan and other celebrities taken with the bald man sitting in a corner and acting as a cashier.Feel important.Feel the heat.Smell the smoke of kebabs.Order 2 bada kebabs and a pepsi to counter the oil.Eat a morsel,feel blessed.Eat another and reach climax.Wash hands,eat saunff,pay money to cashier while matching his face to the photos on the walls.Head out to RBI building while on the way back.Eat meetha-paan,and smoke while eating it.Go home and dont get up till 12.Thats gold.
Plural Man
The Phillipines english imparting mechanism is a little warped.Frank the 3rd engineer on my ship was more warped than the mechanism itself,coz he believed that cartoons and Cher concert CD's is the best cure to anything under the sky.Cher's fairwell concert had to be watched on daily basis as if to cure a oncoming disease.
In full josh Frank's "Cher is so goods,and sings very wells",was overlooked by most of us, for the presence of exotic dancers on the projector screen.Plurals with me are present in state of excessive booze in blood,slurring.Frank's plural ways were not much of alarm,barring when u got an alarm in the engine room and hes on watch.
After snacking in the day room i went down to the control room and found Frank sweating and out of breath,which was an indicator of battles of time already fought and some more to come.
The alarm was whirring in the engine room,making u a lil panicky if u even dont wanna!Frank "Gauravs,its the booster pumps..!",which is to say that the heart of the ship,the engine was about to stop,which is a calamity!"We have to checks the pumps",.."Man!Its gonna be one of those days for which u hope never to see"Well we went into the purifier room,with me having the oiler mustered and gathered the necesary tools.
There was Frank looking at the pumps,and i thought now we gotta stop the engine.So Frank declared "Gauravs!We have to open up the ports pumps!"
And then it damwned on the me the plural,slurring Frank meant only one pump and the cause for alarm was never the pumps but the enlgish imparting machinery in phillipines.
In full josh Frank's "Cher is so goods,and sings very wells",was overlooked by most of us, for the presence of exotic dancers on the projector screen.Plurals with me are present in state of excessive booze in blood,slurring.Frank's plural ways were not much of alarm,barring when u got an alarm in the engine room and hes on watch.
After snacking in the day room i went down to the control room and found Frank sweating and out of breath,which was an indicator of battles of time already fought and some more to come.
The alarm was whirring in the engine room,making u a lil panicky if u even dont wanna!Frank "Gauravs,its the booster pumps..!",which is to say that the heart of the ship,the engine was about to stop,which is a calamity!"We have to checks the pumps",.."Man!Its gonna be one of those days for which u hope never to see"Well we went into the purifier room,with me having the oiler mustered and gathered the necesary tools.
There was Frank looking at the pumps,and i thought now we gotta stop the engine.So Frank declared "Gauravs!We have to open up the ports pumps!"
And then it damwned on the me the plural,slurring Frank meant only one pump and the cause for alarm was never the pumps but the enlgish imparting machinery in phillipines.
Scenes from an Overcrowded Pushpak
The very fine jounery started from mumbai into the cold,paan spitting land of Lucknow.After gettting settled in the sleeping bag,i tried fighting the last nights hangover with the bisleri bottles,and an inflated ego of the TC who said i cudnt smoke in the train.
Woke up after battling nightmares of getting caught travelling ticketless, confirmed the overpriced agent acquired ticket,and parked it among the others,ordered a tea.And was nursing the hangover when the guy sitting next to me exploded on the phone in bhojpuri, half colouring the mike red with his paan!
Rather uplifted at the end of the conversation, he showed his cell phone to his neighbouring and said how one wise man told him to buy a nokia and nothing else,and so he did.Didnt mind spending the extra cash,and he ranted on abt the coveted phone that it was, in his "gaon"
Anyhow the neighbour had a glance and declared it as a motorazr,and so the exchange of the abuses began in bhojpuri.I wasnt miding one bit, simply for the lack of anything to do in the 24hr journey,and whoever said that to discover india is to travel in the sleeper class, is right!
Coz the "Seth" of gorakhpur didnt know anything apart from receiving and dialling,and had the biggest ego,and when it was bruised it was as a massacre of anybody in sight...
Its an interesting experience travelling in the "Mens-only" train as Senti and Rancho call it.
Woke up after battling nightmares of getting caught travelling ticketless, confirmed the overpriced agent acquired ticket,and parked it among the others,ordered a tea.And was nursing the hangover when the guy sitting next to me exploded on the phone in bhojpuri, half colouring the mike red with his paan!
Rather uplifted at the end of the conversation, he showed his cell phone to his neighbouring and said how one wise man told him to buy a nokia and nothing else,and so he did.Didnt mind spending the extra cash,and he ranted on abt the coveted phone that it was, in his "gaon"
Anyhow the neighbour had a glance and declared it as a motorazr,and so the exchange of the abuses began in bhojpuri.I wasnt miding one bit, simply for the lack of anything to do in the 24hr journey,and whoever said that to discover india is to travel in the sleeper class, is right!
Coz the "Seth" of gorakhpur didnt know anything apart from receiving and dialling,and had the biggest ego,and when it was bruised it was as a massacre of anybody in sight...
Its an interesting experience travelling in the "Mens-only" train as Senti and Rancho call it.
Venezuela!
Frank the philipino 3rd engineer and i were working on the deck,him trying to repair an earth fault in one of the deck lights and me as a junior giving him the helping hand by the way of passing him the tools and the moral support in times of the sun shining down on below-the-deck engineers.
The Ship was fully loaded,and was heading in no particular discharge port,as is the case with the tankers,and as Frank loosened the bolts of the casing,we heard the 2nd officer shouting on the radio.We deciphered nothing really,coz with the sun,which engineers are not used to except on lazy sunday pool party afternoons,we asked him to repeat.
Then it came out POW!..Discharge port had been decided as Venezuela.Sailing on a VLCC and the last ports as Basra,Nigeria....this was the oasis for us nomads. The gravity of the situation was suddenly realised.
Now Frank only watched videos of Cher and Tom & Jerry cartoons on the ship for a period of 7 months that we had sailed,sometimes i doubted his sanity!He wore an expression equivalent to the capture of Jerry,which i think was the purest and most natural one he could come up with.I slipped into the dreamy eyed mode for some time,into the stories i had heard abt the beautiful land,from stories of Papillon and the recent book i had read from the ship's library Banco.
We finished work and headed to the day room.The scene there was of 10 school boys discussing their wonder days,and the next plan of action.For me it was a strange encounter seeing the usually high strung ppl loosened out.This carried on for the next 4 days, and u dont really mind the toil if the fruit is Venezuela!
Venezuela meant fresh fruit stock for the ship,some local beer,bars,music and the thought of coming drunk to the ship!
I dont know whether it was the sun shinning on us engineers or the successive earth fault which happened 5 days later , which turned out to be the bad omen for us sailors, coz the charterer wanted his oil to be delievered at an off-shore facility 90 miles away from land, where the only consolation were the phone cards and a bad connection.
Neverthless being on sea the hope of reaching a better port,meeting some weird new people or the bestest the hope of signing off,keeps driving you,its been enjoyable so far,this way of living,coz seeing the land lubbers the only hope i can see and understand is the hope of a higher paycheck or an empty local.Not incentive enough for us sea urchins.
And so i salute to the bullet holed pipelines of the Basra Oil Terminal which is a bringer of hope of seeing greener lands.
The Ship was fully loaded,and was heading in no particular discharge port,as is the case with the tankers,and as Frank loosened the bolts of the casing,we heard the 2nd officer shouting on the radio.We deciphered nothing really,coz with the sun,which engineers are not used to except on lazy sunday pool party afternoons,we asked him to repeat.
Then it came out POW!..Discharge port had been decided as Venezuela.Sailing on a VLCC and the last ports as Basra,Nigeria....this was the oasis for us nomads. The gravity of the situation was suddenly realised.
Now Frank only watched videos of Cher and Tom & Jerry cartoons on the ship for a period of 7 months that we had sailed,sometimes i doubted his sanity!He wore an expression equivalent to the capture of Jerry,which i think was the purest and most natural one he could come up with.I slipped into the dreamy eyed mode for some time,into the stories i had heard abt the beautiful land,from stories of Papillon and the recent book i had read from the ship's library Banco.
We finished work and headed to the day room.The scene there was of 10 school boys discussing their wonder days,and the next plan of action.For me it was a strange encounter seeing the usually high strung ppl loosened out.This carried on for the next 4 days, and u dont really mind the toil if the fruit is Venezuela!
Venezuela meant fresh fruit stock for the ship,some local beer,bars,music and the thought of coming drunk to the ship!
I dont know whether it was the sun shinning on us engineers or the successive earth fault which happened 5 days later , which turned out to be the bad omen for us sailors, coz the charterer wanted his oil to be delievered at an off-shore facility 90 miles away from land, where the only consolation were the phone cards and a bad connection.
Neverthless being on sea the hope of reaching a better port,meeting some weird new people or the bestest the hope of signing off,keeps driving you,its been enjoyable so far,this way of living,coz seeing the land lubbers the only hope i can see and understand is the hope of a higher paycheck or an empty local.Not incentive enough for us sea urchins.
And so i salute to the bullet holed pipelines of the Basra Oil Terminal which is a bringer of hope of seeing greener lands.
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