Aiyo rama it is not Valentine's day but Pink Chaddi day

I love this one - very creative. I hate the morality police goons. Sri Ram Sena is nothing but a bunch of thughs who have banded together and branded themselves.

It is interesting that all issues in India seem to have Ram as the common thread – Ram janmabhoomi, Ram sethu and Sri Ram sena. I always though Ram as the national mythological hero was a bad choice. They say he is the “Adarsh Purush” (ideal man). Is he really? First, he blindly follows his parents order. Then, he kills Vali by deceit for Sugreeva. And, finally, decides to go with the masses and doubt his wife’s chastity. So, what is so “ideal” about these actions?

I wish it was Krishna who was the national mythological hero. In him you have a “rock star” – favorite of women (note: I did not say he was a womanizer), good with the flute (did Ram have any talent. He sounds like a whiner to me), inspiring leader (he got Arjuna to drink his “kool-aid” ) and shrewd tactician (how many times did he pull tricks to win the game?). I bet he would have seen the humor in the “Pink Chaddi” campaign. Hell, he probably would have had a collection of pink chaddis:).

Separated

The New Year got off to a rough start for me. I returned from a month long vacation (half of it was unpaid and the rest was all the vacation days that I had shored up for this trip to India) to work to find that I have no work. My boss (the CTO) of the company told me that due to financial difficulties the company was going through another round of layoffs. Since they had decided to stop all IT initiatives they did not need someone to define and manage IT initiatives.

So, here I am looking for a new job. A recruiter that I talked to mentioned that I should not use "eliminated" or "layoff" as they have negative connotations. Instead, he suggested, I should use "separated." Well, "separated" it is even though it does not change the reality. Someone else told me that averaging 2 yrs at a job does not sit well. True. I would not hire someone who changes jobs every two years. And, in the first 8 years of my work I was a sucker for the newest technology. I changed jobs every two years to work on the latest thing. In the last 10 years it has been the economy and the companies who have been prompting my job changes. One company that I worked for kept laying off people every 3 months that I finally quit after being there for 6 rounds of layoffs; the other decided consulting was not for them; the next two failed (one of them managed to sell themselves before it went under)

Someone once asked me - "How long can a 'start-up' call itself a 'start-up'?" I had no answer for that one. My former employer has been in business for 3 years and is down by $35MM. In B-school they said investors look for 3x3 or 5x5 returns (i.e. 3x returns in 3 years etc...) I bet this is not what they had in mind. Anyway, what do you call a 'start-up' that is in this state? Wind-down.

Back to the job hunt.