When you ask interns about their experiences with their project guides or managers, you get to hear some crazy stories. The insecure and moronic will always treat Interns as a form of life similar to amoeba and consequently low down on the food chain. While the smarter people use the interns to get a fresh perspective to some real life issues and problems. The evolved look at it as an opportunity to build the employer brand.The jobs are back. So are internships. Their cover story of 15 April 2010 is labelled Angels, Bosses and Demons. The article clearly identifies the ideal boss. You have to decide who they refered to as Demon or Angel. JAM's reporter Prachi Parekh wanted to know how I would treat an intern. Here are some excerpts...
We have all heard about being separated from each other by 6 degrees of separation. With some people you wish the degrees of separation would be 600 instead and less than six for the ones you are desperate to meet. The group that started the website at 6bridges.com (their byline says it is "An exclusive global community of Indian Professionals") did it to connect Indian professionals across the globe. The site focuses on 6 key areas (another six) : Career growth, entrepreneurship, Re-skilling, money management, leisure and professional networking. We got chatting about this and that. Let us cross the 6bridges.
Web 2.0 is here with Facebook, Orkut, Twitter ets defining the day for many. It may not be mainstream yet, but it has certainly added a two way collaboration possibility to the erstwhile one way process of writing. It builds a relationship between the author and the reader before, during and after the process of writing. Can a best selling novel be written on Facebook? Can a novel have 1500 authors? Neha Tara Mehta of Mail Today newspaper writes about all this and more on 28 Dec 2008.
The Asian Age runs a list of best sellers for the week. For two weeks now the Booker award winning novel The White Tiger has been topping the list. The others that follow have been pretty consistent too. Brisinger has been at the silver medal winning spot and Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy who writes the immensely popular blog called The Compulsive Confessor is holding forth at spot number three while I am holding fourth
The Telegraph says, " Married But Available (HarperCollins, Rs 195) by Abhijit Bhaduri follows Mediocre but Arrogant and is likely to be followed by Middle-Aged but Active. It is the story of Abbey, an MBA in the Eighties, when MBAs were just beginning to be accepted as god’s greatest gift to the corporate world. The prose is hardly of Booker quality, but the plot could interest a film maker wishing to capture on celluloid the pains and dilemmas of a man the rest of the world calls successful." OK guys, I have made tentative plans of how I will spend those millions. Now let us get cracking on the deal, Bollywood ... unless they meant Hollywood."Low on heavy fundas and high on humor and a feel good read." says Times of India
Do books that tell a great story also make great films? Are these two different forms where the twain shall not meet?While I can instantly think of films like Ben-Hur, Frankenstein, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or for that matter most of the films made by Satyajit Ray who always chose great stories and turned them into visual delights on celluloid.
Pramita Bose of The Asian Age asked me about my favorite books. That's a tough question. It is a bit like asking which one is your favorite movie or favorite city to live in. The answer to most of these questions changes or gets updated frequently. The latest book that one falls in love with often features in a list like this. Some books remain eternal favorites. They linger on. They haunt me. On a lonely evening those phrases and dilemmas set me thinking. Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning is one such awesome book. Spike Milligan certainly remains a benchmark when it comes to writing humor. Here is Pramita's take on the dicussion...
