The Roads Less Travelled …

A work that has often been compared to Catcher in the Rye, because of similar subject matter - disillusionment and rebellion against the mores of the society, The Bell Jar, is an account of Esther Greenwood’s descent into and ascent from madness. The plot and the major characters all mirror real life people in Plath’s life on some degree. As a result the novel was initially published under the pseudoynm Victoria Lucas and was not published in America till 1970s.

While the work itself deals with the “going crazy” and “coming back” of Esther, it portrays at the same time the conflicting demands placed on the woman in the sixties - family vs. career, individuality vs. conformance to the ideal image and dreams vs. perceived reality.  Esther’s descent into madness starts in the summer of her third year in college when she is in New York working for a fashion magazine - supposed to be the chance of a lifetime, a make or break moment in her career. Here she finds herself disinterested and torn between the hedonistic Doreen and conformant Betsy. Returning back to home, she realizes that she would have to spend the summer with her mother since her application for a writing course was rejected. Esther decides to write a novel, but surely and steadily the bell jar of depression descends on her and she tries to kill herself. The later part of the book deals with her recovery at the asylum. A concurrently running plotline deals with Esther’s relationship with Buddy, her “boyfriend”, his socially accepted treachery and her obsession with virginity and maternity. These are not indepedent threads, with events in one affecting the events in the other, but merely follow concurrent timelines.

The publishing of this book and Plath’s subsequent suicide have made her and Bell Jar the icon of feminist movements. Had it not been so, The Bell Jar would have still remained a masterpiece and probably the most lucid and rational description of the mind of a  depressed person on paper. The first person narrative arrests the reader, forcing him/her to look at what Esther is looking, to feel what the protaginist is feeling. Esther’s descent into depression becomes one’s own and does not feel as an aberration but a logical outcome of the events preceding it. The reader shares the claustrophobic feeling, the repugnance at the double standards and outdated ideals of the society and the wish to be free of Esther.

As said earlier, The Bell Jar is often cited as the feminine version of that other society-is-completely-F***** book, The Catcher in the Rye. Yet while, Holden Caulfield looks perenially outward and apportions blame as per his wishes, Esther looks inward, trying to understand herself and why she was the way she was or was not. All the same, The Bell Jar like Catcher…, remains the voice of a generation, wishing to break out, make its own way and find its own path. The issues Plath raises in her only novel, remain as pertinent today as they were during her lifetime, with men and women still grappling with their roles in the modern, “non-sexist” society.

technorati tags:literature, books, plath

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It’s 8 in the morning and I have classes starting in an hour. Breakfast would have just started in the mess but going there so early would be sadder way of killing time than writing this blog. This might come as a shock to some but yes even in the first term at IIMA you do have some time to kill.

One thing that IIMA shows you is the value of every second. Where earlier you would have spent hours doing something that would be classified as nothing later, this place forces you to account for every second of your life. With so much to do and often one’s personal preferences coming into play, the idea of prioritization just gets drilled into ones head.

I had often wondered what do they teach in a management school. And why is CAT the selection procedure for the IIMs? While the academic merit of the examination and the quality people it selects (or leaves out) might be debated, I have come to believe that it tests what is probably the essence of all management studies; “The ability to function under constraints“.

The ability to make tradeoffs; the quality of your decisions under pressure; your ability to identify the needle in a haystack of problems is what separates a good manager from the bad. These are not your standard mathematical equations that can be learned from a textbook. They are principles to be internalized. After 2 months in this place, I am coming to believe that the load in the first term is not a matter of accident (the courses just added up to generate the load) but built into the design of the curricula to aciheve the aim of making better managers out of us.

technorati tags:IIMA

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Techcrunch recently put up this interview with Paul Graham (the one who thinks painters and hackers are alike). Some comments that I found interesting …

“it’s an interesting data point that a company with $88,000 in funding can even compete against one with $2.8 million. That could not have happened before the web.”

“experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.”

“We print it on T-Shirts: “Make something people want.” If you had to reduce the recipe for a successful startup to four words, those would probably be the four.”

“Most of the great startups seem to have begun with something the founders wanted: Google, Yahoo, Apple, even Microsoft.”

In general he speaks about the uselessness of having a business model without a good idea, how google is beatable, and how doing something that you like to do is more important than what you think the market might want you do.

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Last season when this club bought a player for 7m pounds, eyebrows were raised and questions were asked if Dean Ashton was worth the highest transfer fee in the club’s history.

The same club in the final days of the just concluded transfer season managed to bag two of the hottest properties in world football; the minimum market estimate of whose transfers is in excess of 30m pounds. Tevez and Mascherano have been touted for some years as the future of Argentinian football (yeah Messi and Aguero have taken the mantle). At 22 years of age they are young; have already represented their country in the world cups and performed at all levels of the game. 30m combined for these two is definitely not a overestimation.

So where did West Ham get the money for them; especially considering that the Russian oil roubles and the Old Trafford war chest both fell short.

I would personally would have like to see Marscherano more than Tevez in ManU but atleast now I can see him playing week in week out.

Update: Soccerlens provides this link; dirt on MSI, Russian money and a worldwide cartel in football are the key words. Is fun to read these consipracy theories.

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