The Satyam Fiasco

The image of Corporate India has been tainted with the Rs. 7000 Crore fraud by the Raju family. The news about this incident spread like wild fire and soon Google was flooded with search strings which included all possible combinations of Satyam, Raju, Fraud etc. My dad was very much worried hearing about the news as he could not recall which IT firm had hired me for summers. An offer letter from Satyam which would have been celebrated only 2 months back would now transform into a worthless piece of paper. Fortunately I was lucky and my mother reassured my father that its not Satyam. The Satyam recruits who till few days back were crying about the delay in the date of joining are now feeling lucky to have avoided the association with the tainted firm. Now they can apply else where, a scenario which also is not very promising keeping the global slowdown in mind.

Well talking about the origin of this crisis, it dates back to the year 1999-00, when Satyam acquired a firm named Indiaworld. This acquisition was done just before the dot com bubble burst and Satyam suffered huge losses in this deal. To deal with this the books of Satyam were cooked to show the company in good health and Mr. Raju expected to fill the gap in the coming years. But as the fate turned out the gap instead of filling got widened year after year until one day it became impossible to continue with it. The Satyam Maytas (Satyam spelled backwards) deal was a plan to fill this gap. The Maytas promoted by the sons of Raju was a real estate company and Raju planned to fill the fictitious assets of Satyam through real assets of Maytas on a payment of $ 1.3 billion. The payment was not actually to be made (all in the family). But the investors and share holder fury did not allow this to happen. And finally Raju was forced the directors of the company to issue a confessional statement.

The employees of Satyam, most of whom did not have any hand in this crisis are now paying the price of the evil deeds of their employer. Raju who was a hero and a model entrepreneur has overnight become a vilon.

The employees of Satyam have done no crime the government should take care to see that the company continues to operate. It was the last thing we needed in the time of "Global Slowdown".

Trip to Manali

After the grueling six months of my MBA life finally came some respite as the winter vacation. A time to breathe easy and loosen yourself. But as usual this time was misused to the fullest extent. Most of the students had left the campus barring a few and the IIT campus bore a deserted look. I just had Kshitij, my batch-mate who decided to stay back and chill out. We became more and more "AALSI" day by day. Our body clock was completely out of sync. with the sun, i.e we slept at 8:30 a.m and woke up at 4:00 p.m. The hostel mess refused to cooperate with us and consequently having lunch in the mess was out of question. Yes definitely the NESCAFE counter in the campus had all praises for us as we became his regular midnight customers and a big source of revenue for him.

As time passed and boredom started gripping in, Kshitij came up with the idea of Manali trip. Usually people go to HOT places in winter and cool places in summers but we being engineers decided to go against this popular trend. Varun, another member of our group was called in who was doing some project at Standard Charted (as per his version), and he readily agreed to join us. So the group of 3, backpacked and boarded a bus heading to Manali. It being a favourite honeymoon sopt the bus had a dominant couple population and we were feeling out of place or misfit. The journey to Manali was of 16 hours and our VOLVO was quite comfortabe for this journey.

The next day we reached Manali at 9:30 a.m. Immidiately we were surrounded by a group of guides who were hell bent on convincing us about getting the cheapest deal for the hotel. Finally we found a hotel quite reasonable in price (i guess the global slowdown was showing its effects) and we checked in. The first day was spent discovering Manali and places like HIDIMBA temple which is the most popular one there. The food was simply awesome and the locals were quite friendly witht the tourists.

Day 2: We headed towards Solang vally and Gulaba. We hired a Maruti Omni and started heading towards the snow clad mountains. After we reached there the view was simply awesome. There was snow all around and the view was simply breath taking. And yes not to forget the friction on the ice was absolutely non existent. That made it quite dangerous too. Having played over the ice and tredded over difficult terrains, it was time to leave. Although I wasnted to stay there for ever, but the dropping temperature made me change my mind.

Day 3: There was nothing much to do except we visited the river passing through Manali and were waiting for the bus.

Finally we were back in Delhi and all that was left were the sweet memories. I hope there are many more such trips to some in my 2 years at Delhi..............