Walk the talk with Rohit Awasthi

Its’ a nice, bright Saturday morning here in Pune. I switched on my laptop and checked a few emails. Just then I got a small ping on the messenger and it said,
“Good morning, sorry couldn’t reply to your message earlier. The write-up you sent was fine and you could have posted it.” So said Rohit Awasthi, the marketing guru of Pagalguy, India’s top-notch MBA-guidance website. Or “PG” as it is popularly known.

I had submitted a small write-up to Rohit, a few days back. But thanks to the huge frenzy of CAT 2009, the folks at PG have been on their toes to gather concrete information and hence Rohit couldn’t promptly reply, as he always does. PG guys have taken up the prodigious task of representing the students and putting forth the woes faced, in front of the IIMs and Prometric.
I acted like an opportunist and quickly took the chance to interview ‘Gnrs’, as Rohit is better known to all the PG-ites, including me.

I had met Gnrs a few months back at a Pune PG-meet where aspiring CAT crackers came together and discussed strategies. Rohit sported a black T-shirt which proudly flaunted a PG logo and a catchy tagline. He coolly walked where we were gathered and broke the ice by telling us how the meet would course.

Today’s interview began very gradually with the exchange of pleasantries. I made every possible attempt not to maintain any “interview-aura” and so kept it as casual as possible. But marketing guys with their uncanny sense figure out what is in store. Rohit got a hint of what was coming but in spite of his hectic schedule, decided to oblige.

Me: You guys, in PG, are continuously giving us latest updates... the effort that goes in the backdrop can perfectly be judged.
Gnrs: It has been crazy and the madness on forums! We haven’t deleted so many posts in history of Pagalguy. The stats are amazing.
Me: People are fanatically voicing their opinions, I can see that. Sometimes it is just a need to be heard you know.
Gnrs: Yes, we are trying our best to reach out to the right people, so that they hear us and then do something.
Me: The work you people there are doing is like God-sent for most of us.
Gnrs: Well, it is just a part of our work and something we love to do here at PG.
Me: Most, who come into the swamp, get the scoop and the limelight and then just leave without actually making anything out of it. But it is different with PG.
Gnrs: Yes I noticed that. The futility of online petitions and all that jazz.
Me: So you people are working today as well. Isn’t it?
Gnrs: Well yes, I am in office to quickly wrap a few things here. Then I’m off to a test-centre in Mumbai. Today and tomorrow, will be heavily loaded. So I think there are higher chances of more issues to crop up.
Me: Gosh! On a Saturday! So tiring?
Gnrs: Who says it isn’t? But that is what I chose, right? After 7th of Dec 2009, I’m going to take a break from all CAT related discussion for a while. In fact, all the moderators on PG will. We have been working 24 by 7. I guess a break is well deserved.
Me: Sure it is! But are you always so occupied?
Gnrs: Well most of the time. Last month I was in GIM, Goa for a guest lecture. I was there to talk about social media and new roles in marketing. Then back to Mumbai, covering CAT 2009 issues.
Me: Nice. So you are into lecturing as well.
Gnrs: I have done it for quite some time now. I have been invited to various MBA colleges.
Me: Like?
Gnrs: TAPMI, NMIMS, GIM. I have some more lined up and have taken a note of them in my diary. Now I just have to schedule them.
Me: Impressive! But can you manage all that in 24 hours?
Gnrs: So far I have been able to. Then I’m a married man, and that also has its own challenges.
Me: Since how many years have you been married?
Gnrs: 2 amazing years.
Me: And you have been working 24 by 7? So how did you manage the chasm between personal and professional life?
Gnrs: Well, I think nobody can balance that. My professional life is very close to me. And I am clear about that.
Me: It’s a good perspective. Did you always know you wanted to do this? Or is it something that developed over a period of time?
Gnrs: No not at all. I didn’t know what I would be after 2 years. It is the interest in what I’m doing; dedication towards it and then confidence in my beliefs that helped me immensely.
Me: Well now I have a nasty question for you.
Gnrs: I am all ears.
Me: People talk of perseverance, dedication, hard-work and all the big words...Do u think it is all about this? Don’t you think it is more about luck and right decision making at the right time? Gnrs, I have seen people who follow all those big words but don't get what they strived for. So there is surely more to it.
Gnrs: Of course it is about all that and it is about luck too. You see, I met Allwin, Apurv by chance, that is by luck. And then we started working together. I am a believer in destiny.
Me: And fate?
Gnrs: Most definitely. The point is if you do what you love, and I mean what YOU LOVE, indubitably the ride will be tough but you will learn. Life is after all full of experiences, and all sorts of them. You shouldn’t be afraid of taking chances. You know Arpita, when I joined Pagalguy I was the first employee. I faced salary cuts. I saw the good and bad of it all. It was tough for me. I had an admission in VG Som, IIT Kharagpur. I rejected that. I knew, deep down where my happiness lied.
Me: That was harsh, wasn’t it?
Gnrs: Yes definitely but was fun too. Arpita, at the end of it, everything turned out to be for the good, in fact better. So people respect these aspects. Had I failed, I would have learnt something either ways. Yeah, people may call me stupid, but who cares?
Me: Lose the battle but not the lesson. Nice Gnrs. So you say you have taken risks. And lots of them.
Gnrs: Yes, plenty. But wouldn’t life be boring without any of that?
Me: Hmmm. Do you feel sometimes, maybe I shouldn't have done this or maybe I could have done that better? Do you repent any of the risks you took because of an unfortunate outcome?
Gnrs: I am shameless like that so no remorse.
Me: Hahahahaha.
Gnrs: But seriously, I don’t repent like that, at least not because of the outcome. An outcome has too many parameters, most of which aren’t under your control. This, I have learnt over a period of time. But that doesn’t give me a leeway to repeat my mistakes. I don’t repeat my mistakes and make a conscious effort towards that.
Me: Interesting as it sounds. I wonder how Gnrs is at home. If I may ask you a personal question. Do you have clashes at home? If yes, how do you handle them? If not, how come?
Gnrs: The answer to your first question is yes, just like every married couple. Sometimes more, because my work is a 24 by 7 type.
Me: Then?
Gnrs: I explain things to her, my wife Shweta. Make her understand.
Me: Is Shweta working too?
Gnrs: Yes she is a corporate trainer at the RBS. Before, I used to take things very personally. But over the years, I understood and concluded that it is a Woman-thing. So now I’m relaxed.
Me: Hahahaha. But have you faced occasions where you had to choose between office work and family issues?
Gnrs: Lot of times. It happened quite recently. My wedding anniversary was on the 2nd of December 2009. We completed 2 years. I had taken an off from work but was managing forums from home till 3pm. But then, that was the need of the hour.
Me: First of all, congratulations. Do you have your priorities set? Or are they decided at run-time?
Gnrs: I can’t. It is more at-that-moment type. But luckily for me, Pagalguy has flexible working hours. One can take his girlfriend out for a movie even during the day. By girlfriend I mean in for everyone of course.
Me: Hahahahaha. I understand that. So you credit PG for it?
Gnrs: Definitely. Our aim is to create a company where people are treated as mature adults and they should be able to decide what is good for themselves on their own.
Me: You were in Patni before. Do you miss the corporate style?
Gnrs: No. And I guess I never will. Consider any software company. There isn’t a lot of good work, maintenance kind of work. There is no value for innovation and ideation. Some processes are end up harassing people and instead of facilitating them in their work.
Me: Ahan! Was quitting Patni a well thought decision or an overnight call?
Gnrs: Overnight call! I felt I couldn’t do it anymore. I was unemployed for 3 months after that. I did answer CAT and other entrance exams. Then through Pagalguy community services I met Allwin on several occasions. We gelled well.
Me: During your unemployment, did you get a financial pinch? Did you have liabilities at that time, like family et al?
Gnrs: Well to sustain myself I did take up a part time job at IMS. And as far as my family goes, my father has his business in Lucknow. So ideally I didn’t have liabilities as such. Like I said before Arpita, luck matters.
Me: Agreed. So how is it working at PG? Working with Allwin and Apurv?
Gnrs: Just one word for this. Awesome!
Me: Cool, but is Allwin a tough-master? Do you guys have difference of opinions? Does he let you do things your own way as long as you deliver?
Gnrs: He is a tough master but the best part is he does not micro-manage. Whatever we do here, is our own initiative. We come up with an idea, pitch it to the team. After the brainstorming session, the team filters the superfluous. But we can do this together because the aim is straight forward. We want to be the best in the industry and grow fast. We believe if the people working at a company are growing, there is no chance that company will not grow.
Me: You’re in marketing. So is it difficult for you to explain things to your IT guys?
Gnrs: Not at all. We have a lot of cross-domain discussions. If they come up with a marketing/sales plan and if it is good, we work on that as well. So an IT guy needn’t be only stuck with a computer. There is this leverage here.
Me: I read your blog about the PG employees and hiring funda. Sounds like fun.
Gnrs: It is. It’s a great team to work with. It is so because of our hiring process.
Me: You are a moderator too on PG. People find you very strict. And then there are some people tend to butter you. How do you handle all that? Doesn’t it hurt when someone talks harsh about you or do you take it at your stride? Doesn’t all that get irritating?
Gnrs: See Arpita, I can tell you one thing that my decision as moderator isn’t affected by my personal relation with a particular user. Let me explain with an example. In 2006, I was working in PG but not as mod. Back then, I remember sitting next to Allwin and posting a profane word on forums. Allwin looked at me and said “You’re banned for a week.” It’s like that. Vanilla plain.
Me: And then? Did you yell back?
Gnrs: No. I was at fault. I accepted the ban. If I am at mistake, I gracefully accept it.
Me: Hmmm. Good. So what is it that you like most about yourself, about your personality to be precise?
Gnrs: Hahahaha. Arpita is being very specific with words. Hahaha. I am curious and genuine. And above all, I value people.
Me: Well then are you so at home too? Is Gnrs like this everywhere?
Gnrs: Most of the times. I do have flaws but only people closest to me know them.
Me: Well now more of an abstract question, but a very important one. Where does Rohit see himself after 5 years?
Gnrs: Honestly I don’t know. Just giving my 100% and doing something effective and successful.
Me: Nice. I am sure you will have some words of advice/suggestions for the readers.
Gnrs: Readers? Arpita I didn’t get you.
Me: Gnrs, this uber-casual interview has been really good. It would be great to share it with others that is only if you have no objections. You never know who may benefit out of it.
Gnrs: Hahahaa. Well alright!
Me: So some golden words please.
Gnrs: Hmmm. Humour is very important. It can take you out of any pitfall. So guys please don’t lose touch with your funny side, however hard you may be working.

Gnrs aka Rohit leaves bidding a bye to complete his errands, with a promise to meet the Pune PG-ites when he next comes to the city.

I have placed this blog in my technical section since I feel there is some take-home in this conversation. It may be different for each reader. Or none at all for some.

And so the virus ate the CAT...

“The prestigious CAT exam of 2009 has not been able to live up to the standards its predecessors maintained”, so say the disheartened students who kept burning the midnight’s oil during long, persevering preparations. While some have lost faith in the assessment system of the IIMs, others have turned cynics and voiced sarcastic comments on various forums. Prometric, IIMs, Dr. Barua and Mr.Kapil Sibal, government, none have been spared.

There has been frenzy at various test centres across the country. The 1st day of tests, several servers stopped responding rendering thousands of students alarmed. About 30 centres closed shutters on the 2nd day. Students who managed to answer the 2-hour-15-minutes test in 4-5 hours complained of computers rebooting invariably, waste of time due to slow systems, crashes in operation-system processes like svchost.exe.

When questioned by the media about why the infrastructure was so poor, the IIMs and Prometric issued a statement that viruses had caused the tumult. In two days time, the names of two viruses were disclosed. Conflicker and W32 Nimda. But unluckily for the IIMs, people have refused to accept this theory. This article is a small attempt to prove that viruses can indeed cause furore of this scale.

About the virus
Conflicker, better known as Conficker is a worm which was in news in November 2008. It exploited vulnerability in network services of the Windows operation systems, entered the system and created chaos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker. Microsoft had promptly released a patch for fixing this vulnerability on the 23rd of October 2008. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx

But Conficker maker/makers were smarter. He/she/they released other variants of the virus, after enhancing it. So far the known variants of this virus are Conficker.A, Conficker.B upto E.

What the virus does
Conficker is a very smart worm. It enters the system either through exploiting the vulnerability mentioned about or through USB drives. Once on the machine, it gets itself administrative rights, executes some code and creates a process of its own. The process can be viewed in the Task Manager under the Processes tab. It skilfully names the process using a technical jargon and thus no normal user would ever suspect any illegitimate activity there. After this, it tries to connect to the internet through different unimaginable ports. If it finds a connection, it downloads any well-known antivirus to corroborate its legitimacy to the user. Post an anti-virus scan, the virus goes into a long sleep/hibernate mode only to wake up once more, this time to damage the system and steal information. It contacts various servers and downloads harmful malware. Presence of W32 Nimda on the computers at the test centres is just part of this gimmick. Conficker has the capacity to steal passwords and send it to it’s’ headquarters (which is still not known) through other infected computers without leaving any trace behind.

Other than this, if the virus infects any server catering to other clients, it breaks the communication channel between the server and the clients, prevents domain-name-to-IP and IP-to-domain-name resolutions, better known as DNS lookups. It prevents regular patching of the operating system by disabling Windows updates. It can render existing anti-virus softwares useless.

So the claim that IIMs and Prometric, make isn’t all wrong. This virus has the capacity to take the world by a click. But they cannot take shelter under testimonial because:
1) There are good anti-virus softwares like Microsoft’s Forefront which can detect the presence of Conficker.
2) The patch release by Microsoft is available. But applicable only for genuine Windows operating systems.

In our country, people are gifted with intelligence and can crack the toughest operating system codes to make its pirated copies and find workarounds to make pirated/evaluated copies into genuine ones. Thus, such a venture by Prometric and of course NIIT should have been smarter one. Prometric being a non-Indian company can be given a lee-way for the charge. But NIIT, Indian company, should have known about the intricate details of IT infrastructure in the country where more than 58% of the computers have pirated copies of operating systems and other softwares. As for the IIMs, one cannot blame the manager if the computer freaks out.

And yes, it isn't about Windows v/s Linux, its about piracy but the lack of contemplation on the part of NIIT!

VOIP and its effects on E-Commerce

Marketing has always been one of the key elements to good commerce. Where a normal business-man would sell 10 of his products without marketing, a smart business-man, with marketing, would not only sell 16 of his products but also make a customer pool for him. Marketing involves obtaining customers, retaining them and further creating new customers.

In today’s world where everything goes ‘E’ every second day, commerce has matured to e-commerce. Where transactions happen at the speed of thought. E-commerce, which was completely dependent on the telephone, brought with it a need for change in the way things were marketed. Emailing, calling clients and potential customers, providing sales advice and services. All of it required a dedicated telephone line. This is when the online business was badly hit. Due to pricey calling rates, the telephone bills soared, thus adversely affecting the business.
Come 2004. The high scale development of the VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) began. VOIP is also known as the Internet Telephony or the IP Telephony. To mention, VOIP was there around, since 9 years. This technology involves transport of voice/message/facsimile packets via the Internet instead of the traditional telephone network. In other words it relieves the telephone line. The change brought in with it a lot of good news and relief for the online retailers. The benefits noteworthy would be
1) VOIP provides inexpensive calling rates. Long distance as well as international calls. The reason being, that internet bills are much lesser as compared to the telephone calls. The telephone calls are billed per minute, where as the internet usage is billed per megabyte, i.e. amount of data transmitted.
2) Since VOIP carries voice and data communication over a single network, the infrastructure cost is further reduced.

VOIP also provides a whole new set of advantages. Telephone companies charge call-conferences, IVR, call forwarding. But thanks to the open source VOIP implementation like Asterisk, these facilities can be used for free. VOIP can also be used for secure calling using encryption and authentication.

Implementation of VOIP phones is very simple. The cheapest being the computer-to-computer implementation. Widely used operating systems, like Microsoft’s Windows XP, support VOIP. Some messenger applications like Gtalk and, Yahoo Messenger 9 and later, provide the calling option. All that is needed is a headset. The other way of implementing the VOIP would be the IP Phones. Which look no different than the traditional phones.

VOIP offers a plethora of options to enhance e-commerce. A customer can begin a chat-conversation as and when required. All the issues being faced by him can be looked into faster. Queries being fired by potential customers can be attended quickly. This would not only boost sales but also lead to long term customer satisfaction.

VOIP also allows smarter web browsing through chat and video conferencing. This would give a customer the feel of a face to face talk.To sum up, VOIP is the technology to look for. It is the future of calling. The smarter, cheaper and better way to do business.

Conficker Virus on my machine!

Yesterday around 8 pm I decided to switch on my laptop and watch a movie. The movie was in .avi format and hence a VLC player was required. I connected my pen drive
and immediately Mc Afee sent a pop-up notifying me about W32Conficker virus. My first reaction was to disconnect the internet connection. I looked into the Registry
but didn't find any thing great. Windows\System32 also didn't show any DLLs modified yesterday.

I assumed my machine was clean and re-connected to the Internet. Somehow I couldn't convince myself that Conficker hadn't done any damage to my system. I decided to
look into the network traffic. On monitoring for a long period I saw several domain pings and a few note-worthy points.

1) All ping were in-bound. None out-bound.

2) IPs of various ranges. 112.X.X.X till 118.x.x.x. Then 202.x.x.x etc.

3) I used a certain tool to trace IPs. The IP location on the world map and the network map was consistent in a very few cases. That is to say, 115.x.x.x was being shown a Shongzhong on the map but the network address was traced to Australia. Its strange! There are tools for IP jumping. I have heard of this. So I assume that is
the case here.

4) Pings were made from various companies mostly internet service providers. Form the US, China, Australia and even Singapore.

5) The first ping was made by 212.X.X.X. On tracking, the actual IP boiled down to 72.x.x.x. This IP is that of Ukraine and belongs to an organization there, named
WildPark. I have taken down the complete address of the organization. In fact, two persons from the organization have been identified as well. One of them claims to be
an Alexander Lapidus and the other is Oleg Chernov. I looked up for Lapidus on the internet and saw that people have reported him as a cyber-world scammer.6) Unsolicited connections were sought for several UDP ports, ICMP ping, MySQL, MS SQL, TCP port 8080, HTTP proxy, Microsoft-DS etc.

Folks who have worked on Conficker before have drawn conclusions after several observations that the Conficker virus could have its origins in Ukraine. If this is to
be believed then I think the 5th point stated above could act witness, a base for researchers to further work on.

Its very difficult to determine or conclude anything now. I shall keep posting further observations.