The Quarterly BITSians BITSunami Team & S Nagarajan (IAS Topper) The BITSAA Edition Sandpaper [2.0] Fall 2005 BITS, Pilani, Alumni Magazine BITSians on Wall Street Private Equity • Investment Banking • Hedge Funds • Sales & Trading FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 0 Sandpaper [2.0] Fall 2005 Issue 6 EDITORIAL 60 BITSians at India’s Best B-schools 63 FedEx Delivers – Book review FEATURES 7 News GENERAL INTEREST 9 Masala & Spice 66 The Writer’s Market 10 Dilip’s column – Fits BITS 70 We Who Are Not As Others 72 Confessions of a BITSian Woman COVER STORY 12 BITSians on Wall Street RESEARCH & INNOVATION 32 Our Alumni in High Finance 74 Embryonic Stem Cell Research 75 Quantitative Concepts in Arts & Sciences NOSTALGIC NOTES 83 Mission to Mars… Abort? 33 You Only Live Twice: A Tale Of Renewal 35 The Dridge THE QUARTERLY BITSIANS 78 BITSunami Team NOTES FROM PILANI 81 S Nagarajan, IAS 2005 Topper 36 CSD –An Era Of Collaborative Research 82 Civil Services in India 38 Evaluation pattern at BITS – a new story 40 BITSAT Review BITSIANS IN THE COMMUNITY 42 The Pharmacy Group at BITS Pilani 86 The diljales make a difference 45 Back to BITS 48 Oasis to Oasis ALUMNI CORNER & BITSAA 87 MIT, Stanford, or Caltech? On a Scholarship? CREATIVE & HUMOR 88 BITSAA Women’s Council 50 A Month of Bhavan’s Night 88 BITS.aid 54 The Looking Glass 89 BITSAA 30 Under 30 Awards 56 Lost… in every which way 90 BITSAA Silicon Valley Elections 91 Partyin’ around the world BUSINESS & STRATEGY 94 Classnotes 57 Hedge Funds FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 1 About Sandpaper 2.0 BITSAA SANDPAPER VISION To read past issues visit the website: http://sandpaper.bitsaa.org/archives/archives.htm FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 2 About Sandpaper 2.0 SandpaperOnline http://www.bitsaa.org/sandpaper/sandpaper.html BITSAA Newsletter BITSians IN ACADEMICS Every month we bring you a newsletter At last count, there with stories about BITS and BITSAA were 208 BITSian through the Yahoo! Groups. In case you alums teaching as miss an edition, you can visit the professors at Newsletter archives online and go through universities and issues and news that you may have research institutes missed. around the world. All details including Photo Galleries research, emails and phone Click on “Photo Galleries” on numbers are to be www.bitsaa.org and see photos of Pilani, found on the cartoons, artwork and books by BITSians, website. Contact as well as profiles of BITSians in business, these professors. academia and research. Start a dialogue! TEAM SANDPAPER – 34 Pierce Road, East Windsor, NJ 09520 EDITORIAL BOARD Dilip D’Souza, Anuradha Gupta, Anupendra Sharma JOIN THE TEAM (Also includes *Chief Ed) CHIEF EDITOR Sandeep Mukherjee* Sandpaper 2.0 is created by ASSOCIATE EDITORS Ashish Garg, Pushkala Venkataraman, a global team with members Dileepan Narayanan spanning seven countries in PILANI TEAM Anindita Dutta, (Team Lead), Himabindu four continents. It’s a great Chitta, Sukanya Vijayakumar, Vernon place to gain organizational Fernandez, Sandip Gangakhedkar, Sindhu leadership experience, Anand network with the alumni GENERAL INTEREST Sandhya Krishnan, Madhurjya Banerjee community and enhance BUSINESS & STRATEGY Prasenjit Chaudhuri, Vignesh Shetty your writing skills. EDUCATION & ACADEMICS Vikas Chandra COMMUNITY SERVICE Laxman Mohanty Please email your articles, nominations for Quarterly CLASS NOTES Suraj Srinivasan BITSian, letters to the TECHNOLOGY Vivek Iyer (Lead), Anand Jayaram editor, feedback and THANKS The team wishes to thank Prof Rahul requests to join the team Banerjee, Prof Raghurama, Prof R K to: [email protected] Mittal, Mukul Chawla, Neel Broker, Aditi Pany as well as all those who helped us put together the BITSians On Wall BITSAA International has Street article. Thanks also to everyone been granted 501(c)3 tax- who sent in his or her articles. All articles exempt status by the IRS, that could not be included in the print and is registered in New version will be made available online for our readers to enjoy. Jersey, USA. ♦ © All copyrights for these articles belong solely to the authors unless stated otherwise. FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 3 Advertising Feature BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine Special Advertising Section FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 4 Advertising Feature BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine Special Advertising Section Wissen is seeking outstanding BITSians to join their team Buy the world’s best cricketing gear or play fantasy cricket online FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 5 Editorial Masters of the Universe? Barbarians at the Gate? Both? Tom Wolfe, in his book Bonfire of the Vanities, others, we hope that the article makes for called them “Masters of the Universe”. In enjoyable, educational reading. Barbarians at the Gate, the implication is less In addition, this issue flattering yet just as also breaks from our powerful. Investment tradition of awarding Bankers, Traders, the Quarterly Equity Analysts… the BITSian to list goes on. The individuals only. importance of Wall Warren Bennis, Streeters to the free leadership guru and market can hardly be management overstated. At their educator, often best, they are true reminds us “none of market makers us is as smart as all ensuring the flow of of us”. There is capital to areas where it perhaps no better can be most example of this than productively employed. the outstanding This often has the end achievements of the effect of raising BITSunami Team, standards of living and the first group to be national productivity. At awarded the their worst, they Quarterly BITSian. symbolize greed and hyper-capitalism – a We hope that these sentiment perhaps best stories, our regular captured in Michael features, and other Douglas’ words, “Greed ‘extras’ on is good” in the movie sandpaper.bitsaa.org Wall Street. help you stay connected with your In BITSians on Wall BITSian heritage and Street, the Sandpaper spur you on to 2.0 team had the whatever it is that you opportunity to meet and speak with many of our want for yourself. prominent alumni who have built careers in various functions of high finance on the Street. As always, our alumni were extremely gracious Sandeep Mukherjee (’95 Phy Mech) in taking the time to tell us their stories and providing us with various insights into careers on Chief Editor Wall Street. We spoke about topics ranging from November 7, 2005 the long hours and the lure of the lucre to the league tables and dynamic hedging. Our goal is to inspire alums and students with a penchant for such careers to follow their dream as well as to help them chart their courses. For FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 6 FEATURES | news THE SANDPAPER 2.0 TEAM BITS & BITSAA NEWS BITS OPTED OUT Atul Gupta, currently working with Infosys Technologies BITSIAN IAS OF INDIA TODAY Limited as a Technical SURVEY Architect, has close to 9 years of TOPPER BITS opted out of India Today’s work experience on Microsoft S Nagarajan, a BITS alumnus, survey of 2005 because of a technology projects across has topped the 2005 civil pending court case between business domains. services exams conducted by the Union Public Service BITS and India Today. This explains why BITS does not Commission. Nagarajan was figure in the India Today ranked first out of 422 rankings. In 2004 when India candidates (also see Quarterly Today released its rankings, it BITSian). did not collect the data from BITS, Pilani even though it mentioned it did so. BITS questioned the validity of the data because there were many factual errors in India Today’s description of BITS. India Today did not accept the errors Atul Gupta and hence BITS has gone to the court against India Today and the case is still pending. SUBODH KARNIK Sadly, no press reporter carried LEADING THE WAY this story. AT ATA HOLDINGS ATA Holdings has announced Krishnamurthy Surysekar Subodh Karnik, a BITS alum, as Senior Vice President and EXCELLENCE IN Chief Commercial Officer. ATA Holdings Corporation is an RESEARCH Indianapolis-based holding Dr. Krishnamurthy Surysekar BITS DLP MS SS company with six wholly owned (’76), currently the Assistant subsidiaries specializing in Professor, School of STUDENT IN aviation and travel industries. Accounting, College of Business MICROSOFT MVP Administration, Florida International University, has 2005 LIST BITS ALUMNUS been awarded the Florida Atul Gupta, ME Software BECOMES MD OF International University Faculty Systems, is one of the recipients Award for Excellence in of the Microsoft MVP (Most NYLIM Harish Kumar, BITS alum, has Research - 2005. Valuable Professional) Award this year. been appointed the Managing Director and Head of Growth VIVEK PAUL JOINS Portfolios at Equity Investors TEXAS PACIFIC The Microsoft MVP (Most Group of New York Life Valuable Professional) Award is Investment Management LLC GROUP given out each year to (NYLIM). Dr. Kumar, who has Vivek Paul has quit Wipro and outstanding members of a bachelor's degree in Mechanical joined Texas Pacific Group Microsoft online Developer Engineering from BITS, is a (TPG), one of the world's largest Forum. CFA charter holder. Private Equity firms as a FALL 2005 │ BITS Pilani Alumni Magazine │ 7 FEATURES | news Partner. At TPG Ventures, he The U.S. Citizenship and will focus on Technology & Life Immigration Services (USCIS) Sciences investments. organized the “Celebrate Citizenship, Celebrate America” Vivek Paul also sits on the Board of Directors of Electronic Arts. BITSIANS MOVE AT CISCO Prem Jain senior vice president at Cisco recently announced his retirement. Meanwhile, Pankaj Patel (ex SVP at Redback) has been promoted to senior vice (right) Arvind Matthew president, Broadband Edge & Arvind Singh Mid-Range Routing Business Energy and Corporate R&D Unit. He holds an MS in EE divisions. ceremony the week of July 4th.