Face the Book

Considering the amount of time we spend on Facebook, it is not surprising that we leave traces of our personality online. Here are some tips and techniques that can be used to judge a person by his Facebook account.

Seven Facebook Thumbrules

1.  Any girl who puts up Katrina Kaif’s photo as her own display picture on facebook is no Katrina Kaif!

2.  The quality of a person’s social life is directly proportional to the amount of activity on his wall. If you can generate a hundred ‘likes’ by simply posting a smiley, you’re a rock star. If you need witty quotes and hilarious videos to generate the ‘likes’ you’re still doing fine. If you posted a picture with your cute little nephew/niece’s or declared “Just skydived out of a plane and landed on the Taj Mahal” and still generated two ‘likes’ and a comment which says “Long time no see” then you really need to start paying people to be your friends!

3.  Any change on facebook will be vehemently opposed! There will be communities like “A million members here and facebook will roll back the changes”. People will put up angry status updates. This will continue till the next change when people will suddenly pretend to love the old change. By now every feature of facebook has been opposed. It is now a collection of things we once detested! Facebook developers are currently working read hard to come up with the next despicable thing for the world!

4.  If Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ is to be believed, an average person knows about 150 people. This is about the number of people he/she can have a strong social relationship with. Therefore subtract 150 from the number of friends a person has on facebook to come up with a factor called “Fake Friend Factor”. FFF gives you a good idea of how pretentious/diplomatic a person is. Upto 500 FFF is a reasonably fake person. If you have an FFF of over 2000, you’re probably an actor. Beware of people with FFF greater than 700. They could be con artists!

5.  Being tagged in photos is a great joy. However 2 out of 3 photos you are tagged in would be a part of an application such as “My sweetest cuddliest friends” or “BiRtHdAy CaLeNdAr!” or “Winnie the Pooh’s Coochi coos!” or a B school event poster that one of your friends is trying to promote.

6.  Six out of 10 people are incapable of spotting a spam link even if the link says “Go ahead, click on it, this is not a virus, this is a very good link which will transform your PC into a mixer-grinder!”

7.  Nine out of 10 status updates on facebook are reposted. “Repost this if you have the best dog in the world!”. “Repost this if you are computer literate enough to repost”. Recycled jokes from Chuck Norris to Rajnikant to Anna Hazare, from Bill Clinton to Tiger Woods, from George Bush to Sonia Gandhi. Old and clichéd sayings (Light travels faster than sound that why people appear brighter blah blah blah yawn!). Super emotional (almost gay) verses about friendship and love. Therefore please repost the link to this blog to continue the glorious facebook tradition!

Skill Set Extraordinaire

MBA teaches you various skills of great use in the real and the virtual world. I have previously shared some useful tips about an extremely valuable skill in a post. This post goes far beyond that skill and tries to make your life seem less miserable in an MBA program. In fact these skills make B School life very comfortable for a lot of people I know.


Seven Skills an MBA Student Must Have


1. The Central Tags: An MBA course is likely to ruin your social existence beyond recognition. Offline, this situation may be painful, but it need not appear so on your networking sites. Learn the art of pushing through the crowd to be able to score the central position in every photograph being clicked. Parties are often remembered (only) by the photographs taken of them. The party would appear to be revolving around you and you would appear to be having ‘A Blast!’ Tip: Not using a deodorant and dancing to real fast numbers helps secure that coveted position! You can always photoshop the surrounding disgusted faces later.


2. No Shame No Shame: This is what Rocky Balboa would be screaming had he been an MBA student. A true MBA student has the audacity of calling an assignment for which he didn’t even think of moving a muscle, his own, and happily claims marks for it. He leaves his project work to some guy in the group and keeps himself occupied with spamming social networking sited while the other fellow burns dawn oil and yet has the guts to look into the toiling fellow’s eyes in the morning and ask him whether he has finished the assignment and if he could explain it briefly.


3. Spontaneity in PPT: The art of presenting slides that one hasn’t prepared, or gone through, or even bothered to look at. Skip any lines that you don’t understand and explain every word that you do. You may not be able be make the effort of the person who made those slides, worthwhile, but you may yet be able to save your face and that of your group. If you can’t figure something in those slides, ask the audience in the name of an ‘interactive session’.


4. Multi-slacking: The skill of being able to watch a movie, listening to a song that your roommate is playing, constantly keeping an eye out for any ‘likes’ to your latest comment on facebook, talking to the guy who came in to borrow money from you and forwarding a text message, at the same time! It helps you be extremely entertained, particularly before a test.


5. Team Work: Understanding that teamwork is a strategy which helps the mediocre benefit from competent people. It is about division of rewards without division of labour. Since most MBAs are Mediocre But Arrogant, it is in their best interest to incessantly promote teamwork. So don’t even draft a mail without consulting your TEAM.


6. Statistics and Quantitative Techniques: You should be able to forget all your payables and remember your receivables and also work out the dismal possibility of actually receiving them. You should be able to calculate the cost/benefit of every atom of work that needs to be done before you do it (or don’t). You should be able to compute your popularity index before you try to gain favours from others which you don’t intend to return. You should be able to quantify all favours you grant to people, and multiply them with the largest possible factors. “When you owe people money, they remember your name.” says a friend who is perpetually in debt. He somehow always manages to calculate and reduce his odds of being thrashed! Calculations help your basic survival!


7. Most important skill: The ability to survive the great people at MBA who are bursting with above skills. Sarcasm helps!