Women issues- A general mentality problem

Women in general have to face lot of problems and it is believed that in India the problem is even worse. As I hear about more cases of atrocities against women I start introspecting myself as a member of this society. Things are changing but unfortunately it will take at least a generation I believe for the situation to improve. We as a society think regressive to many problems and the solutions we recommend are many times disheartening.

During my childhood, if I was bullied and I complained to my parents, they had a simple solution- face it or don't go to play. Face it was not a difficult solution for my parents because the problem wasn't a severe one. Don't go to play was an easy solution but not an appropriate one. This is how we think of solving problems. Trying to solve problems by avoiding it rather than solving it. Not finding the appropriate solutions to the problem is actually a problem we are facing. Our big problem as a society is not the problem but the outlook towards the problem or the way we want to tackle the problem. As a teacher when I scold a student for not doing home assignments, I am advised to be mild and sometimes not say anything because kids are not strong enough to accept it. A similar attitude issue is when we look for alliances for marriage we don't normally look for love and compatibility between the partners which should head the list but rather we look for physical age (rather than mental age), caste, language, status, etc as criteria. Again our outlook towards a particular aspect is not very sound, although it works in most cases. Things are changing but will take time. Every society evolves and we have definitely changed for the better in most aspects and we will continue to improve our outlook.

The kind of problems women face is very difficult to imagine and they are really brave enough to face what they go through. The number of rapes, molestation issues at workplace or otherwise faced by women are so dreadful leaves a mental scar which is very difficult to heal. We need to change our outlook towards women and the way many males as well as females look at females need to change. We become judgmental, we start becoming suspicious of women. The problem cannot be solved by asking women to curb the way they behave, or protecting them or asking them not to go out alone. If we are going to continue with this, I am afraid we are looking at simple solutions which tries to side step the problem rather than solving the problem. What we really need is a strong policing, enforcement of laws for such crimes. These are the short term solutions. The long run solution has to come through proper education. We have a long way to go as a society in terms of education and till then we will be improving our literacy rate without increase the group of educated individuals.

GMAT journey

From V31 to V37. There are many inspirational stories on GMAT on various threads. I wanted to share my experience.
First attempt on 12th Aug 2014- One month of Verbal preparation, Quant is my favorite subject and I keep doing it regularly so didn't prepare specially. Managed to score 680. I prepared from MGMAT guides for Sentence correction, Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension. I couldn't manage time to revise sentence correction. It is very important to learn the concepts and apply SC rules properly. It is very much a matter of logic than grammar. I went through the free videos on Egmat site and realized I had not prepared that well conceptually.
Q50
V31  
IR8
AWA6

Since I intend to apply for a top university PHD in Finance/Accounting program decided to prepare for my retake. Being a working professional, I knew I wont be able to give the necessary time for my preparation. I decided to join Egmat Verbal Live prep course. I started going through the videos and learn the concepts properly. I understood strategies and how to approach the GMAT after attending Egmat's strategy session. I started giving quant mocks and verbal mocks on GMAT club website. I was doing consistently well on quant scoring 50 and 51 on the mocks. I must say the analytics offered by Gmat club is simply amazing. The problem area was verbal and my inconsistency made me nervous. I knew I have to improve my verbal to score high on GMAT. There was little room for improvement in Quants made me more anxious. I had to get Q51 alongwith increasing my verbal score. My verbal mock score was hovering around 31 and went upto 35 but wasnt able to score consistently decent score. I realised that I wasnt applying the process learnt from the SC course of Egmat. Verbal is not my strong area and posts saying that avg improvement of GMAT score is minuscule increased my tension. 

I prepared from Advanced Manhattan guide for Quants as I wanted to get that Q51. I gave my mocks regularly. Also I observed that my verbal accuracy reduced whenever I wasnt studying regularly. I decided to reduce my workload and study religiously for my GMAT. In the last week I took leave and put in lot of efforts in my preparation. I took notes, revised whatever I studied. As I read MGMAT SC guide I understood a lot of concepts which I hadn't understood previously. Couple of days before the actual test I appeared for my last verbal mock and I scored 25. I was devastated. I dont know if that was the right thing to do. Couple of hours later I reappeared and scored 34. I wasnt sure about my performance and was worried about my inconsistency. Also I had exhausted all my mocks and so I reset the question pool. May be I had seen the questions before and analysed my mistakes and that influenced the score of 34, all these things were on my mind.


The day arrived 24th Oct 2014. I was anxious and I quickly revised the concepts on my way to the exam center. I wrote my AWA pretty decent. Integrated reasoning I was doing pretty well at the half way mark. 6 questions I solved in 15mins. Unfortunately I couldn't answer the last question due to paucity of time. During the break I told myself this is my time and gave Quant and could complete all the questions with 5mins pending. Except for 3 questions which I guessed rest was well answered. In this break after the quant I was again nervous because this was what going to make or break my score. I decided to go little slow in the first half of the Verbal questions. In couple of questions I lost focus and my application to my mind, not having enough time to reappear for GMAT and in that time I strengthened the argument where the question was to weaken the argument. This is a complete No No and would suggest everyone appearing to GMAT to keep calm and stay focused. Knowing that you have marked a wrong answer makes matter worse. As I was going slow on initial question I had to rush in the 2nd half. In hindsight I should have balanced the timing a little better.

Finally I answered the last question at the last second and hit the submit button and started praying. First thing I saw was the 730 score and I was relieved more than happy. 
Q51  
V37
IR7 
AWA 4.5:(

Highlights of my preparation

The difference between my verbal in 1st attempt and in 2nd attempt was the confidence level was different as I knew atleast 3 answer choices why I was rejecting. This meant the score of V31 in the 1st attempt was not proper indicative of my skills. It is extremely important to eliminate the wrong choices for the right reasons to score heavily on the verbal section. To ensure that I improve on this skill I made notes of areas within a particular concept that I find difficult to understand or questions where I went wrong. This helped to me to have a kind of synopsis of the concepts that I can use it for last day revision. Any course will teach every concept elaborately. However, we may understand a particular concept better than another concept. So we should allocate more time on concepts that we find difficult to tackle. This goal can be achieved by studying consistently while you prepare for GMAT. Dedicated efforts are required to get a high GMAT score. Consistency is the key. Professionals who are working have to manage their job and find out how can they regularly study for the GMAT. I would recommend the Advanced quantitative guide of MGMAT if you are very good at Mathematics concepts. The difference between Q50 and Q51 is extremely large qualitatively and quantitatively. This guide is designed to help you achieve Q51 score. 

Hope this journey helps you with DOs and DONTs in your GMAT preparation and exam appearance. 

Thanks 

GMAT retakers

https://e-gmat.wistia.com/medias/rqs76v459f?preview=true

Posting the link of the interview with egmat CEO, Rajat Sadana on GMAT strategies. How to prepare for GMAT and how to approach competitive exams in general. Hope this hleps to GMAT and CAT aspirants. 

Clean Independent candidates is the road ahead for our nation

Are we really the largest democracy in the world?

I am wondering after the sting operation by a news channel "Aaj Tak" do the political parties and the politicians really care & understand what democracy means. The nexus of politicians and the builders is an open secret and can be a plausible reason for the enormous increase in the prices of realty sector. The amount of black money that is circulated in the realty sector must be the highest among all the other sectors. The sting operation by the news channel revealed how politicians combine with the election officers to create fake IDs so that the polls can be rigged. Literally every vote is being sold at Rs 2000. The disappointing thing about the sting operation was an executive of a company producing chemicals mentioned the names of national parties purchasing chemicals from them so that the ink applied on the finger can be erased and the voter can vote again. How can such candidates frame laws for the general public? It is a mockery of the entire political system and a shame to democracy. This is one of the incidents which got known to the common people. The sting operation only reiterates that such practices must be prevailing in all elections in past and even prevails in the entire country. All these incidents are demotivating for the voters. It is simple if you play an unfair the chances of losing the game is highly probable & hence discouraging.

Why does poll rigging take place?

The polls are rigged to gain an unfair advantage and ultimately to win the elections. The political parties are quite a strong structure and are capable of rigging the polls. It is extremely difficult for independent candidates to manipulate the results due to lack of contacts, money power, muscle power. Even if an individual tries to manipulate the polls people are more likely to stand against the individual than a political party & its candidate. I have a belief that it is the political party framework which gives the courage to the politicians to do such shameful acts.

What can be the solution?

There should be an encouragement to promote candidates who are nationalist with proven record at the local level with a clean image. The political parties are forced to give tickets to individuals not necessary on their ability to improve the constituency but based on their ability to garner votes & raise funds for the party. The choice of candidate is not driven by performance but based on caste, religion & other factors which should not be the case for selection. Even Anna Hazare encourages clean independent candidates to contest elections and wants more independents to get selected in the Lok Sabha & Vidhan Sabha. Mahatma Gandhi had advised the dissolution of Indian National Congress after independence & advocated decentralization of power. Gandhiji's foresightedness might have expected that stronger political parties might threaten the structure of democracy.

http://news.oneindia.in/india/revealed-how-bogus-votes-can-change-the-lok-sabha-2014-poll-results-1423494.html
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/2014-lok-sabha-polls-fake-voter-ids-booth-level-officers-delhi/1/352386.html