The Curious Case of... Vishal Dalal
(All of us are born curious. Some of us actively practice it, irrespective of age. Our Curious Cases series give you a glimpse into the minds of such curious folk. May they rub off you the right way!)
Vishal Dalal - is the founder of the Boat Club Quiz Club. A man with a passion for weird feats of memory, he mugged up the periodic table in his schooldays, just for fun. At IIM Calcutta he memorised his batch roll call one weekend - 15 years later he can still recollect the roll number of each of his 200 + batchmates. Mr Dalal also reinvents himself ever so often. In his career it has meant jumping from technology into banking, from banking to consulting, from India to the UK and onwards to Singapore. It also resulted in the jolly 100 kg "teddy" from COEP morphing into a fearsome quasi-Schwarzenegger. Sadly its also meant that the quiz fanatic of yesteryear rarely attends a quiz nowadays. [Introduction written by Shrirang Raddi, whose own Curious Case is here.]
Name
Vishal Dalal
Location
Singapore
What I do
Management Consultant
On the Curiosity scale, I am...
Off The Scale Curious
What I prefer to consume (in descending order of preference):
Books --> Movies --> Social Media
Number of books and movies I get through in a year
50 odd books - lots of movies (perks of flying almost 20 hours a week !!)
One book I’d recommend to a friend / colleague:
Justice - Michael Sandel - simply written but asks some very difficult questions
My best source for book / movie / website recommendations:
Amazon - it doesn't recommend. It just tells what I'd better buy
One movie / show I’ve loved that hardly anyone else has watched
A great 1980s coming-of-age movie - Vijeta
I am currently reading:
One place on Earth that I am very curious about:
Area 51 - want to know what lurks there
Website(s) that I get a lot of useful info from:
One topic I am super-opinionated about:
Urban planning and what makes a city cool
People come to me to find out what I think about these topics:
Philosophy, watches
What I prefer to use (in descending order of preference)
Linkedin --> Facebook
The strangest food item I have eaten
Crocodile meat in Kenya - it tastes like a rubber chappal
If I could spend a day in the mind, body, and shoes of a person, it would be...
Claude Shannon - the guy who invented information theory
One interesting / fun fact I recently learnt:
Biometrics - apparently even the tongue print is unique in humans. I dread the day when we all have to lick our ATMs to unlock them
I stay up-to-date by doing this...
Reading, surfing websites
One interesting/fun fact about myself
Spent 20 Bitcoin once to buy a Pizza - regret it to this day
I express my curiosity by doing these things:
Reading, learning new things (learning Mandarin now )
The one thing I am very interested in is
making enough money to pay for a trip to Mars one day !!
A habit or skill I’d love to acquire:
Learn flying
A movie or TV show that taught me something new
The Republican Presidential nomination process - learnt a lot about the history of the pyramids from Ben Carson
If there was one mystery I’d like to solve, it would be
I would love to do this at least once
Make enough money to go to one of those decrepit erstwhile Soviet republics and get to take a Sukhoi-30 for a spin - they call it Air-Force tourism I think
People I would like to ask all these same questions to:
Sanjeev Chandran, George Thomas
Curiosity is important to my work because...
It is the single most important means of survival in consulting. You can stay ahead only by learning something new everyday.
Someone I know who asks a lot of questions
My curiosity tip
A good sign that you're learning something worthwhile is that you feel stupid all the time
Where you can be found online
Facebook mostly