CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND!!

1. I suck at modern technology...
2. I hate Operations Research and everything related to it (including faculty)
3. I hate talking to most people...
4. I hate most Bollywood movies...
5. I have a big ego...
6. I have an attitude problem...(well you have a perception problem)
7. I am usually indifferent...
8. I hate social activities, parties, orkut but I still conform...
9. I hate animation... until Shrek changed my views
10. and finally... I think MBA is over-rated and am in it for the money and may be the "holistic experience" but definitely not for the knwledge!!

Liberal but not liberated!!

The trouble with me is that I crib too much…. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to start working, then when I did start working, I couldn’t wait to go back to college, and now that I am in a B-school, I can’t wait to go back to work! I guess it’s a normal human psychology: the grass is always greener on the other side!
I come from a run-of-the-mill, middle class Bengali family; over- protected and a little spoilt in the early years, but then my parents were liberal enough to let me live my own life and make my own choices. So when I moved out of home as a teenager, wide-eyed and overawed by the fast and furious life in the fast lane in the city that never sleeps, I was full of new dreams and new promises: I was free, and yet, somehow it was harder to be free from myself- my ingrained middle-class inhibitions, my sense of right and wrong and my idea of “acceptable norms”. I continued to be chained by my narrow world, where everything was black and white; so even when I saw my peers live in the moment and enjoy their new found freedom, I still remained the shy kid with clearly defined boundaries and goals which I chose to call “FOCUS”! Then came a time, when I stepped out of my well guarded pupa, embarked on a journey of self-discovery, I was liberal, but not yet liberated- on one hand, I had the time of my life, and on the other, I was torn apart by the apparent inconsistency!
Today, as I look at myself as a bemused spectator, I have learnt to accept everything as a shade of gray, I have altogether renounced the idea of absolute right and wrong, I no longer have rigid principles but I am true to my values… but I still continue to be the little girl struggling to enjoy the freedom which is handed to her on a platter!

And we are back... unfortunately!!

Well, break ke baad aapki swagat hai… people have been cribbing that after 5 months of unkind criticism and ridicule, my Hindi was starting to become palatable but one week away at home has brought me back to square one!! Kids can be so cruel…

Diwali came and went before we could say Jack Robinson, and that in that one week I tried to cram in all sorts of pleasurable activities that we don’t get to do in college: sleeping, watching TV, meeting nice people (friends and relatives) and eating good food. Add to it the usual paraphernalia of the Celebration Season and India-Pakistan matches, you have the perfect recipe of FUN! Wondering if we can add a new core subject called Fun(d) Management in our course… we already have some 20 odd subjects in the second semester, one more won’t make much of a difference! Talking about second semester, well, the less said the better! We have already had a quiz within 24 hours of our arrival, and that too at 7 am. And it only promises to get worse…

I never could understand Physics in school. But now I think I got what that old man was trying to say when he made such a hue and cry about “Theory of Relativity”- the exam week seemed to drag on and on as we counted each minute of the agony, but the vacation week just flew past us.

At least now I appreciate Einstein’s statement: “Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

First Impressions!!

I have survived (just about) the first sememster in a b-school... with 3 more to go, it doesn't seem to be a bright prospect! i thought that first sem was all about taking baby steps into reality, coming out of our cocoon and leave your half-baked, naive ideas behind and get into the mode of "structured thinking" as they call it! well it was sooo much more than that! From Kotler to OSHE, we have been exposed to a plethora of gyaan! We have been charmed by Prantosh and lured into the world of core concepts, STP and the famous 4 Ps of marketing; technologically challenged people like me struggled to make sense of ERP, data analysis, excel vba and flash (when you think about it, computers can be a real pain in life!); thrived in the agony and ecstasy of WAC assignments; been driven crazy by OB theories and made a mess of Maslow, Herzberg, Freud and the rest of the psycopathic gang; scratched our heads trying to find out why the balance sheets never tally; suffered from post OR depression and given up royally- LPP, Inventory Theory and Regression: u must be kidding me; were united in collective desperation in trying to figure out the mystery behind statistics; pfaffed our way through HR; spent hours over group projects, ice creams and last minute innovations; and covered for each other in non-acads! the past three months have changed us in many ways: for the people who were staying way from home for the first time, it meant a watershed moment in their lives. For seasoned hostelites like me used to bad food, inane curfews, and frustrated wardens, it was a taste of familiarity and reliving those stolen moments of midnite b'day bashes, watching FRIENDS late at nite, gossipping in the early hours of morning, getting late for lectures, fighting for the bathroom and sharing each others' deepest , darkest and silliest secrets. B-school education is often hyped for its holistic appeal, about its breadth but I never imagined that it would make such a sweeping transformation in our lives in such a short span of time, as we slept through the guest lectures and romped home with plumb offers during the placement week. Now after 4 months of herculean struggle, we have managed to survive the first semester and as we rush home to celebrate Diwali with our respective families, we also prepare ourselves for the 2nd sem- allegedly the toughest in the B-school life cycle!
So long... let's take a short break from the Symbiosis family!!!

DELOITTED!!!!

The last week has been a crazy rollercoaster ride of uncertainty, anxiety and euphoria that is a part and parcel of every B-school: it was time for the eternal saga called the “placement week”! If you thought MBA entrance exams were competitive, think again! It’s a jungle out there and it doesn’t get any worse than it did in the last few days…
The best of friends, room mates and study partners were suddenly pitted against each other in a vicious onslaught- with every passing GD, the battle just got tougher as we all vied for the top brands and the best profiles. You name the company, we had them on campus trying to snap up the best talent! In a stiff competition where every round is an elimination stage and one small mistake meant that you were out of your dream organization, we got the taste of the real dog-eat-dog world out there. As each shortlist was announced it brought about whoops of joy among the successful candidates and moved the rest to tears- the pain of rejection was never so acute as it was in these days! Somehow we all lost our sense of proportion; we forgot that it was only 2 months of summer internship and not the end of a journey; that there were more important things in life than a project which will eventually end up as a passing reference in our CVs! Granted it was the first stepping stone to the corporate world for most of the students- freshers (mostly toppers) from top colleges who had always had it easy! I can’t even imagine how much worse it can get during the final placements- not a pretty picture! But at the end of the day, a majority of the batch was placed and the remaining were sure to be placed in the next couple of days, and thankfully we all came back to our senses, as we celebrated (mostly in relief) our collective success- peace restored and sanity regained!

As for me, I was more of a bemused spectator in this mad mad world- unlike many of the brilliant people here, I have a relatively humble background, I am used to rejections and I was mentally prepared to be one of the last students to be placed…as it is, being a Finance student, we were warned that we would have a tough time! Also, I don’t have an exactly glittering record of conversions in GDs, so I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular! But as luck would have it, I became one of the first students to be placed in a dream company- Deloitte Consultancy, one of the top 4 consultancy firms in the world, and also the highest paid! I couldn’t believe anybody would be as stupid as to pay me such obscene amount of money for 2 months! But there you go, now I come with the Symbiosis tagline, though I am as smart (or as dumb) as I was three months ago. Having said that, it was my dream profile and I deserved to get through: the selection criteria was tailor made for me: 18-page written case analysis, two rounds of interviews (one of which involved a random case study with no data) but no GD! It happened well before the placement week, so I was practically free during the week itself. But I think I was very lucky and I am deeply thankful- I am not exceptional, nor am I any better than most of my batchmates: I just happened to get the right break at the right time! And probably I was sensible enough to know that while it was important, it was just a small part of my life…

Barbarians at the Gate!

It’s been a week since India was crowned the first ever Twenty-20 world champions: a welcome deviation which almost healed the pain of the 1st-round exit in the World Cup earlier in the year. Indian sports isn’t exactly as flourishing as the Indian economy and Indian cricket in particular has received its share of brickbats! So is this flash-in-the-pan victory in the Indian version of baseball enough to win back the huge fan following that cricket attracted not too long back? Granted, we played really well during the tournament and beat the best in the game- Australia, South Africa, England and arch rivals Pakistan (twice), and deserved to be the champions. For a first-time event, the T20 world cup generated huge amount of interest, not to mention revenues. And following our victory, the market value of the budding cricketers has touched a new high. But somehow T20 just doesn’t seem like cricket- it smacks of refined commerialisation, a gimmick to get through to the masses repeatedly let down by its national side and a quick-fix solution to a more deep rooted problem! Mind you, I am no purist mourning the near extinction of the classical version of the game- good old Test cricket. Come on, we are leading the life in the fast lane, we barely have time to catch a few glimpses of the 50-over ODI, let alone a 5-day event which will probably end in a draw! Twenty-20 gives us a packaged deal: instant gratification, brute force, adrenaline rush and it is the closest we can ever come to competing with football. It’s value for our time and money, and nobody is complaining, so what if the greatest masters of the game opt out of it- it gives a platform to the raw talent (literally)! Say goodbye to the gentleman’s game to be played in the leisure of the afternoon sun in the lush green outfields: “Times they are Changing” and it’s time for the “Barbarians at the Gate”!!

Grounded for Life!!!

I think our institute is taking itself too seriously and that too, literally! I mean I know we study at Symbiosis, and hence we are supposed to be in close contact with the industry (symbiotic relationship with the corporate sector: it’s elementary, my dear Watson)… but when the industry is almost breathing down your neck and the concept of personal space for growth simply doesn’t exist, it becomes a problem!! For instance, during the last month, we have had more guest lectures than actual lectures by our faculty, which is all very well, but when it becomes a repetitive jargon dump on tired students, then it’s not very likely that it would be a beneficial exercise. And of course, now that the pre-summer placement talks have kicked off, it isn’t exactly rocket science to figure out that we are actually trying to lure companies on campus by inviting some of the top corporate honchos for the sake of “guest lectures”… nothing wrong with that, especially when you need to place a batch of 200 unprepared students in a space of one month! But it does become a form of a circus when you force a bunch of overworked first year kids to dress up in sarees and blazers and sit for long sessions in the auditorium almost every day (sometimes twice a day) especially after 2 grueling FCQs. Hell, these days, I wear a saree more often that my mum does!
Obviously, this state of affairs is bound to burst the bubble! One such guest lecture (the guest happened to be prominent industry expert) found a majority of the batch sleeping peacefully and blatantly in the audi, while most of the others were busy working on their laptops, listening to music or just plain day dreaming…. Mind you, it wasn’t that the lecture was bad, it was just that we have had an overdose, and couldn’t take any more of that convoluted management speak! End result: the guest wasn’t exactly too thrilled with our batch (which may well mean no placements), 10 of the culprits had a dressing down from the director and as of now, the entire batch is grounded indefinitely! We are not allowed to go out of the campus, no night outs, diwali vacation stands cancelled and the worst part is that we don’t know how long this curfew is going to haunt us! The only way out of this mess seems to be to crowd into the library or the computer lab all at once, because we have nothing better to do!
It’s not that I am a crusader against guest lectures- I think they are an important part of business education, it’s great to have successful people from the industry and share their experiences and give us a first hand view of how the corporate world functions! And of course, some of the speakers have been really outstanding, it’s just that I don’t like the idea of packing our days with fancy jargons just before the summers: it seems a get-rich-quick tactic and it doesn’t give us enough time to really absorb the learning. Being bombarded with general gyaan about the “changing business environment” is a poor disguise for what really is a batch assessment exercise! I feel like a helpless Indian girl dressed impeccably in a saree, sitting and waiting demurely for a prospective groom! But of course, if it comes with 4 slices of pizza and a bottle of soft drink (like today), I am all for it….there is no such thing as a free lunch, but hell, listening to sophisticated VPs (even if they don’t make much sense) is a small price to pay!

Real vs Reel

Finally I have to lay my hands on the much-coveted book: “Snapshots from Hell”. But I am glad I waited till I was three months into my MBA- man, I identify with the lead character so much! Well, unlike Peter Robinson, I haven’t worked for the government (thank god for that), I am not a poet and of course, I am not in Stanford. But emotionally I can empathize with him: for instance we are both trying to survive a sadistic system, where our aim in life has become “not to flunk”, we are both zombies trying hard to make sense of what goes on during the long lectures, but in vain and both of us suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome: i.e. we blame ourselves for everything that goes wrong. As Prantosh Sir said in his final lecture- we should learn to forgive ourselves and move on from our failures. Hence, I should ideally blame our OR faculty (and not myself) when I start crying after every lecture (post-OR depression)
I can’t believe we are almost through our first sem: we are done with most of the lectures (rather, they are done with us), companies have started visiting the campus for pre-summer placement talks and there is a flurry of GLs. It seems like yesterday when we had our first Marketing lecture and we were awed by Prantosh Sir. 3 months later, he gave his final speech, moving us to tears. I haven’t done justice to his teaching in terms of my FCQs, but he has humbly portrayed marketing as a “beautiful subject”. Time to open that big fat Bible of marketing- as he fondly refers to it as “Reltok”!

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AT SCMHRD

1. Thou shall sleep during lectures.
2. Thou shall curse Sweety Stores everyday, and yet buy stuff from it at exorbitant prices.
3. Thou shall not turn up for Vedanta lecture earlier than fifteen minutes before the end of lecture.
4. Thou shall be a “visionary” when it comes to FCQs, assignments and submissions.
5. Thou shall love (leer at) thy neighbour: SCIT/SIIB guys/ girls.
6. Thou shall not attempt to distinguish between different dishes in the mess.
7. Thou shall religiously contribute to the “SCMHRD Fine Collection” (read SCMHRD Extortion Fund) by breaking inane rules- dress code, mobile phones, OSHE lectures.
8. Thou shall not have more than 30% attendance for non-acads.
9. Thou shall (NOT) learn 4 foreign languages: French/ German/ Spanish/Chinese, Excel VBA, OR I, Statistics.
10. Thou shall have only one religion: PFAFFING and only one god: PRANTOSH!!!!

60 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE- ARE WE REALLY FREE?

We celebrated Independence Day in great style in college, and why not? As our director put it, we have come a long way in the last 60 years! From a poverty stricken third world nation, today we are one of the fastest growing economies, commanding respect from all corners of the globe. And 25 years from now, we are going to lead the world: it’s some achievement, not withstanding the trials and tribulations of a democracy of one billion people!

True, we are no longer slaves of a foreign master , but are we really free? Free from our own inhibitions, our narrow limitations and our traditional thought process? We still have a long way to go in terms of independent ventures, entrepreneurship or just taking the road less traveled.

Being a part of the MBA fraternity, I consider myself privileged, and yet, I can’t help wondering if the MBA degree in our country has been reduced to a passport to the air-conditioned corporate offices! Today, most B-schools run the risk of being reduced to glorified placement agencies, with very little value addition to the students, but nobody is complaining because we barely look beyond the return on investment, purely in terms of capital…
Few of us have the courage to look beyond Campus Placements and follow our dreams! I have immense respect for one of our alumni, Prakash Mundra, who started his own business, but people like him are few and far between!
You do have the likes of Rashmi Bansal, the JAM lady, who followed her heart, Sarath Babu who set up his own catering services and the 4 young students who started their lingerie line, instead of giving in to the lucrative offers in the temptation island called IIMA. I know it’s not easy, but once you actually take the plunge, the rollercoaster ride is so much more fulfilling than selling soaps for a multinational! I have seen one of my friends, an IIT-IIM guy, give up a cushy international job to start his own venture; I have been lucky enough to share his frustrations and euphoria, but do I have the courage to follow my own dreams? Can I be free in the true sense of the term?