The End of An Era

My two years at Bee-School is coming to an end. There were times when I hated this place, the people around me and just wanted this phase of my life to come to an end. But now when the end is near I don’t actually want to leave this place. Why? I am pretty sure that this place has not grown on me. But the sense of comfort, the idle life of second year, the familiarity factor, the knowledge that once you are out of this place you will be back to the big, bad world, you will be accountable, you will have to deliver results from day 1 makes something inside me feel that I don’t want to leave this place.

As I am writing this, placement is still one and half months away.

As usual, I become introspective at these times. I have read in the writings of many people who have been to the hallowed portals of business education like Harvard, Stanford that these two years were one the most ‘exhausting’ and ‘fulfilling’ years of their life. Well, I can’t say so. As far as education or knowledge is concerned, there is a certain unanimity in the batch that we don’t have much to boast on that front.

Neither did I make great friends at this place, in the sense I made in my undergrad days. Yes, I made some good friends. Even managed to have one crush. And then again what a coincidence. But are they friends for life? I don’t know. From my past experiences I have seen that you tend to lose touch with physical distance and more so with time.

But yes I have grown as a person in this place. This place has boosted my self-confidence in more than one ways. It has brought about a sense of independence, self-reliance in me, which 8 years of staying away from home – parents, sibling – couldn’t bring.

It was quite an emotional roller coaster. I felt at the top of the world at times. A feeling of elation I don’t know when did I last experience. And there were times when I have felt like crap, dirt, despondent, an underdog of the batch.

But the place I will miss the most will be The Library. I still remember the day when I first ventured into our library. It was my third or fourth day in the institute and I was just browsing through the shelves and on seeing all those copies of HBR dated back well into the early 1970s, impressed me. I never had the good fortune to peep into the finest libraries of the land – Nehru Memorial Library, National Library or any of the IIM/IIT libraries – but I still feel that our B-school has quite a decent library. So many good books to read from which I discovered in the 2nd year that I regretted not having discovered them in my first year. As with my previous employer’s library – where I hardly issued any technical books (read Java, Struts, .Net and what not) in my entire 3 year – I rarely issued any hardcore management books or the books specific to the various specializations viz. marketing, finance, ops. I discovered Satyajit Ray and Hemmingway, read the collection of Indira Gandhi’s letters, and of course the usual fare on American CEOs and their wall-street pantomimes.

But all said and done, this place as more than anything taught me to focus i.e. to cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter. As far as the biggest legacy of an MBA education is concerned i.e. the art of gassing/bullshitting your way out of any crisis, well I was never very good at this particular art and I doubt things have changed much.

2nd Quarter Results - 6 Months at a B-School

I had heard and read a lot about life @ a B-school. Both good and bad. Mostly from friends who had made it to similar places and public forums like PG et al. But experiencing it first hand is a different ball-game altogether.This is a strange place which at times makes you behave in a strange manner.Welcome to the world of perennial sleep starvation, marketing jargons, impromptu batch meets where balance sheets never tally and mastering excel is a necessity for survival. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is probably the most important pyramid after that of Pharos. The race to meet the deadlines, the fight to get into the hot shot committees, the arcane quizzes, the occasionally insane workload, the nightouts, weird assignments where Google is the messiah. All are part of this life.Lots to learn here - both in the classroom and out of the classroom. Especially from the peer group. Here we have quite a diverse batch – from CAs to a marine engineer to a lawyer. Before coming here I never knew that you can do so many things on excel or rather excel can do so many things for you. You study everything from labor laws to consumer behavior to inventory management and wonder what you are actually here for.The glamour quotient which you associate with a B-school before coming gets considerably reduced once you come here. This entire trumpet blowing of workload and stress is nothing but hype and hoopla. An over exaggeration, I would say. I realize that this place is not perfect just like all other things in this world.At first, 18 subjects in 1st sem, 10 hour of lectures everyday, quizzes every Saturday (you don’t know which subjects’ quiz will come this Saturday), no concept of Sundays or week offs gives you the impression of great academic rigor. The system is good on paper but there are enough numbers of loopholes, for the ingenious ones, to exploit. There have been hardly 6-7 days in the last six months when I have felt really stressed out. (Of course this doesn’t include the exam days). At times I feel that I had more pressure in my engineering college with 3 internals every semester.If there is sleep deprivation, it is probably more as a result of late night sessions of ‘Age of Empires’ and ‘Counterstrike’ rather than some weird assignment on Linear Programming. After a month or so, people started sleeping in the class unabashedly. And the best part is that profs (apart from a few exceptions) don’t mind. They understand. Of course, the skill of sleeping in the class with open eyes or at least in a manner which will not attract the attention of the faculty is an asset.The unending streams of assignments are initially done using the Japanese practice of inventory management, Just-in-time (J.I.T) and eventually using S.H.I.T (some how in time). Of course, Google is your savior here. I wonder how many of us would have been able to complete their PGDM if Sergey and Larry hadn’t come up with their invention. There are times you feel that the only thing you will be good at after coming out of this institute is getting the right thing out of Google in the smallest possible time. How I wish somebody pays me loads of cash for this particular skill.The Saturday quizzes are even funnier. Lots of permutations and combinations are worked out on every Friday evening in an attempt to guesstimate the subject which is going to screw your happiness on the next day. You listen to the rumors or rather grapevines (hey I have flunked in OB) going rounds in the hostel corridors and mess tables. Then you zero in on a subject or two, which results mostly in a correct prediction (touchwood!!). But at times your prediction backfires horribly. You study marketing and go, only to find an economics paper. And then comes our collective ability of bullshitting. You write whatever you feel just to fill the pages. As far as studying is concerned, you initially start on Thursday. Then, eventually after a few weeks, a combination of procrastination and boldness pushes the start of studying to Friday evening, then to Friday late night and finally to Saturday. The reason may be partly attributed to the fact that excess of anything diminishes its importance. Finally, what results is the mockery of a well-intentioned system of evaluation.The early morning tribulations (read non academic activities viz. yoga, aerobics and gym) is a unique feature of this particular B-school. You curse the system, swear the authorities but still turn up day after day. You, the bleary eyed one, do some weird asanas and dance with music. The incentive is not health but attendance which is probably the most important thing here after God. It is a necessary evil to get your PGDM. Sometimes you start wondering whether you have come here for learning something or keeping 90% attendance in all subjects. Believe me, 90 is the most sacred figure here and there is a lot of number crunching involved to make sure that you touch this magic figure.The faculty is okay. Actually the permanent faculty sucks but visiting ones are mostly good. Some are demigods, if not God. They mostly have those six coveted letters stamped on their CVs – IIT IIM. The way they teach, the layman level examples they give, explaining things logically, analytically, the way they push your thought process to its limits is simply amazing but such profs are hardly one or two in number. As always, the best are outnumbered by the mediocres. And as always I just love the pep talks, philosophical discussions about life at a B-school with our teaching greats. Some of them encourage introspection and make you step back and think, which is probably the only thing I am good at. You realize how important it is to develop an original thought process which is structured, logical and is based on a sound reasoning. Now I realize why some MBAs get paid such obscene amounts of money (those who get paid such amounts).Just like the 4 Ps of marketing, we have 4 Ps of management education – Presentations, parties, placements and paychecks. The last two being the most important. That is precisely the reason all of us are here. Everything else is incidental. Never knew that ‘zero’ is as important as the ‘Day 0’ of placements indicate. I wonder when there will be a ‘day minus 1’ of placements in B-schools.But this MBA thing is a big leveler. Here, engineers struggle with P&L accounts and balance sheets while CAs get screwed in IT systems. It some how brings everybody on an even ground.But at the end of the day all of us have come here for different reasons. Although the common denominator is ‘transformation’, each reason is unique in itself. The ‘take away’ of all of us will be different but I guess the common ‘take-away’ will be a paradigm shift in our thinking processes. Yes, MBA gives you a new perspective towards everything that surrounds you. This training makes you look at everything around you in a different way, thinking of new dimensions and possibilities. You start appreciating the small things and intricate details which you used to take for granted. However, cynical I may have sounded above but I can see the changes in myself. Surprisingly, most of the things taught here, are pure common sense but as somebody said ‘Common Sense is not so common’. But most importantly this place teaches you humility, kills that false pride and ego which often makes us blind to others' perspectives. It teaches you to respect and appreciate others for whatever skill they may have.Just like most of the things in life, here also the onus is on you. As one of our stellar visiting profs told us on the induction day - how much you get out of this place depends a lot on how much you will put in.The good things of this place are discipline, strong emphasis on IT based teaching and IT oriented curriculum. This is quite a happening place with lot of out-of-the-classroom activities - from our annual B-school fest to Six Sigma Awards to live research projects – happening round the year. There are so many things happening that it is practically impossible for someone to be a part of everything.The key to survive and excel this odd journey is, knowing where you eventually want to go, setting your priorities straight, keeping focus on your lakshya and on the way, picking up the things which are relevant to your goal.As they say here ‘The Journey is the Reward’.

Epilogue: We have unofficial orders from the top that any bad-mouthing about the institute in public forums will be severely dealt with. Keeping in mind this fact, I have refrained from naming the insitute and tried to disguise all details as much as possible.

The Scorching Summer

I had written this piece sometime during the summer placement process of my bee-school, around a month and a half back. This is my smallest post so-far but it encapsulates (quite well !!), the way I felt about this maddening race to outdo each other, politely called COMPETITION. The ultimate gospel of business.

The summer placements are going on nowadays. Tomorrow or rather today, coz it’s already 1:27 am, is the day zero. This is the time when you come to know what stuff people are actually made of. GDs are perhaps the biggest bottleneck. People shout, scream at the GDs. Ladies capitalizing on their assets and looks to get ahead the race. Some even go to the beauty parlors before sitting in the GD, especially when there are two young men are in the panel. It’s ridiculous. It’s insane. You see the desperations, the frustrations, the triumphs. The best of friends bite each other in the GDs. All the bonhomie vanishes within seconds. It is a typical B-school affair. During the past few days, the heat has increased from lukewarm to hot and probably tomorrow is the time for superheated steam. The placement team is doing a fantastic job. These are the times which make me realize the kind of life I am heading towards. Fast paced. Highly competitive. And also makes me realize that I am not a natural fit there.

All I wanted to say about CAT

I recently, heard one IITian say that ‘My Life would have been much easier if I hadn’t heard of these two words (or rather acronyms) – IIT and IIM’.
I don’t know about IIT but I can say the same about IIMs.
So, what’s in these institutions, which has got into the psyche of young, educated Indians.

When you look at the whole army of software geeks (I guess it’s a wrong word when you use it in context of ‘Indian IT services companies’) from Gurgaon to Hyderabad, with great, secure jobs preparing for CAT, you may wonder what else do you need man. You get paid probably 3 times a ‘core’ guy (that’s what they call civil and mechanical engineers who sweat it out at construction sites and blast furnaces), you spend your weekends at discs, you generally freak out at Barista and Pizza Hut, you can’t think of watching a movie at any other place apart from the multiplexes. Then why CAT?
Ask anybody. Why CAT? Why MBA? Why IIMs? They will have loads of bullshit to offer you. Some will say I am just bugged with technical. I can’t code my whole life. The management cadre is where the real action is and to reach there fast, I need an MBA, preferably from one of the IIMs, to rise quickly up the corporate ladder, to fulfill my entrepreneurial aspirations, to get a brand on my CV..blah..blah. But some are candid enough to admit that they are in this race for the sake of pure moolah, those green bucks which can give them whatever they have ever aspired for – from an annual vacation in Europe to a sprawling 3-bedroom flat in some hip locality of some place like Gurgaon, Bangalore or Mumbai.

Then come the B-school rankings by India Today, Outlook, Businessworld etc, each claiming to be more authentic than the rest. They make it a cover story; write great things about these great places of education and all the fallouts of having an IIM tag. This makes many more thousands to dream of a sprawling office at Manhattan, attending board room presentations in pinstripe suits, dining at the best restaurants and all that. And they too join the MBA bandwagon. Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen to the CAT race. All the Best. You too can do it.

Well much has been said about the greatness of IIMs and the yearning of the middle class Indians for a ‘secure’ and ‘assured’ future. I am not going to comment on why 1.75 lakhs are running this mindless rat race when they all know that less than 1 percent is going to make the mark. What are they actually fighting for?

This is the oft taken way to ‘heaven’:
Slog your ass for that revered exam called CAT – Common Admission Test for around a year or two, get into an IIM, slog your guts out for another 2 years under inhuman pressure amongst the most fiercely competitive peer group in this world, get selected into Morgan Stanley, earn a seven figure salary (preferably in USD), do M&A and INSTANT NIRAVANA. Is this all to life?
Yes, you have achieved something in life; an accomplishment and you have ‘earned’ it. Agreed but is this all?
I have heard of Infosys people quitting US assignments to take a year off to prepare for CAT. You take a year off, cut yourself socially and say ‘I need to get through this time’, ‘Its all in your attitude’, ‘If you believe that you can make it then nobody can stop you’ and all that stuff. But is it normal. A guy who has not done anything except studying for 1 year, haven’t watched a movie, haven’t tried to woo a girl. Is he normal? After all IIMs are looking for people with a holistic personality and not the nerd types. They want just the perfect ones, the achievers who have been number one in whatever they did throughout their lives whether it was editing the college news magazine or topping the IIT-JEE or playing national level squash. If they are so bloody perfect then why do they need an IIM degree or diploma or whatever they offer?
Here I come to my favorite pastime – B-school bashing.

They take the best of bests, play around with them for 2 years or rather test their endurance to bear the unbearable and then blow the trumpet that the ‘Who’s who of the corporate world’ from Vindi Banga to Indra Nooyi, from Harsha Bhogle to KV Kamath are our alumni.
But definitely this CAT thing has turned out to be a big money churner for not only the coaching institutes like IMS, TIME, Career Launcher, Career Forum or Career whatever but also for the B-schools. They advertise themselves as if saying you come to us and we will give you the passport to heaven. TAPMI says we ‘create’ ‘wealth creators’. My foot!
MDI, Gurgaon charges 1300 bucks – higher than even the revered IIMs - for applying to each of their programs (you have to buy separate forms for each of the programs) and they don’t even have to conduct an exam of their own. What do they think they are? They call themselves – a school for thought leaders and change managers. Are you sure that you can ‘create’ thought leaders. Well I am not.
Then there are the eternal villains of this whole game – the sucking coaching centers who preach as if they have some magic potion, which will take you past the doors of IIMs. They do all the number crunching about sectional cutoffs, percentiles, all India ranks and all. Their center heads are alumni of IIMs, who found that they could make more dough by becoming the director of TIME rather than slogging their butts off in some goddamn MNC. They write CAT every year only to get an astronomical percentile of 99.7+ and then claim to have mastered the technique of clearing CAT. They tell you all that crap about being focused and all those motivational stuff straight from Shiv Khera or Stephen Covey. They say no exam is un-trainable. Agreed. You rub, polish and do whatever you can to turn a rough stone into a shining diamond, an IIM material in this case. But then where is the scope for natural talent, those who were born to crack CAT, those who have ‘it’ in them, those who clear everything with seemingly zero preparation. They are the studs. Of course, they form a very miniscule percentage amongst the 1.75 lakhs. I guess the coaching wallahs will give me full marks on this.

Today, I am going to write about my experience with CAT.
About the times when you feel guilty for sleeping 6 hours a day, when the first thing you talk about in Monday morning in office – of course in hushed tones lest your manager hears you - is the anticipated cutoffs for yesterday’s mock, when the word ‘cutoff’ attains new meanings, when you get damn depressed with your scores in mocks and feel that you are fighting a lonely, futile battle wherein the odds are heavily stacked against you with studs like 10 pointers from IITs, BITS clearing the cutoffs like a breeze, when every moron on this earth seems to score higher than you, when the CAT jargon like sectional cutoffs, RC, verbal, time allocation strategy, quant, DI caselets all become a part of your life and your everyday discussion, to a point when they start to drive you nuts. When people start doing Vedic Maths to increase their speed. When you wake up early every Sunday morning and brave the Mumbai locals to go to Dadar, where by looking at the crowd, any person unfamiliar will Mumbai will say that half of the metropolis is up on this Sunday morning to take the IMS mocks. After all they are the ones most of the students take and they supposedly give you the most realistic position of yours ‘vis-à-vis’ your peers.

And finally comes the D-day. You go to the center with a million prayers on your lips, with the blessings of your parents and best wishes of hundreds of your friends. You are on your way to achieve the unachievable, to attain the unattainable. You switch off your mobile 2 hrs before the test and decide to calm down, soothe your nerves. You don’t talk with anybody lest you get distracted because you have to give your best during the next 2 ‘most imp hrs of my life’. Then you dare to look around your ‘competitors’ and see people chanting ‘Gayatri Mantra’ with closed eyes, some anxious dad giving water to his daughter and her mom praying frantically so that her daughter justifies all the sacrifices they have made for her so far.

You come out of the 2 hr show, only to see the STAR NEWS crew just outside your center and a couple of policemen trying in vain to direct the traffic because of the unimaginable crowd of young ‘MBA aspirants’ coming out of the center after writing the most important exam of their lives. You overhear the STAR NEWS guy getting hold of an already unnerved guy and asking him the difficulty level of CAT-2005 and then he rambles something in his microphone about today being a red letter day for 1.75 lacs young men and women. You go and switch on the TV at home and you will probably see the expected cutoffs of this year with the TIME, CL gurus discussing the nuances of this year’s CAT as if they are discussing ways to eradicate poverty from the developing world.

Why is there such hype about just a 2-hour entrance test? There are other imp things taking place in this world. People are starving in spite of our boasting of self-sufficiency in food production, US are bombing Iraq for the sake of Oil and the innocents are getting killed, jihadis are mindlessly killing innocents, thousands of kids die of diseases like diarrhea which can be treated easily if they get medical attention in time, millions don’t have access to proper sanitation or safe drinking water or electricity for that matter, countless are being deprived of quality education and schools. But nobody talks about them. These are things we urban middle class take for granted – electricity, water, education, healthcare. Anyways I won’t go into my nationalist philosophies because I myself am not doing much for the country. And I guess you should first practice what you preach.
All these make me remember what Allwin Angel – founder of Pagalguy.com had written into one of the posts. He had said that you people are taking a very simplistic view of life – cracking CAT, getting into an IIM and be set for life. There are things much more meaningful in life than cracking CAT like getting someone smile, helping somebody without expecting anything in return.
But I guess pinstripe suitwallahs don’t have time for all that.
Another article I remember reading was by an IIM- Calcutta dropout. He had quit IIM – Cal after 1st year to pursue his dreams. He said that he heard his inner calling. In that article, he had said that an IIMC pass out has a swanky office at Nariman Point, if not Manhattan, a trophy like wife at an equally elegant home and every time he lifts the phone, he says ‘Ciddybank’. But there are things more important in life which ‘Ciddybank’ may not offer you. Then, you have to listen to your inner calling and take your own course.

Meanwhile the race for CAT 2006 has just begun. All the Best and happy running.

Epilogue:
In all the above places, I have used ‘you’ but this ‘you’ actually includes me because I too am running this rat race just in the hope that one day I will get hold of that elusive pot of gold. I have been doing all these things, which I have bashed above, since long and will probably continue to do so for some more time to come. This article is not to judge what is wrong or right. These are just my personal opinions and you may feel at many places, the tone is that of ‘Grapes are sour’. But I just don’t care about what you think. Now, you need not to be Albert Einstein to understand that I belong to the unfortunate majority who couldn’t ace this ‘rat race’. This bashing is just a way to vent out the frustration I feel. I bet it feels better after bashing somebody, something. I know IIMs will continue with their invincible charisma and IMS will continue to rake in the cash. But still somewhere, at someplace I feel that this is a mindless pursuit. You may call me a loser, an underdog, who takes solace in finding flaws in the system and preaching great philosophies but lacks the courage to stand up to fight the system or swim against the current. Here again I just don’t care what you feel.
But I won’t say that I didn’t learn anything from the CAT exp. If not my aptitude has increased many times. I have come across some of the most competitive people I have ever met and the best thing was that they believed in healthy, positive competition – ‘Co-operate to compete’. I may have made a mockery of the simCATs but they used to give me a strange feeling of competition, mixed with awe and a burning desire to ace the next sim. Acing one mock used to make me happy. Yes, happiness comes from accomplishment. You benchmark yourself against the best and keep on raising your bar. Nothing is enough. But I guess the best way to survive this strange competition is to compete against yourself. In all it was a nice experience in itself – I am more matured and I learnt a lot of intangible things which I may not have learnt otherwise.

Not everything in this write-up is original. I have taken ideas from ‘Making of an MBA – Snapshots from Hell’ by Peter Robinson, ‘The IITians’ by Sandipan Deb, some ‘Outlook’ articles and some posts from Pagalguy.com, a brilliant site inhabited by some brilliant people.