Ready for School

"If the geeks of ancient India are to be believed, it all began, all of creation, including all of life, all of Facebook and all of the telecom spectrum, from a primordial state which the Gautama dude later called 'suchness' for lack of a better expression. Because this fundamental condition from which all matter and energy is created, is beyond all expression, all language, all being and all non-being. Put in scientific parlance, it is a non Cartesian state of infinitely curved space-time continuum which do not yield to the postulations of classical, relativistic or quantum physics. Every ISB application, like all things manifest, is therefore born of such 'suchness' in the metaphysical as well as scientific sense. So at the most fundamental level there is no statement, there is no purpose and there is no tangible relationship thereof.”

In a desperate attempt to stand out from the Indian/IT/Unfortunately-Male crowd, you thus fill out a Statement of Purpose half inspired from the Upanishads, half plagiarized from Deepak Chopra and almost all bull shit, click the submit button and as a cursory afterthought, curse yourself for overdoing it. Yet again buddy, congrats.

You curse yourself for that fateful day months ago, when you decided to tag along your colleague to the obscure Christopher University (name changed for fear of legal assault) to attend a 'part time mba' sales pitch. You curse Prof. Tom Weismann (name changed for fear of physical assault), HoD Marketing, for handing you a FREE copy of the Kaplan GMAT guide with the assurance of a seat, in his words, coveted by future business leaders across America - 'provided you clear a score of 500, which I am sure you can with due diligence'. Having made futile attempts to give away the book to innocent passersby, you shove it into the darkest recesses of your least frequented closet, for fear of taking the GMAT by mistake and landing up at the aforementioned college even by accident. Kaplan would inadvertently be salvaged by your unnecessarily meticulous wife, and placed repeatedly in line of view. Almost as if to remind you of your worst failures years ago at the hands of the desi version of the GMAT, whose name even Voldemort would dare not mention. Slipping into bouts of self pity, you curse the GMAT, That-exam-whose-name-shalt-not-be-uttered, contemporary management thought, the utilitarian education system and the whole edifice of capitalism for rendering your life miserable. You curse Harry Potter for no particular reason. You curse every one under the sun and the One presiding over it. (You remain extra careful not to curse your wife)

Weeks pass and you begin to develop a kinship with Kaplan, finding use for it as a headrest, a paperweight, a chopping board and occasionally as a dumbbell. At work you begin to seem a little less there. At home you begin to seem even more absent. Then one fine day, for no apparent reason (detractors might point to a missed promotion in the March appraisal cycle) you decide to Just Do it, in the Nike sense of the phrase. You Do Kaplan, you Do Manhattan, you Do Princeton and in your spare time you do their maternal aunt as well. Three months later, with ample help from your karmic forces you've “Yay Done it!” and you feel on top of the world. You curse everyone all over again, this time with a typical MBA attitude and smug jubilation. You feel a bit like Ricky Ponting, so you try to pull yourself together. You now dare to raise your sights a bit higher. From Bharatidasan college of Management your greedy eye now dares to cast itself upon the fabled hallways of ISB.

Now sitting in your cubicle, with your Thailand born American client of Caucasian features screaming in your ear for another failed deployment, you realize to your horror that not only had you badly screwed up the SoP, in all the excitement you had made the fatal copy-paste error of no reprieve - you had mixed up your responses to essays 3 and 4. You write a profusely apologetic email to Ad Com requesting them to switch your essays 3 and 4 from the backend. You realize that the ad com surely knows better than to select someone so full of bullshit, let alone an unusually careless and worst of all, overly apologetic person from the Indian/IT/Wish-I-were-a-lady community.

But one fine morning, waking up to the offer of admission, you are reassured yet again that you have prevailed despite all odds. You are convinced of a long standing self allegation that you are indeed God's chosen child. Humbled and overwhelmed by a universal sense of gratitude, surprise!, you clench your fist and curse everyone all over again, putting the latest cuss words to use, this time just for the fun of it. But you keep the volume low so as not to miff your sleeping wife.

Then tragedy strikes. The dudes start a Facebook group to ‘facilitate interaction and networking’ (ahem) among the class of 2012. The social networking ignoramus that you are, you join in anyway if only out of compulsion to impart your infinite wisdom and superlative vision to the perhaps less gifted of your future class mates.

Having published the odd piece online which received a record breaking 7 hits (though that includes your immediate family and two neighbors), you had anointed yourself a worthy successor to Rushdie. Now you find that your batch mate has published a national best seller. You had prided yourself for being a war veteran having survived several successive failures in You-know-which exams years ago. Now you rub shoulders with gentlemen who fought and won real wars and who shoot infiltrators in the valley for target practice. You thought of yourself as a consensus candidate for the Nobel Prize in physics because you had once suffered the Brief History of Time and happen to know the full form of GSLV. Now at the canteen you might bump into a true blue scientist working on the Chandrayan mission. You heave a sigh of relief that the zen monk at ISB is thankfully from the class of 2011, now that you are an exalted spiritual master in your own right having survived the odd guided meditation video on Youtube.

In numerous other ways the facebook group continues to make you assume a little less about yourself. You think about them all - entrepreneurs, creative artists, the omnipresent IITians, super studs (err…as in students) and you find your self-esteem making an auto correction. For some obscure reason you do not curse by instinct this time. Instead you feel a sense of gratitude. You feel grateful to all things and people including Prof. Tom Weismann for conspiring to put you in the company of, at the risk of sounding kiss ass, such an illustrious peer group. Amazing as it sounds, you even feel grateful to your own wife, and for some apparent reason you fail to recollect.

Having come to the fringes of reality at last, you rest your case. You surrender.

You are NOW ready for school.

In Limbo..

The movie Inception has been making rounds in my heads since I watched it a few days ago. Cannot help but compare how our lives are going the Inception way.
Consider this:  Right now ISB appears to be the reality and this wait has kept us in Limbo ! We try getting kickbacks to the real world (read ISB) through the FB page, and people who are already there in the real world (our seniors). But the kickbacks aren't strong enough to take us out of this limbo ! Guess the real kickback is going to be the O-Week which will formally bring us on the ISB world ! :-)

But Hey Wait ! The ISB world will not be real either ! Will it ? It will be a dream within a dream scenario again with ISB this time as the dream and the Corporate World as the reality. We will be slogging out against each others Projections till the Placement month of January, hoping for a good kickback again, this time to the Corporate world with fatter paychecks and a mind full of gyaan ! And it takes no Extractors to find what's going on in the dreams of 90% of the batch! Shhhh.... Its Consultancy. :-)

Hey wait again ! Lets get this thing a little more complex ! Is corporate world the reality? Where do we head to after a hectic days work ? Friends, families and may be ourselves? But we already have them with us now ! So why are we getting ourselves these kickbacks for the coming year ?

The reality check is that good salaries shouldn't be our kickbacks ! New friends and good relations could be  better kickbacks in the long run !
The reality check is that we shouldn't slog against each others the coming one year ! Thriving for knowledge could be a better kickback !

And to lighten up the mood, here is a cartoon I made based upon the idea suggested by Varun Sayal. If you like the cartoon, you can join in at Arbit's Facebook Page for more.

Arbit Choudhury, hailing from www.arbitmba.com will join as a management student at ISB this april !  A student with big dreams and bigger mouth, replete with jargon, Arbit will try making mockery of management concepts and theories. Ideas for the Arbit strip can be sent across at arbit[dot]mba[at]gmail[dot]com
 

Premature thoughts on the batch

So, the first thing we did after we got our admission offer emails, was to setup a Facebook group. We could have had a Google group or yahoo and all that other communication overload, but nothing would have propagated the nonsense factor like FB, which is why FB groups rule. Yes, we are the FB generation of India, deal with it. 

Our FB group was rambling centre. A rambling center that I'm greatful to; it helped me understand my batchmates better. Since FB is barely searchable it is impossible to verify the "facts" that I have mentioned here, and hence I urge all of you reader to believe me without questioning.

Based on my extensive research:

Dancing: One of the earliest discussions on the group. About 400 people out of the 150 at present, like to dance. Another 50 want to learn how to dance. I think we have everything from Bharatnatyam dancers to "exotic" bollywood dancers. We will break down the dance floor, quite literally.

Hate IITians: This is quite a large group. Infact, most women are part of this group. They just hate IITians. I don't specifically blame them, they are IITians. Within 2 days of a particular lady posting an anti-IITian post, there were 200+ comments on it. The funny part wasn't the open hatred for IITians, but the desperate attempt by IITians to garner some love. In the end everyone agreed to disagree, but the reputation of IITians on campus had taken a bad beating by then.

Gambling: Of the 150 people on the group, I'm quite sure 140 are gamblers, including me. The game in vogue was Texas Hold 'em poker. We even had 5 people who had chip-sets which they pledged to the ISB Class Of 2012. The good news ofcourse, only 10 people knew how to play. 2 people offered coaching classes and we had our first bidding war. We also had our first gyan session with people warning against price wars. Ofcourse, the opportunist bastard in me saw another way out. I'll take free classes for who ever wants and then rip them off during the game. Not sure if my bathcmates are dumb enough, but worth a try.

Sports: Here is an interesting one. The number of people who have an opinion about Nadal vs Federer matches = group size (150). The number of people who play tennis = 5. People who've heard of Bolton Wanderers = 15. People who've heard of Real Malorca = 4. We actually have a basketball team, including subs. People in this batch love to run. Mumbai marathon enthusiasts apart, i'm waiting to see how many run because they're late to class. Not sure if we have a wicket-keeper for the cricket team yet, but round 2 will have to really add up on those numbers. As of now, I can remember only 2 people who said "cricket" on their posts.

Anxious people: Lots of people were in denial. They thought they didn't get into ISB. That is the only way I can explain the number of people who were anxious about the new admits website link. Some people were very freaked out that ISB forgot to send the link only to them!!

Couples and Families: Of the Round 1 admits, most people are married! I tried to understand how many, but then quickly achieved the label of "looking for girls" guy. I don't deny it, I do find women more interesting than men. The more interesting part is the number of people who hate families. People didn't want families of the Class of 2012 admits to be part of the face group because of concerns like seriousness of discussions, dilutions of networking and "i think it's a bad idea". All this while people were discussing their favourite drinks on the same group. 

Alcohol: Based on 2 back to back posts in the group, there are more book-readers than alcoholics. euch!!! Even at one of the meets in Bangalore, I was the only one drinking in a beer-cafe till one kind lady decided to give me company. I'm sure this will change once the course starts. Of the people who do claim to drink, their tastes are quite expensive. I can never afford to drink with them or maybe they'll all come down to my level - I think Atniquity Blue is premium whisky.

Networking: Why does everyone in b-schools say networking?! You're going to live with these monkeys for a year, it's not networking, it's called being social!! The most accurate way of summing up networking is here - http://thecoldcall.blogspot.com/2010/02/youve-got-friend-in-me.html. Yes, I'm a cynical b@star&.

Gender Inequality: The women in this batch have *way more* attitude than then the men. I'm going to do my very best not to get on the bad side of some of them women. While this might seem like kissing up to a few readers, I think of it as survival instincts.

FT Rankings: The rankings just came out. ISB - 13. IIM A - 11. SLAP in the face. Ouch. Life will move on. We will continue to find reasons why we are better than them and every non-MBA human will continue to not care.

Enfiedlers: 2. Yes, a dismal 2! One is a woman, which is adding to my earlier point of women with attitude. Both not sure of bringing bikes to ISB. Other bikers, 0 as of now. 

Dumb Questions: I don't intend to be rude (wink wink.. nudge nudge), but some people post the dumbest of questions on the group. If you don't have a relevant question or something valuable to add to the group, no one is going to mind if you shut the hell up. You do not have to go out of your way to ask a dumb question. That is referred to as "desperate class participation". They might allow you to put up pink curtains, but you should really ask ISB, not the new admits!

PS: Yes, it is important to toss my opinion about the batch around; simply because of the entertainment potential. 

PPS: The point of this post - to capture the current state of affairs before the Round 2 admits join in.