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.