Whispering Shadow

A journey is not defined by: where you come from where you go A journey is defined by: how you get through your time how much fun you have how you manage crisis who joins you on the way who walks away from you midway who seeks your help who you seek help from who promises to call you back once it is over who calls back once its over where you take breaks where you run out of your supplies when you almost quit what you take back home what you forgo why you took the journey in the first place

Like a typical management student, I will begin this post on my first year at a b-school with statistics. In the past academic year at MDI, I have met and interacted with nearly 600 students who were strangers to me before I came here. Apart from students, I must have attended at least 3 dozen sessions by the acclaimed and not-so-acclaimed executives, senior managers and achievers who have come and spoken about why they are doing the best thing on earth. I have given 43 exams, 86 quizzes and submitted at least 20 projects. I have seen two placement cycles of 630 students. Three festivals and six loud, crazy parties have passed by. Been a part of two elections and become secretary of a club in the latter one. Lastly and most importantly, I am sure I have slept only 4 hours a night on 75% of the days (not verified, could be higher!). The frantic pace and the shocking numbers are perhaps the least pronounced change in my life. What has changed from my engineering years is, the rate of bon...

Though the Time Machine in the H.G.Wells' novella may still be a distant reality, I have managed to discover its not-so-close substitute in the form of a b-school. It seems just yesterday that I landed at MDI, fresh and full of apprehensions about what the coming few months are going to throw on me. I have become one-sixth of an MBA since then, I have given 14 exams and 28 quizzes in the process, submitted around half a dozen projects and haven't quite realized where was it that the learning has happened, though I am certain it has. It is as if all the actions were involuntarily performed by a unknown side of me. What has happened more consciously is that I have been promoted from the nocturnal creatures to a qualified insomniac. Seniors say if you are sleeping too much, you are not making the most of your time in a b-school, which I partly agree with. Say for instance the last week from Monday to Friday, I slept for 4,5,3,4,2 hours per day respectively everyday. And sometimes ...

I just finished my lecture on Human Behaviour in Organizations (HBO) and have my Marketing Planning and Managerial Economics lectures coming up. The beauty of a b-school is that when you are doing the stuff you are supposed to do, i.e. study, you feel sleepy and when you are doing everything else that has no correlation with you becoming a manager, you are awake. It is involuntary. Which is why they have quizzes. Like today, our HBO teacher comes in and says I have a surprise for you. The whole class roars "No Quiz!!" Having a quiz is less surprising than not having one. But then 10 minutes of staying awake through those 10-20 questions is not as painful, is it? It is definitely less painful than a thirty page case study which you have to make a presentation on with one day's notice (my sympathies to my friends in HR). But then we don't start when we have 24 hours in hand, it is too un-manager-ly. We strongly believe that it is important to learn to handle crisis now ...

If I said the last post came after ages, this one has taken many more!! Time has flown by, all of a sudden, leaving me without much time to let any feeling of farwewell to sink in. Ironically, it has been the longest one month of my life. In addition to the expected preparations, tying the open ends of the threads of my life in Mumbai was not easy, especially when they are entagled with all the lives that have touched me deep in there and made all the difference. I also had important people to meet in Bangalore which made an added demand on my limited time. Amidst all the chaos, I didn't realise when I reached Gurgaon and how my first week in Gurgaon went by. Matter of factly, it was an incredibly long one too. I slept 3 hours on an average every night, with 45 minutes being the least in a day and 5 hours being the most. I had an option of paying up fines for sleep, delay and indiscipline (sleeping in sessions, stooping on the desk, etc.) but it was the easier way out. I chose to ...

I am jubilant. I have stayed away from the newspaper for a week. The feeling of nausea due to overconsumption of information has finally ceased. I have even stayed away from the many news channels that crowd the first 50 channels of my television box. So what if the world is slipping deeper into recession and India is anticipating two events (IPL and the Elections) which will see expenditure of 0.6% of our GDP in just over a month? Not much can change within a week. At least nothing that has any influence on me. Why the sudden aversion from current affairs one may ask. I was preparing for a b-school interview. The array of questions that they can ask you is insane. And as a result, even if you consider yourself to be generally well-read, you are never as ‘aware’ as your interviewers are of the world around you, at least you don’t interpret things they way they do. Hence to try to raise the bar, I was reading like never before, reading topics which I would conveniently skip otherwise, ...