Studying in a management school is a drag in many ways, particularly in the first year, because the relentless pressure, the ruthless competition and the unreasonable demands of a curriculum designed specifically to prove that there are torments and tortures in this world more boring than 3 hours in a materials testing laboratory waiting for a rod of cast iron to go craaaackkk!!
Actually, now that I think about it, the analogy with the materials lab isn't all that farfetched. Now that I look back, the first year at IIMA is kind of like an extended 'tension' test, with 250 poor, innocent, naive and blameless students replacing rods, beams, cantilevers and all kinds of assorted structures and being subjected to unthinkable loads. For those who haven't had the singularly enthralling experience of being in a testing lab, let me describe the sordid, sadistic and scandalous things that go on there.
The primary instrument used in these labs is a beast called a Universal Testing Machine (innocuous enough name isn't it). It has two clamps between which a rod of iron is kept. Then the machine is switched on and the two ends are pulled or pushed under ever increasing forces. After a point, the rod starts stretching like a rubber band and finally it snaps. After you've become sufficiently immune to the brutality of the whole spectacle, it's quite funny (and some might even say philosophical) to see a solid piece of iron, the kind which when aimed at strategic parts of the body can inflict substantial damage, snap like a twig from a tree growing in a particularly parched wasteland.
Well the first year at IIMA is a bit like that. If you want to see the sight of grown men and women cry then do visit the place during the first term. That's when the shock is at its most debilitating for most. The endless stream of chapters to be read for Economics, the God damned balance sheets that refuse to balance even after the most intricate of machinations to make the two sides even out and those bloody awful cases in Operations Management that make you question whether life would not have been better had one been born before the Industrial Revolution. If you manage to get 4 hours of sleep at night, consider yourself lucky and after you've sleepwalked - or rather forced yourself to 'sleep-wake' through 3 hours and 30 minutes of illuminating (euphemism for soporific) Socratic discourse from Professors who I suspect are always calculating the opportunity cost of lost consulting fees, there's the cheering prospect of a Short Manac (short form for Managerial Accounting - the bane of every engineer's existence) quiz in the afternoon, which makes you lose your appetite and after 20 minutes of struggling to make sense of columns of numbers and statements about 'prepaid rent', 'paid up capital' and 'cost of goods sold', you submit a sheet which is 50% blank and 50% full of guesses. After the invariabl struggle to avoid the 'did you get the last answer-, should it be Rs. 50.5 or Rs. 51.25- man I couldn't figure this one out, I'm screwed', crowd, you head back to your room and crash on your bed, to catch a few winks before you go completely mad. But not for too long, there's still chapters to be read for tomorrow, a report submission, a filed visit for a human resources project and ....
So you see, its a real surprise that one doesn't get to hear stories of students of IIMA being cleaved into two after one year here. I suspect there's a massive cover up of the sordid tales of abuse and torture..much like Abu Ghraib. However, most of us do survive to tell the tale. And now that we look back at it, it wasn't all that bad either. It stretched us to more than our limits and you do get a sense of having ahcieved something merely by surviving and your scars are like a badge of honour.
The second year at IIMA and I suspect at most other B-schools is completely different and gives you a lot of time to think and introspect as well as explore the world around you. And call me a compulsive cribber, but to me that's a far scarier proposition than having your nose kept to the grindstone. Last year, everything was properly structured and laid out and all you had to do was follow instructions. Now you're master of your own fate (by and large) and you can't blame anyone else. That's the real scary part.
Anyway, one thing the second year does give you in great abundance is free time and that is the reason why I've started this blog. Hopefully it will give me a chance to pen down (or rather type down) my thoughts and experiences and years later when I look back at my years in this place, it would be good to have a record of how I felt going through this wierd roller coaster ride.