@Rashmi Bansal - Nothing Happened to IIM Calcutta

One of the popular posts on the internet about IIM Calcutta is this one by Rashmi Bansal. Now Rashmi is the founder of JAM magazine, that is more than decent in terms of its quality. Also she was implicated in the IIPM-JAM Controversy along with Gaurav a good friend of mine. Hence I considered her opinion with more attention that I would normally.

Unfortunately though, the post itself is quite damning. If you were thinking about coming to IIM Calcutta, no matter how strong your convictions you would be forced to rethink. I did too.

Now that I’ve been year for almost 6 months, I decided to revisit the article and see how true it is. Unfortunately, the image she portrays is incorrect and misleading. There are a lot major defects in our system, yes. But not the ones that she points out to. Not all anyway.

Let us consider the points that she makes.

1. The natural beauty of the campus
It is a well known fact that the campus is really beautiful. Its a bird sanctuary, a haven for photographers etc. Rashmi grants us that. I concur totally in her views. This place is quite awesome that way.

2. Infrastructure
Rashmi says that

“The whole atmosphere is friendly, not intimidating.[…] a sense of this being a larger than life institution(IIMA) remained. That sense is missing at IIM C.”

Last time I checked “intimidating” was bad. It makes sense to have an intimidating backdrop if you were NDA and code of conduct, discipline was what you needed from your students. I don’t see how an “intimidating” backdrop can help you in a business course. In fact business is all about being entrepreneurial and self-starting and perhaps even creative. Not regimental and disciplined.

3. Laidback academic culture
Rashmi points out that our academic culture here is laid back. We have a 75% attendance requirement. She contrasts this at IIMA where “weeks feel like ‘Survivor’ episodes”. And again she counter-intuitively states that the former is worse.

In my opinion an enforced rule which forces you to sit through a class makes you much worse off that a system which allows you some leeway. The time you spend taking an Operations course you have no interest in, could be better utilized doing something you like. I’d take an academic lifestyle where I choose what I do with my time, rather than living under some enforced rule. We did not have the 75% rule either a few years back, and it flummoxes me as to why it was introduced in the first place.

I think it’s a major advantage that our first year is NOT a grind. Thankfully, you don’t need to “survive” your first year at IIMC.

4. World Class Amenities
I must concede that we do not have amenities like we should. The admin. is in full construction mode to fix that, as I type. But more importantly it’s not as bad as she paints it out to be.

Now I’m a pretty finicky sort of guy. I like my space and I like my luxuries. And I get all the basic necessities here. I don’t think that “you can barely fit in one bed, and study table.” in our rooms. They are much bigger. I get piping hot water for bath, have a telephone in my room to order anything I want from the night canteens on campus and there are washing machines in my hostel.(though I’ve never used it because I get my clothes washed by the dhobi who washes and irons clothes via room delivery) In short – sure I would’ve like an air conditioner, banquet meals and carpeted floors! But that does not mean that what I have is inadequate by any measure.

Rashmi has tried to be reason why IIMC’s rankings have dropped over the years. And I think she has done so honestly. However she the examples and the points that she makes are invalid and inaccurate. In my opinion, the real reasons lie in matters as external as our location to the fact that we don’t give a rat’s ass about our PR. Maybe I’ll try to analyse those issues one day.

However this explanation was in order to set the record straight.

December 24th, 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: JAM, rashmi bansal, IIMC, IIMA / Trackback

Original Joke of the day.

Q. If gay people come out of their closet, what do masochists come out of?

Ans. Their Iron Maidens.

Laugh, dammit laugh!

December 20th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Trackback

Two Hypotheses

I thought this deserved a mention here. I’ve finally found a method to prevent flame wars on message boards. On quizzing forums you would typically post “obligatory” questions so that even if your message is irrelevant to the reader he gets to answer a question. So I propose the ““Abhishek’s Law of Increasing Marginal Flaming Cost” – What this simply means is that if you choose to reply to a post which is obviously irrelevant (i.e it came with an obligatory question) then you have post TWO obligatory questions in addition to your scathing commentary. This would make it harder and harder to keep the conversation going. Imagine that by the 48th post on the thread we’d have entire free quizzes per reply. Such joy!

In totally unconnected discourse, me and a friend here were discussing job qualifications after our end term exam in the Information Technology course today. We were discussing how the Macroeconomics text book we use (Mankiw) makes excellent use of cartoons. For example we were studying the concept of the Ricardian Equivalence which states that a decrease in government taxes will not necessarily boost spending. A standard counter is that for this to be true tax rates remain constant “over the long term” and hence people don’t worry about such future considerations. Now Mankiw manages to find a very apt cartoon for this specific concept. There is a scowling kid who’s saying “What’s this I hear about you adults mortgaging my future?”. The book is replete with such apt placements of cartoons. I wondered aloud to my friend, “its awesome that Mankiw manages to find these cartoons to illustrate his point” – to which he replied that maybe Mankiw does not do it himself. Maybe there is a controller of cartoons. Maybe there is this guy who’s only job is poring over cartoons and placing them. He would be “Head of Cartoon Placement”. And when asked what his profession was he would be like,“I place cartoons. I did history and geography before, but now I’m specialising in macroeconomic theory”.

Which led to me narrating my previous discussion with my cousin about job qualifications needed to be a “pusher” at Tirupati. Now if you’ve never visited the place, then there is this huge dedicated team whose only job is to push people who are outside the main temple inside and push the ones inside out. I and my cousin were nonplussed working out the modalities of the selection procedure and the qualifications needed for the same. So in the unlikely event that you are indeed in the business of people pushing at Tirupati please don’t forget to tell us how you bagged that coveted position.

This is our theory. Drawing on our “understanding” of the IT course that we’d taken the same day – we theorized that every candidate undergoes a week long trial during which each devotee is tagged with a RFID tag. This is not a fanciful assumption given the level of automation that the temple already employs. Then an average people-pushing rate per person is calculated – thus providing a simple metric for selection.

And thus ended a day that began with a paper in Cost Accounting and later in IT Systems. With theorizing. The way it should be.

December 9th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: exams, end terms, it, arbit / Trackback

Fretty me

If you have noticed my sidebar, I’ve been making efforts to collate all the blogs written by people who are or have been students of IIMC. I was hence directed to read My Dayz With Myself – which someone claimed is a “popular blog”. Yeah, right I said to myself. Another narcissistic bastard like me bitching about his daily life. But I still had to have glance.

What I found was the extremely well written blog by someone who has passed out of this place for over two years. I read through some of his latest articles, and gleaned that he is “sell[ing] Soaps and Shampoos for a living”. I also figure out that he is single, considering that his parents have recently put out a matrimonial ad for him. I look at his blog and realise that this guy has already done what I have been trying to do on this blog. Document what happens to people who comes to places like this. What are they thinking while on campus? What are their emotions during exams, during sports meets, during placements? What do they end up doing? And how do they look back? I have here in front of me a virtual time machine which I can use to figure out how his feelings towards the course and curriculum changed as he gradually progressed to his degree.

I’m currently reading the part about what you feel when you are about to take your term II exams. And everything that happens before. There are a few things that have an eerie sense of deja vu. In fact, all the things that he describes are so similar and so exact to what I am feeling and thinking right now – that its positively astonishing. And what that means is that what we have here is machine which is subjecting students to the same kind of regimented treatment year after year, and manufacturing “managers” which are expected to do various jobs in the industry. And that casts a huge doubt over the very credibility and existence of the system. The very purpose of a place of higher learning is to enable students to take out of the system what they like, and create their own experience out of it. Everyone’ time on college should be defined by what they want out of it. And this should be true for those who are academically inclined, those who want to play sports and those who want to do nothing. As far as I can see (and understand) these people are being virtually treated alike and are being injected with the same formula dose. This is a sorry state of affairs.

Take for example, this post written some time before the summer placements.

“the point i am trying to make is that life is getting to be so pushing here.u may think-this nut is just trying to show off but im not.infact,i am genuinely disgusted.believe it or not,sometimes i really feel scared and sick thinking that the rest of my life may be so fast and demanding as this.maybe i am a wrong kinda guy for this kinda life.”

I didn’t feel the same way simply because I don’t take things that seriously – but I can totally understand what he was thinking. I know of a lot of people who must be thinking along the same lines. But the interesting part is when these feelings evolve and transform along the way. I’m yet to read the entire memoire, but I’m guessing it will go from frustration to disgust to relief to pressure to nothing-to-do to when-will-I-graduate to ultimately existential questions of why am I doing this and what do I want? Its magical how mundane and parametrized these things become when viewed from a distance. Esp. when you are at the beginning of the same path.

This begs the question, “so what?”. So what, now that you’ve realised what’s going to happen to you. How does that change things? I think it does. I’ve had an inkling all the time about what could happen if you went along with the flow here. Did things as everyone did. But my hypothesis now stands at least anecdotally confirmed.

Well for one, I’m going to think hard about what I want to do once I get out of here. It’s probably easy for me to say that I’m going to think beyond some of the typical jobs that people here do now that I still have almost 18 months before I make that decision. But I’ve also decided to do differently a few things while on campus. I’ve decided to try out my hand at academic research. This would also allow me to know the faculty here better and work with them, though I will have to pick and choose who I interact with and how. I’m guessing even the faculty would be used to a regimented reaction from students. I hope I could make them view us in a better light.

Today has been a funny day. Its been one of those days where you think a lot about the so-called broader issues. Things that happened around me have only intensified this feeling. An old friend reminded me about those lazy evening spent watching movies at NFAI and going to concerts at Mazda Hall. Ramanand wrote this very poignant post – the best I’ve read so far about the events of November 26th. It was just one of those days which end in these kind of blog posts.

So forgive me if I’ve been rambling, because that is one thing I try to avoid. However inflicting you with my personal disorganised stream of thoughts is certainly a good way of getting my mind in order. Thanks again for listening, and in case you didn’t like this performance our normal performer will be in next week.

December 4th, 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: globe, personal / Trackback