@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.

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!

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 48^th 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.

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 26^th. 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.