Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Blame me.. Blame you....

The canteen was a favourite place for the students of GIM... for three reasons....

1.It was a bit far from the ever so ‘disciplined’ folks who ruled GIM from the main building

2. It hadn’t had AC and such plush paraphernalia but hadn’t had the omnipresent camera which made everyone in GIM a talented actor the moment they stepped into the large main door where sat the huge picture of a self obsessed photoposer Dr Joy smiling like an idiot.

3. There they could sit, stand, talk, crack jokes, run, play and very very important...use mobile phones and be young men and women. Live their age and stop feigning to be managers in the making........

I felt relaxed when I walked into the canteen every time for almost the same reasons as stated above… I was not a student there, I taught them Marketing, but felt the same lack of freedom at GIM as did the students and anyone who worked there in any capacity, except of course the family members and close pen pullers and palanquin bearers like the VC, ED and the ubiquitous spies…
It was in the canteen where I sat alone, that a colleague in the Marketing dept opened the news into my ears…

There is a meeting now… at the Kings chamber….and you are wanted….
What meeting? …..I wondered at that info… till five minutes before I was there hanging around and I wasn’t told….
Industry feed back this year seems to have plummeted and they are worried.. he said in hush, as if the walls too have ears…

In GIM it was possible, but I didn’t find a news value in that piece of narrow cast.. it was a known secret… and this meeting was routine….

And now with the AICTE team coming… it is getting into their nerves it seems.. the ED was announcing this in the faculty room….he went on…

I smiled, at his naiveté for the veteran I was at GIM I knew the real reasons and the real formula that works behind every such thing in that B school

My canteen sabbatical was over and in ten minutes was plunged into the largest chamber in the world which seems to have been conceived modeled on the oval office, but poor execution made it looks like a villains den, that appeared in almost all below the average Hindi cinema..
The students of the second year of Master of Business Administration at GIM batch after batch had one feature which was carried down as if through some inherited gene, with amazing precision... they all become lack luster, lifeless and lethargic.....life suddenly for them, was over or almost near to it.... studies become a mere ritual and so was other facets of life....
It was clearly not the pressures of management education that was the cause of this disease, for even in the first year they have the pressure and they do enjoy it...
It was not the work load that came in the shape of cases and assignments, work books and log tables, balance sheets and brand report cards, for by second year they should be feeling comfortable with all that and not in the contrary.....

As Prof Ram put it..the first years are good… the second years are mediocre and even poor…. But this is what they said last year also… this is what we are going to say next year as well!!!

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