Your day starts at 8.45 AM and never ends. There are classes, exams, assignments, assignments, and some more assignments. All of these, in a campus, situated nearly 20 km away from the city area, only between mountains, wildlife, and all kinds of floras and faunas that you can ever think of, except humans. Even the dogs around are never able to sniff out the omnipresent Dominos or CCD stores, let alone the niches. Sounds like a mundane life, doesn’t it? Well, guess what! It’s not even close. Why, you ask? Because IIM Sambalpur has little pieces of chocolates that save me from these life-sucking dementors. People call these chocolates as SaP.
SaP is an acronym for Sathwik Parivaar, a weirdly named group by a weird guy (see Uday Ramineni Srinivasan), with each person in the group being weirder than the other (yeah, one of them is me!). It is named after a Hyderabadi CompSci guy, Sathwik Padam (Padam Sai Phani Narsimha Sathwik, to be precise). After completing his graduation, Sathwik worked at ADP for about 10 months before joining IIM Sambalpur. Being a Raghuram Rajan devotee, he is always found fluently speaking equity, arbitrage, market returns, alpha, beta, theta blah blah blah which might literally be Greek to half of the Indian population. Even as I write this article, he might be sitting in the Gurgaon Office of Eldrok where he is interning as a Finance Research Analyst for Aviation and Education Industries. Before I forget again, we still need to take a party from him for being selected the President of Bears N Bulls, the Finance Club of IIM Sambalpur, and Vice Secretary of Industry and Alumni Relations Committee.
Party reminds me, I was supposedly supposed to get another treat from a guy from SaP, whom I helped edit a few parts of his book. Debayan (or Tower as he is called because of his unusual height) has already written two books under the pen name ‘Dev Ayan’ and is working on the third. This Media PR Committee coordinator loves both calmness and controversies. Calmness in his own life; controversies in others’. The character completely hates exclusivity, even in his career path. This writer-turned-chemical engineer turned MBA interning in digital marketing at a FinTech aspiring to be a marketer, can always be seen rattling in almost all Indian languages, even the most difficult ones. He writes not just stories, but poems, articles, and even blogs. I remember starting writing a blog with him on advertisement analysis which did gather some initial fame but now runs asymptotically to the X-axis.
You don’t always need to be a marketer to market your requirements. Vikas, the fin-enthusiast civil engineer from UP, has proved this to me time and again. He has so well positioned his wants that the entire college is aware of them. The main reason for this is him being crystal clear about his aims. 1.
XYZ ko college se hatao (Get XYZ removed from our college) (name concealed on purpose). 2.
Mujhe girlfriend dilao. (Get me a girlfriend) 3.
Mujhe pani pilao. (Give me water to drink). He despises the particular person so much that he wants them removed from the college. Most of his memes and jokes in the group are about that person. If he wants anything more than getting that person removed, it is a girlfriend. Though from experience, all his close friends can tell you that he is hardly interested in girls. Excel is his first and last love. Interestingly, he hates filling his bottle with water. No one has yet been able to figure out his strange aversion towards this activity, but everyone living on his floor is always trying to figure out ways to hide their bottles from this water-seeking guy. The best part is yet to come. The most amusing thing about Vikas is that he can crack you up at any moment of time. You are crying, you are heartbroken, you have failed, just go to him. You are sure to laugh!
Vikas’ room is often a haunt for the Gen X of our Group. Kangkan, who comes from one of the seven sisters (no, I’m not being a regionalist), is the guy with highest Work-Ex in the group. Perhaps this is what triggers his obsession with calculating the future value of anything and everything. He only does what he thinks will benefit him significantly, and that too after a series of KBC with associated people and what you may call a detailed professional analysis of the subject in consideration. You always get to hear phrases like “
hamare zamane me nahi tha ye sab” (this did not happen in our times) or “
kya fayda iska?” (what’s the use of this?) at least a hundred times a week from his mouth, but the good thing is that he is always ready to help you out with his experience in the corporate world. You may also consider him one of the sincerest of all experienced people of our batch.
So this is what my college life is all about. A bunch of brilliant idiots, (Yes, they are all brilliant. This is why they are in an IIM!) running behind projects, assignments, and submissions all day and night long, and yet not leaving out a single opportunity of adventure!
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If I get an opportunity, I would love to work for the Fashion and Retail Sector of ABG. With the shift of retail market consumer from the traditional method of belief to the modern method of analysis, BRAND has become the most important aspect of Apparel purchase. I have always been interested in the field of branding, and one of my summer intern projects at Dentsu Aegis Network was also based on ‘Branding of a BFSI’. Pantaloons was voted as 'India's Most Trusted Apparel Retail Brand' in 2014-15, and I am sure that the skills I have developed from my college and internship will help maintain the brand name.