Life 1.0 before IIM Indore!
As I’m sitting here writing this article I can’t stop myself from thinking about how life has changed in the past two months. Two months back, I was at my office doing 10 to 6 job, handling the frustration of customers and witnessing the pressure on each of us due to innumerable measures were taken by the Govt Of India. Well, we bankers were still dealing with the repercussions of demonetization and then came the debt waiver. But still, life was in a comfort zone. I was getting a message on every 25
th of the month that XXXXX amount has been credited to your account. But somewhere I always believed that this is not how my life should go about just like that. I wanted something new and challenging every day and wanted to go back to the academics desperately. And for this, I chose to take CAT and worked towards fulfilling my dream and landed on the planet I what we lovingly call IIM Indore.
Life 2.0 at IIM Indore!
Hey, what’s going on! Do you have any idea? That’s how days go by when you come here. You will lose track of which time dimension you are in after entering here. You are still under the hangover of either your previous job or college and are not quite used to this rigorous schedule. Before you can understand anything, you will find yourself inundated with crazy selection preprocesses of clubs and committees, getting PORs aka position of responsibility (of course brownie points for your CV), surprise quizzes, mandatory sessions (else PPRA:-P), long - long pre reads for your next class and what not. I heard people saying four hours of sleep is a luxury in a b-school. Well, that is cent percent true. Imagine a person used to a sleep of about 9-10 hours getting a nightmare like this in the beginning only. If you sleep at the wrong time you might miss out on checking your inbox where emails come like torpedoes informing you of surprise quiz that will happen in the next one hour. You will feel totally drained and you might doubt your decision to join a b-school. Wasn’t life better before? Well, the answer to which after some time you will say: “NO”.
As you settle down and ponder over your life here you will realise that it's not that a big deal considering how far you have come and life’s too big for such trivial things. Isn’t this the challenge that you were craving for and desperately wanted before? If yes, then you have got all the ingredients here to polish you and to make you more resilient and strong over the course of time. MBA teaches you the way of life. It tells you how much you can learn from all the uncertainties and how to meander your way around them. Economics, Marketing, Accounting all are good and certainly will help you in making your career but it’s your learning outside the class that matters the most. Discipline, valuing your time and other’s time, smiling even during the toughest times and many such things will be your takeaways from here. You would be thinking one month into MBA and I’m giving you 'bhaari wala gyaan', but believe me that’s true. You yourself won’t realise how certain positive changes have crept inside you and you have started loving your new life. In the end, I would suggest to keep working and dreaming and remember this....
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.