I have been working around for almost all my life right after graduation. But there has always been a zeal in me to try newer things, take up new challenges and strive to never make my life easy for something better.
I got selected into Tea Board of India in 2013 and have been an officer of the government till the day I quit. But unlike a typical babu, or rather the typical impression of a babu, I have always strived to be as clockwork as possible; this maybe the reason why I was feared for my punctuality by many of the stakeholders. I have also been appreciated a lot of times for striving to find solutions for the same people who would fear me and designing a path amid odds.
In 2018, probably the bat hit my head, figuratively of course. My younger brother cracked CAT, graduated in engineering and headed off to join IIM Ranchi. This is when I realized while coaching him for the WAT-PI that this is something that I would too like to do. So, we packed him off in a plane and off I went back from home to my workstation with the books he had been lugging around.
The role that I worked in required a lot of travel and even my commute to the office on a train would be about an hour long at the least. To top it up, I had already paid up for the gym and had cooking and chores duty at my residence. With all this at hand, I realized that sitting at a table would be almost impossible, except for the weekends and some holidays.
So, off went the table plans, the books that were huge weight out of the window (again, figuratively), and in came all the gadgets I had at hand namely the iPad, the laptop and the cell phone.
In managerial roles, it is told that one should listen to their juniors, and I had one at home. This brother of mine happened to quip that you can either learn or you can practice for the tests and learn on the job for your test. Being a person who would like to take the efficient route (I have never been able to sit at a table for more than 30 minutes ever in my life and I proudly have the attention span of a fish) I took the test.
To spice it up, it was “test and learn on-the-go”. What it meant was, all learning happened on my commute. That probably had been the toughest learning methodology for me till date. Imagine standing with your nose stuck to someone’s back or bag on a good day and armpit on the worst, holding the iPad or the mobile, scrolling through the applications and solving QA and DI-LR. There have been times when I have dozed off while in comprehension questions, though it even happened on test day. The other spare time I could find was while cooking, so I used to wait for the rice to boil and the fish to fry and did the sums at the same time.
The biggest takeaway through that process was that I was always under pressure of either the commute, the nearby passenger wanting to gossip, the calls from the office, overcooking the rice or burning the fish, or some other trouble for the day which I was gifted by the Almighty. The biggest pressure maybe was that I have been out of academics for almost 6 years when I started crawling back in. And as a lovely friend of mine put it, the ‘dil maange more’ trait in me is what makes me do these things (though the exact word used was madness).
So, the test came and the test went away and I had no idea what had happened inside the hall, except that I got some shut-eye in the verbal section. Cut forward to January, and I get interview calls from IIM Lucknow, IIM Shillong, all the IIMs participating in CAP and the newer IIMs who didn’t.
The interviews were another game of their own and the only common theme for me was defending, “Why at this age?”. If you ask me how I defended this, my honest submission (pinkie promise for all who still believe in it), I do not recall the exact words. But I can surely tell you that it contained something or the other from the passages above.
So, here I am, with conversions from almost all the institutes interviewed for and finally having selected PGPSM at IIM Lucknow. I am Prakash Roy, an engineer by profession, a Factory Advisory Officer at Tea Board of India, Ministry of Commerce, Government of India, a humble being with hobbies in photography (Instagram: @prakashray), blogging (
utopianfisherman.blogspot.com,
prakashray27.blogspot.com), micro-blogging (Twitter: @prakashray) and a knack to speak in public. This is my story of whatever it took for me to get through CAT.
And if you are in search for some inspiration, look up the Stanford Commencement Address of 2005.