It seems only yesterday that i joined this wonderful institution called IMT Ghaziabad. Time has flown by steadily since then. It was only my first day at this place and it was looking a bit weird, to be very honest. The infinitely long guest lectures, the emphasis on attendance, the twenty percent plagiarism rule, the chronic scarcity of sleep – everything utterly failed to impress the engineer in me. Then came the most dreaded part – Senior freshmen interaction ( a gentle synonym for ‘ragging’ ! :P ). It was around 10 pm. All clubs and committees started giving their intros. Some said they were the ‘heart of the college’, some ‘eyes’ , some ‘ears’, some ‘most visible on campus’ etc etc . Then came the ragging part which continued till 4 am. All in all, it was fun.
Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur in association with the Harvard Business School Club of India successfully organized the first Inclusive India Forum 2014 at IIM Udaipur campus on 26th July, 2014.
‘Free-rider’ - this is one word all B-schoolers are familiar with. If we go by definition, ‘free-riders’ are people who benefit out of something without paying for it. Whether you hate them or are indifferent, you cannot deny the fact that their presence (or should we say absence!) in your groups does lead to a lot many critical changes in things like division of work, number of hours that you spend on your project/case etc. The primary reason behind free-riding can be attributed to a phenomenon called ‘Social Loafing’ according to which the efficiency of individuals decreases when they work in a group as the onus does not lie completely on them. Although, most free-riders show the same behaviour in terms of not turning up for meetings/discussions, not replying to messages, not picking up phones etc., the ways in which they do it is unique to every individual. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some common types of free-riders that we encounter in daily life.
The way some people tell history, India’s pre-liberalisation days were a wasted period. If only India had embraced capitalism and the private sector back in the 1950s or 1960s, India would have been like South Korea today – India and South Korea had roughly the same GDP per capita in the early 1960s, but today India’s GDP per capita is around $1,500 while that of South Korea is more than $23,000!
A major source of learning in MBAs is through case study competitions. It lets you do some of your most meaningful work. Solving real life business problems for Mahindra, ITC, Phillips or HUL gives you a great rush. There is also great motivation of huge prize money and PPO/PPI. Here is a list of things that help you get cracking at competitions.
This is going to make very little sense. Or maybe a lot of sense. I hope to leave you mildly intrigued or mildly bored. Like a Chetan Bhagat book.
I read a lot of nonsense; none of which includes any kind of religious or spiritual or self-help psychobabble that other human beings read. I have not read The Secret or The Magic or Seven Habits of Highly Constipated People or Count Your Rabbits Before They Scratch. A lot of people- mostly old, mostly of the female variety- spend a lot of time and money on reading crap like this.
My wife once told me that the essence of the book “The Secret” was that you send positive energy up into the Universe. For example, you whisper to the Universe “I want to have a great day in office today” and the Universe shall listen to you. But if you were to whisper to the Universe “I want that bastard who keeps boring me with lame jokes at lunch every day to get impaled under the photocopier”, the Universe isn’t going to listen to you. Because that’s just not positive.
While you are figuring out a positive way of asking the Universe to ensure certain irritants in your life die painfully, I am left wishing that I could write books containing psychobabble like this; crap that might help people believe they actually have a chance of changing their lives. Like “How to improve your life by wearing odd colors to office everyday”. Or “The eight untold secrets of stress free photocopying”.
But I can’t. And thus I will never be an incredibly successful writer. Perhaps. Because what I am about to do is give it all away for free. Life, the deeper meaning of life, the Universe and everything else. Yes, free! (Feel free to donate to my cause by buying my book which, of course, has nothing to do with this blog post.)
As I said, I read a lot of nonsense. Most of it has nothing to do with the self help variety of literature that people make small fortunes peddling. But I am addicted to reading- I read to fill my mind with stories… fiction, non-fiction, history. And in my endless quest for nothing but pure entertainment of the soul, I believe I have stumbled upon The Actual Secret. If I were marketing savvy, that’s what I would call the book. Or maybe, The Real Secret. Or better still, What That Bitch Rhonda Bryne Didn’t Tell You.
Let me tell you there is no such thing as the Universe listening to you. Or people with seven specific habits being highly successful. (I haven’t read the book and slept through presentations where people spoke of the book; so I am going to refrain from attacking it, for now.) Erm... back to my point- no such thing as the Universe listening to anyone. The Universe barely has time for itself- it’s not going to listen to you. It has galaxies, black holes, comets, asteroids, stars, planets to manage. It is about the rank of a General Manager in the Corporation of Everything.
As I said, when you read as much as I do and you read simply for the guilty pleasure of sneaking a read in your limited leisure time, what you acquire is not knowledge but wisdom. Without sounding too boastful, the rough approximation of this is the attempt for attainment of God through prayer. Pray and you shall hope to find God. Fill your soul with stories and you shall hope to have a mildly intriguing/ boring epiphany.
So now that I have built this up with about seven paragraphs of riff raff, I am going to break it to you. The deeper meaning of life, the universe and everything. And (drumroll…) it is…
The meaning of life is merely the act of forgetting that we are going to die. Everything that we ever do; our education, our love lives, our careers, our families, our children, our fitness regimens- are all a charade to help us forget that we are terminal. When we rue a bad appraisal, when we bereave a dead pet, when we celebrate standing second in a debate, when we cuddle next to a pillow with the flu- all our sorrows, our miseries, our joys- all our senses collude to create an emotional space in which the fear of impending death gets crowded out. Simply put, our everyday gamut of emotions, of pursuits, of little joys and miseries helps us forget- helps us live.
When sages, godmen, demigods, etc. meditate and withdraw to their mythical mountains to ponder on the meaning of life, they are in effect validating my philosophy as well. Their crusade for the meaning of life helps them evade the absolute certainty of death. I believe that their quest for a grand afterlife engages their minds so that they might forget that they too shall be dead in a few years. And thus, their quest for meaning would actually stand as a subset of my “Real Secret.”
And thus like all great stories, I shall finish this with what I started. When I read, when I fill my head with stories- real or fictional, it just helps me forget. And that is the deeper meaning of life. Simply, to forget.
Now if you disagree, consider this… I could have written a book about this. Titled it “What That Bitch Rhonda Bryne didn’t tell you” and made a few million bucks. And that would have made you extremely jealous.
It is another matter that your jealousy would have made you forget about your mortality. But let me not oversell this.
I have not plagiarised this theory but if Einstein or Stephen Hawking or Rhonda Bryne or Asaram Bapu has already written about this, I am going to plead ignorance. I read to entertain; not to educate and have given all these writers a miss.
It is almost a month in XLRI and there have been more than hundred surprises in this period of time. However the most heart-warming surprise was ‘Village Exposure’ program. Honestly, at the beginning, I was looking at these 3 days as a vacation, especially after excruciating start of B-school life. But what came after going in village made a huge impact.
