“Err… what? Why MBA? But you’re already into one month of your first term!” ask people when I confide to them this weird thught I often ponder over, “You must’ve answered that question in the IIM interview right?” I wish I could find an answer to my “why MBA?” puzzle in the answer I prepared for my B-school interviews. But it is not easy to fool myself into thinking ‘I know’ something ‘I don’t know’. Is it for getting pamper-placed post these arduous two years? Or for tasting that ecstatic feeling of being hailed as an MBA Grad? I know it’s for none of these and it is certainly not for getting that “holistic higher-education experience that I have always yearned for.” (Refer Barpanda, S(2013), IIMK Admission interview form).
Then, WHY exactly am I doing an MBA? The thought haunts me. I hear its evil laugh when writing a difficult quiz and see it flashing its triumphant evil smile when I look at myself in the mirror every morning. Frustrated, I wonder why I wonder at all in the first place. After all, I never got answers to the myriad of WHYs I have pondered over in the past; like “WHY do people pray unreasonably?” or “love unconditionally?” and then also “fight against each other irrationally?” And then there are the WHY’s of a more personal-nature- WHY am I the way I am? WHY I end up in places I think I would never end up in- basically, why I zigzagged from Science stream to Economics to now MBA? And all these WHY’s have always been a subset of that universal WHY i.e. WHY am I here on this planet, leading this life of mine?
I guess by now, you, dear reader, must be thinking of me as some weirdo or one of those monks from the Himalayas. Well, I don’t blame you but I must say that I mull over ‘my purpose of existence’ solely at a ‘functional’ level. There’s nothing ‘spiritual’ about it, mind you.
The days at IIMK are going to get drearier still and perhaps sooner or later I will get gnawed into the daily grind that is typical of a business management course. Now at the end of this rambling, when I think of the possibility of my mind getting numbed by the hectic academic life here and later by the taxing corporate-life that I’ll come to lead, I feel pretty alarmed about it. And that’s strange because in a way, such drudgery will help me finally get rid of the perturbing WHY’s. However, no matter how much I dread my current state of constant-confusion, I wonder if I dread more the day I’ll dismiss all my wondering altogether and ring master myself into taking everything as a given. And then it hits me that I am better off with a muddled mind than a non-questioning, mechanical mind.
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