My experiments with MBA - First Quarter at XL

As I sit in the class staring blankly at the slides being displayed, my mind wanders off (as it often does :D) and I start to think about everything that has happened since I entered the hallowed gates of XLRI. What have the past six months really meant to me? - Chaotic for sure filled with intense yet fun and challenging moments

Like everyone who gets a chance to be here, I too entered this place with a lot of energy, passion (the elusive quality everybody seems to be looking for!!) and a fair bit of confidence (a shade of overconfidence maybe, time will tell...)in myself and my abilities. Then it came..BAM!! Reality hit me hard in the face and I found out that I was not good at a whole bunch of things. And here are a few lessons that I have learnt during these six months.

Humility - You don’t really know as much you think you know

Getting into a B-School, you are likely to believe that you are up there, the best of the lot, the crème de la crème so to say (which to a certain extent, is true!!). Many people here graduated top of the school, gold medallists in college and an awesome job to back that up, but there is quite a high probability that many are still idiots (me included!) when it comes to business. And it’s not their fault. Business is something which comes with experience and that has no substitute. There may be examples to the contrary but what I say this is true for majority of the population. The good news is, MBA education will shatter your dream world and bring you back to reality.

I learnt I wasn’t here for a walk in the park. Even in such a short span I have learnt quite a bit in areas I thought I was good at and discovered many which I didn’t even know existed. Being humbled is one the best things that has happened since it will help me not only in my education here but also in my life. Learning stops if you have a chip on your shoulder and believe that you know it all. XL makes sure you realize that.

Stay Calm

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s “If” pretty much sum up everything that you need to do at a B school and in life, especially the part about keeping your head. Life at a B school comes with a lot of opportunities. But along with them come the deadlines and the stress associated with them. There have been days when I had to prepare for 2 exams the next day all the while staring down the barrel of 3 deadlines. Times like these can be pretty overwhelming. The only way to deal with this is to stay calm and believe in yourself. That and believing in the age old maxim “This too shall pass”  J.This will continue to remain true for ever. B schools just give you a taste of and prepare you for life ahead.

Bite off only what you can chew

Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, acknowledge them

Just because you are not good at something does not mean that you are no good. There are people here who are absolutely brilliant at some courses and almost pathetically bad in some others. Over a period of time I realized that living my life with this attitude was simply not healthy. I too had my strengths. Just needed to figure out my strengths and leverage them.

This is also true in life. It’s okay to have both strengths and weaknesses. In fact it’s only human to be so. We are all imperfect (except of course if you are Sachin. He is perfect. He is God!).Play to your strengths, acknowledge you weaknesses and work on them. Success will automatically follow. This certainly is one of the biggest takeaways from my time here till now.

Make friends, not contacts

A lot is said about how you need to “network” and build “contacts” in a B school. I saw a lot of people get into the mad rush of networking without really knowing where they were going with that. I too tried to become a part of the crowd and was tempted to do what everyone was doing. But the last few months have made me realize one thing-To Make friends, not contacts. Be social, interact and try to build relationships with people as opposed to a network in the MBA sense of the term. The friends that you make and the kind of relationships you build are what determine the course of your life

And now we come to the most important part of this article. The most important thing that life here has taught me, the magic ingredient, the holy grail of all MBA’s and it is..wait for it...GAS!! ( Globally Accepted Shit, Is it??). Don’t have a clue about the problem or its solution, GAS away. The answer to life ,the universe and everything else is not 42 (Sorry Douglas Adams!) but GAS. For those who did not get the context, either read up Douglas Adams or better dismiss this line as a piece of GAS and move on.

There are many other things that life here has taught me, but the professor is really starting to stare at me and I need to concentrate fully on sleeping with my eyes open and giving the impression that I’m listening. Signing off till the next time.

– Srilu. 

Self Loathing

So this is what it has come down to. Sitting in the middle of the day, surrounded by people I don’t care about and spewing out a diatribe about how everything now is so pointless. We, the evolved humans of the 21^st century are lost. We are looking for meaning and direction in all the wrong places. Actually let me re-phrase it. We should stop looking for meaning and direction altogether, at any place. There is no meaning, there is no direction. Even though I don’t know what it was like, I believe we have missed the train to that destination ever since we left the simpler decades. It’s not our fault. We were just plain unlucky to have been born in the wrong time. Why, you ask? Everything was so much better back then. The music, the alcohol, the drugs even the women. It is all so much artificial now. We listen to pseudo-music, drink pseudo-alcohol, consume pseudo-drugs and date pseudo-women. They are all too perfectly aligned with our ideas of what good music, alcohol and music should be like. They are so perfect that they give away the fact that they are fabrications. I don’t want perfection. I don’t want heaven. I want more of the same. The same feeling that I get when I smell the woman I love, with all her imperfections. The same feeling that I get when I listen to a rock ballad in the middle of a quiet night with a glass of cheap whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Instead, now I am being judged and asked to judge others based on criteria that the internet has decided. The internet which was supposed to emancipate us has instead made us slaves to the views and ideas of a collective entity and we are supposed to conform to those, or else, we are labeled. We communicate with each other in pseudo-English and are slowly but surely tweeting and updating our Facebook statuses to death. And the worst part is that I am out there doing the same. I too am out there, conforming. Hence, the self loathing.

The Rural Immersion!

“The true India is found in its villages”, exclaimed Gandhi.

This statement gains all the more importance today, because understanding that of the 83.3 crores of Indians live in rural areas, 40% of whom live without electricity. We rank a dismal 136 in the UNDP(United Nations Development Programme) Human Development Report-2013, on the HDI index; ironically developed by an Indian, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

To be the superpower that it so wants to be, the upliftment of these villages is critical.

It was with this aim that the Rural Immersion programme was initiated by XLRI. “Leadership with a humane touch" has always been the cornerstone of the institute.

                      
                       

It was thus that we set out on the journey to Chaibasa, approximately 62 kilometers from the institute. Our basecamp, the Tribal Research and Training Center (TRTC) at Guira. The Director of TRTC apprised us of the various undertakings under the aegis of the center, to help the under privileged sections be a part of the mainstream.

To  make  us  understand  the  attachment of the people to  their  villages, he showed us the video on Adivasi Struggles  – “GaonChhodabNahi”. For the uninitiated, think about The Na'vis sentimental attached to their lush jungle moon of Pandora, in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Recently, a  Kolhan Community College was opened to offer vocational training to the tribal youth and to organize the un-organized youth in a movement called the ‘YuvaJumur’.  Also, the center hosts students from rural areas who were studying to clear their board exams.

He also gave us some insights on how to conduct ourselves in the villages, especially when we need to get permission from the village headman(the Munda’) and how  to  get  them  to  open  up  regarding  various  day-to-day  struggles. Some caveats related to interaction with villagers were also given so that we do not hurt the sentiments of villagers, even mistakenly. We must thank TRTC for being the great host that it was.

                           

Our visit to the Purnapa­ni, Peta Peti and Khedabera villages gave us the opportunity to interact with several people in and around the village. There included people ranging from  the Munda of the villages to the families including the womenfolk. The conversations gave us immense information and insights about their economic status, education, health and social standing.

The primary occupation of the villagers is agriculture, with Cereals, rice and wheat being the primary produce. The harvest is heavily dependent on rain. Inconsistent monsoon and lack of nearby water bodies such as ponds and lakes have hampered growth and forced some of the poorer villagers to seek jobs elsewhere. The farmers also face difficulty in finding willing labourers to work on the farm during planting and harvesting seasons. Villagers also complained that they receive no agricultural aid from the government.

The villages we visited, being close to the jungle, had many people taking up wood cutting to be their primary source of income. Some villagers also make axe handles to earn a living. The point of concern here is that trees are being cut but no measures for afforestation was being undertaken. There is also the migration of villagers to larger cities (going as far as Bangalore) to do odd jobs.

Government schemes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) are in place. Villagers seeking employment usually have to go through the Gram Sabha. Some of the jobs that came under the purview of MNREGA included manual labour jobs like digging and road laying. This year 3-4 roads under MNREGA scheme were constructed. The villagers, who availed employment as part of MNREGA, however complained that they did not receive payment for up to a month after the job ended. Most of the villagers had obtained their Aadhaar card and availed the benefits of Direct benefits Transfer for their wages and other Government incentives. There were also cases where people had applied for the Aadhar card, but had not received it after a long time.

Rations and provisions are availed through the Public Distribution System (PDS). Below Poverty Line (BPL) families are entitled to receive 35kg of rice. However, they receive only 34kg of rice, the remaining 1kg being siphoned off by the transporters citing fuel expenses. They are also entitled to avail four litres of kerosene through PDS every month.

In our discussions back at Basecamp TRTC, we concurred that Education, Health and Electricity are the key drivers which can put these villages on to the road of development.

The current scenario

Electricity:

There was no electricity in the village. Electric poles and lines were in place. However, the electricity supply for Chaibasa was unreliable. Solar panels and solar lights instead were installed in some places, but were not used that frequently. Villagers said that they themselves had to dig pits and install poles and wires, while the government retracted from funding the tasks.

Education:

There was one government school in the village. However, there was only one teacher available to teach students of classes 1-8. One teacher in a school teaches 200 children. Some students enrolled in the government schools move to Chaibasa or Purulia after 7^th grade for further education.

The only incentive for sending children to these schools was the Mid-Day meals. The quality of the Mid-Day meals was found to be satisfactory. The people hired to prepare these meals were grossly underpaid, thus forcing some of the older students to contribute towards its preparation. Also it was noted that the  villagers mostly sent boys to school and not the girls.

           

HealthCare:

There was no major primary healthcare centre in or around the village. The nearest major hospital was in Chaibasa. There was however a small Government run centre present in the village which was ill-equipped to handle the major needs of the villagers. Health programs are initiated by the government, but villagers claim that they don’t get the medicines when in need. TRTC had opened night school for illiterate people, but have now closed it due to poor attendance.

The brightspot was that the Government appointed Anganwadi workers were present in every village. They were responsible for the care and conditioning of pregnant women and newborns. The pregnant women had health checkups conducted every Thursday. They were given some basic nutritional supplements and medication based on their condition. Vaccination schemes for Polio were also in place for newborns and children up to the age of three.

The Munda and the residents also told us that the villagers receive no help from the government in agriculture like provision of subsidy for fertiliser. Also, the kachha houses added to their misery. Since there is no supply of newspaper in the village, nor there a television due to lack of electricity, the villagers are literally cut off from the outside world.

We have compiled a comprehensive report citing the issues that demand immediate attention.

It gives us joy to know that our recommendations for the village’s development will soon be implemented, with the future batches taking up the task of monitoring the progress of the villages adopted by XLRI.

The Village Immersion programme gave us the (much required) jolt to help realise the harsh realities of the people residing in villages. It also provided us the opportunity to understand that there are more important things that demand our attention (more than status updates on Facebook or tweets about what you had for lunch).

In short, it sensitized our being, for the greater good.

The first 20 days of Life at XL!

The first 20 days of Life at XL!

When I converted XLRI, it was a good 2-month period still to go before I would get to step into the most sacred and hallowed portals when it comes to a Business school. So, the 2-month period was spent getting high on XLRI achievements and specialities which well and truly set it apart from all Business Schools in India. As 14^th June neared, the excitement was palpable and emotions galore.

So, finally, I landed at XLRI on 12^th June. And the moment I entered the campus, I knew I was in for a very special chapter in my life. The lush greenery blew me away. XLRI campus epitomizes beauty in the highest form and you got to visit the campus to appreciate its splendor. 13^th June was our orientation and I got to see the Professors with such skills and experience that you would just wonder in awe whether you deserve to be taught by these Gods. The rest of the day was spent in exploring the picturesque campus and getting the official photograph clicked.

Then came 14^th June and XL culture took off that very day. The senior-junior interaction was immense and the seniors had planned so many things for us which took us by complete surprise. We even freaked out by some of their planning but everything was planned and planned to perfection and it was made sure that we were all smiles at the end of it. I would have loved to disclose what all greeted us in the first few days and the flawless planning of seniors but as they say it- Whatever happens in XL, stays inside XL! Such ice breaking sessions and parties ensured that we took to XL culture in the best possible way and the XL spirit got imbibed in us and we all were breathing XL, living XL, sleeping XL (for whatever small duration we managed to hit the sack) .Yes, we were living our life big-THE XL SIZE!

Now, I introduce you to perhaps the most important aspect of MBA - DREADED DEADLINES! There were deadlines galore and I was running like a kid in a lost territory with no idea where to go but one thing was certain- Deadlines are there for a reason and in a Business School you are supposed to meet them come what may! So, I worked, sometimes taxed myself but eventually did what mattered the most-meet deadlines and after meeting deadlines, the joy was divine and I felt the satisfaction of achieving something tangible.

The professors at XLRI have an aura around them and I had heard a fare share about their legendary tales even before stepping in XLRI. When the time to meet them in person came i.e. lecture time, what I had heard about them disappointed me. The Profs, as we love to call them, were far more dynamic, learned, knowledgeable etc. than those stories could portray.

Our accounting lectures are taken by the most dynamic teacher I have even seen in my life. He is called GOD in XL-lingo. He can make a drab concept look insanely appealing and can crack the wittiest of jokes without showing a tooth. And amidst all this, he makes accounting seem fun and teaches concepts like no one else in the world can.

The B-School world is entirely different from an engineering college and after 1 year of not-so-hectic corporate experience, life here has taken a different turn where I have to be on my toes all the time and I have so much work and so less time that prioritization is what I end up doing more often than not. Life is running full throttle at XLRI and days are days but the different part is nights are not the usual sleepy nights where you are just dozing off. There are so many events taking place during night. Excellent peers, stupendous teachers, unmatched XL culture, bonhomie shared with the seniors make all this running around like mad-men worthwhile and all I can say is XL MERI JAAN!

The most eventful 20 days of my life have been the 20 days spent at XLRI and this makes excites me all the more about the major chunk of life that is still to be lived at XLRI.

Cheers!

Once an XLer, Always an XLer!

A sneak peek!

It wasn’t the best of times, it wasn’t the worst of times either.

The Indian elephant was chugging along at a below average growth of less than 5% and the United States seemed to run over the cliff anytime. Sachin’s retirement was last thing one could wish for.

Was it the best time to do an MBA, albeit from a premier institute like XLRI?

A walk through the hallowed corridors of XL would lay to rest all these concerns.

A sneak peek into the Summer Placements Celebration

The famed XL culture pervades everything. Experience it! 

Wishing the XAT 2014 takers the very best.