MBA – The Epilogue

So my course at IIM Lucknow ended.. and this post is just about some jottings on that.

There is very little cynicism in these posts as far as i can see (which means obvly the discerning reader may see a lot more). It is not a case of sour grapes.. i did taste one or two grapes in my tenure and they were sweet. Neither is it about a holier-than-thou thing as i myself am party to a lot of these things and they were all my learnings which clearly shows that it was me who made most mistakes in the first place. Neither is it a Us vs Them thingie .. the Us and Them tend to overlap in most cases.

So i start ..

Learning1: A business is a business. You may sell soap ,you may sell sanitory napkins, you may sell luxury car or toiletries … anything and everything can be a business. There is nothing more noble or less noble about anything. You may find a business dull and boring but there might be hundred other takers for that on campus.

Learning2: Similar thing applies to roles as well. Just because nobody on your campus opts for lets say a HR role doesn’t mean that it is more bad as compared to a Fin or Mktng or Consult role. There are takers elsewhere for the same role and perhaps they may earn a lot more than what you would earn in your less bad role. It all lies in between your ears .. no role is superior and no role is inferior. So no point in carrying a respect-my-authority kind of an image about any goddamn role

Learning3: What are very petty things in the larger scheme of things (called life! :) ) like a pre-placement offer or a membership in a campus or club can change people (and it does!!!). Sample change i noticed in many .. From being a courteous gentlemanly type to being a pompous i-am-the-king-lick-my-foot types overnight. It is a fact of life and you have to live with it. Nothing can be done about bloated egos. Not just here but elsewhere in life too. It is like what Vivekananda said about Untouchability … “Don’t-touchism is a mental disease” . Well yeah .. I agree :)

Learning4: Milton Friedman was right when he said that “the business of business is business”. That is pretty much how things run here.Ethics and CSR are just pep words and it shall remain so in the future as far as i can see it . As long as CSR is the penultimate slide of the pre placement talk presentation i.e., just before the “we work hard and we party hard” slide… i don’t see things changing ;) .

Learning5: B-School is the best celebration of the Adam Smithian doctrine of “Self Interest”. This is the best training ground for the big bad corporate world as it is called ;) .

Learning6: There was a prof here who spoke about “Power Elite” and their influence on societies. One would totally experience it. The power elite exists and it does know how to get things done for itself. The silent majority either serves the power elite indirectly or just remains silent .. true to its name. If they protest .. slowly they would be inducted into the elite and the silence shall remain. What is so special about this then.. isn’t that how the world works?

Learning7: Everyone working in the white colar corporate labour force at whatever level should be exposed to these little nuggets of MBA curriculum. The course does change your world view and makes you understand a lot of things better.

Learning8: Like the now famous “Disadvantages of an elite education” article says .. there are many many pitfalls of an elite education and most people i know of (including me) are party to it. Perhaps some unlearning is in queue next!

Learning9: Like a prof once said in the class .. “Money money money.. brighter than sunshine.. sweeter than honey”. No better place to learn this than a B-school. All ideals in 7 out of 10 cases are shallow. Scratch the surface and somewhere the “M” word shall crop up. Again.. isn’t that how the world runs? Perhaps!

Learning10: You can learn a lot more from the people around you than from some dated academic textbook. Institutions like these are what they are because of the people and i did meet some awesome people and i shall carry those memories for the rest of my life.

The biggest benefit of them all: It offers you immense time to introspect about yourself. My world view has changed in its entireity. My faith on a lot of things has been questioned. Perhaps i understand the rights and wrongs of a lot of things a lot better than what i would have done otherwise before.

With that i end the post.

From now on i am an MBA. What i do with that degree i do not know. Will it really make a “tangible”/”material” difference to my personal and professional life in terms of what they would have been otherwise? .. I do not know.. Yet!

All i am left with now is a sense of emptiness.

PS: Oh yeah! The rider is that … i will be an MBA only if i manage to clear my last term courses! :D

 

Roots

So i saw this movie sometime back and i thought it deserved a post on my blog :) . Rarely do i write one whole post on a movie.. but this movie is in line with all those questions about development that have been troubling me ever since i started this journey called MBA and may be sometime before that.

Note: This is a english post on a telugu movie :P .. so the ones who dunno telugu also can read ;)

It is a telugu movie called “Sontha Ooru” (Hometown) . It is a movie about how an entire village is sold off by the villagers as the Govt wants to come up with an SEZ in that area. It talks about lost livelihoods, the goodness of village life, the fate of those hundreds of villagers who migrate to cities in hope of better life etc

I will write about some of the things in the film that appealed to me.  I might be revealing the entire storyline.. but given the fact the movie released months ago.. i think it should be okie. The movie btw has got loads of good dialogues and not just the ones mentioned in this post.This is not a great film strictly from an entertainment point of view. There are many mistakes and constant interruptions to the flow. But for a serious movie viewer this movie shall remain a cherished one. Especially considering the dearth of such films in telugu industry.

The central message of the movie starts when a govt officer comes to the village headman’s house and says   “మన ఊరుకి మంచి బేరం తెచ్చాను . మన ఊరు అమ్మేద్దాం ” (I brought a nice deal for our village. Lets sell it off) . The premise being that the government wants to build factories/industries in the area which can potentially generate employment to lakhs of people. To this the village headman reacts “అసలు ఊరే లేనప్పుడు అభివృద్ధి ఎవరికి” (If the village itself vanishes .. who’s development are we talking about) .

They then call for a village panchayat to decide whether to sell the village or not . During this panchayat an old farmer gets aggressive and reacts “మీరు ఇచ్చే ముష్టి పట్టుకెళ్ళి పక్కూరిలో పాలేరుగానో పట్నంలో కూలీలుగానో బతకమంటారా” (Are we to take your alms .. and live like milkmen in the neighbouring village or like labourers in the city?? ) . The village headman by now clearly under the delusion of SEZ driven development advocates in favour of the “sell” .. citing the utter poverty and farmer suicides. He goes on to say that the juggernaut of globalisation and industrialisation is unstoppable and that change is permanent. What follows is a interesting debate between the farmer and his son at their home. The son obvly in favour of selling the farm land and the father saying the farm means everything to him.

The central character of this film is that of an Undertaker portrayed by L.B.Sriram who also penned the dialogues. Once the village is sold and people start leaving .. the Undertaker sits with the village headman and complains about the decision to sell the village for SEZ. The headman then asks ” Don’t you want your grandsons and granddaughter to become doctors and engineers ? Do you want them  to remain as Undertakers?” . To this the undertaker replies .. “ఎంత మంది కావాలండీ డాక్టర్లు . వెయ్యి మంది బతుకులకి లక్ష మంది కావలాండీ ? మరి ఆ వెయ్యి మంది చస్తే కాల్చటానికి ఉండద్దా ఒక్కడు ? (How many doctors does the world need. Do we need a lakh doctors for a thousand people? If those thousand die .. will we still not need a undertaker to perform their deathrites?) “ .

Tough questions these …

Another character is that of an NRI. He comes back to India after staying for long in US in the hope of dying a peaceful death in his home country. But seeing the sale of his village happening, he goes back to the US again. He comes to visit the Undertaker .. and again a brilliant conversation ensues. Btw he makes an interesting remark about how “Tippa Apparao” becomes “Tippa R Appa” after going to the US. Just loved that bit ! :D . The NRI then says “ పుట్టిన మట్టే మట్టి కొట్టుకుపోతున్నపుడు నేనెక్కడ కొట్టుకుపోతే ఏ రా” (When my motherland itself is being washed away.. does my own departure from my village really matter?)

Slowly the entire village vacates the place and they move to the city in search of alternate employment and greener pastures. The village brahmin who was “one for a thousand” in the village becomes “one in a thousand” in the city and is left starving. The village shopkeeper ends up as a clerk in a city supermarket and so on. The undertaker who used to burn one dead body at a time in the village for some thousands of rupees now burns an entire mass grave of migrant labour for a lakh rupees .. Economies of Scale ?? .

The undertaker then goes to the village headman and blames his decision of selling the village for all this misery. He says the headman made a mistake and that being .. “వేర్లు ఊర్లో ఉంటే .. చెట్లను నరికి పట్నాల్లో పాతావు” (You brought the trees to the cities while the roots are in Villages)” . The undertaker goes on to kill the headman in his anger . He is then stoned to death by the public while he keeps screaming .. ” మనుషులు రోడ్ల మీద వెళ్ళాలి . రోడ్లు మనుషుల మీద వెళ్లిపోకూడదు . చావు మనిషికుండాలి ఊరికి ఉండకూడదు  ( People should walk on roads. Roads shouldn’t run over people. Death should be for people not for the Villages they live in)

A very very touching movie. It might shatter the belief systems of  some faint hearted ones. There are other characters in the film including that of a prostitute and her lover so on.

And i proceed to finish my course project on “Infrastructure PPP and Economic Growth in India” as a part of my “Economics of Growth and Development” course! .. Irony huh? :) …

I hope someday i understand the doctrine of development in its entireity .. the post industrial revolution model i.e., ! :)

PS: On similar lines is this youtube vid someone shared on fb sometime back.