The MBA Mentor - Stop being so jealous

A guy is sitting in an internet café. Typing away at furious speeds he is looking for information about something. Something very important to him.  And then he spots a blog. A blog of some arbit fellow.  But this arbit fellow is of some importance. Important because this arbit fellow of ours is a from one college. This college of his is a Well Known Management in West India. One of the colleges to which our patron aspires to get into. If not the WIMWI, then the one in south India, else the one in east India. Of course he has special meaning to the alphabets. Yes, you and I have also read these alphabets but our patron and this arbit fellow have created new notions for these alphabets. ABC. Man these must mean something apart from apple, ball and cat right. Well so what if they are the starting alphabets to some colleges locations. Ahmadabad. Bangalore. Calcutta (aka Kolkata). Or as the arbit fellow will correct us with more clear addresses. Vastrapur. Banerghetta Rd. Jokha. How does it matter in our story? Of course it does. Did you not notice all the smiles and emotions overplaying on the face of our young aspirant when he came across this blog. Lets focus our attention on the patron. He seems to be searching furiously all over the blog for something. Ah he has found it. Seems like it’s only a home address.

What we need to realize is that every patron like ours will always need one thread to show some present common link. Then he plans to cling on to that tiny link. This is what he will start with and then go on to form one bonding between the patron and the arbit fellow. This is where our patron brings in the email where he plans to form the link. This email is one of the most important ones in his life according to him, so he will go over and over the whole mail. Not too short, not too long, not too boring, not too vague, not too descriptive. God its difficult to write this mail. Once this is done the whole process kicks in and we know the rest.
But let’s follow the patron for a few more days. He goes  on and laps up every word that the arbit fellow says. From gyan on classes to preparation on the d-day. Laps it up with such care as if its nectar falling straight from heaven. And this does not stop here. The adulation for each and every word coming out of his mouth feels the same everytime. To the extent that the arbit fellow goes on to become a personal shrink to our patron. And so the journey starts. Now the patron goes and pings his mentor every time he wants advice, assurance etc. I don’t say its bad but cmon man give the man a break. He is just a normal human being albeit with a slightly better luck/brain/perseverance. And just because he is here in one of the IIMs u start thinking he IS the nxt steve jobs/laxmi mitta etc. So is it wrong to be the patron. Is it good for the mentor to continue in that sense. Well lets see it from the mentors perspective.

Forget the fact that a year ago he was also in the patrons shoes and he was looking for mentors, and he prolly did find a few. So now its his turn to earn some of the mentees, some of the adulations, some junie who will look upto him like GOD. Well obviously who wouldn’t like that? But should the mentor not be a little careful. Maybe it is time the mentor does not feed on this attention but rather let the mentee develop himself according to his choices. Is it not the ultimate dream of any mentor to see his mentees go on and progress beyond him. Well I bet that any of us who have mentored someone or the other at any point of time have felt a pang of jealousy when the “आज का छोकरा ” who had just come into the college goes on to become a big shot while I am still in the same old job.

Stop being so jealous. There will always be someone who is smarter than you. Someone who prolly deserves to earn all that adulation. Stop being so jealous. Its time you accept that you have earned what you deserve, its time to let him earn what he deserves.

All the best to all the mentees. And you mentors cmon show them that the old horse can still gallop. Go on do something productive now. 

An Education [2009]

This post is simply here because I want everyone of you to realize something. Something that maybe you all know, prolly have understood it much better than me, prolly believe in it more than anything but the question is how much of that is put to practice. The main character of the movie in discussion here is a young school girl who has a goal of getting to oxford. This seems to be more a goal as put in her head by her father. She plays the cello and has some issues in Latin blah blah . Then one fine day she comes in contact with a man double her age and there starts a nice little romance. The hero as expected has a sports car, takes her to performances, classy restaurants and even to Paris. Now the expected change in the girl includes a deep desire to shun all her oxford romance and give in to the pleasure of living life with this knight in shining armor, except that in medieval times he came on a horse these days he comes in a sports car.

An interesting thing here of note is the reaction of her parents throughout the whole episode. From the moment when they laugh at a fellow for the ridiculous idea of taking a year off for “roaming around” to gifting a Latin dictionary to their daughter on her birthday (R u kidding me?). Then they get to know of all the glam sham surrounding the “knight” and they agree to the fact that maybe marriage is not so bad a deal after all and she might as well go and show her back to the oxford dream. Is that all the parents ever wanted? Does this mean that when my dad says that I should do MBA is he only asking me to become a more “marketable” groom?

Well lets not digress into my marriage.. that is a big big story in itself when it plays out. Now for the topic itself, well the whole point of marriage as questioned by the girl is one point of highlight in this whole discussion. And the next one comes at the point when the girl has a encounter with her head mistress. This is what I want to reflect on.

The girl very frankly tells her head mistress of what she thinks of her head mistress’ life. And how she will go enjoy the world, dine at the finest restaurants and enjoy the finest jazz while her head mistress will slug it out there in the same school. Is this what you also think? Is this what the world thinks of me and you? Obviously in this hell hole of a place called the world (read rat race), we tend to sympathize with people like the head mistress, and we say that GOD will bring them to justice. Well said. But in reality the world will always be like this?
Now I will open a pandora’s box. I will ask one question – How many of you deep in your minds think that you deserve the life that the little girl is going to enjoy while you are living out the life of the head mistress. Many of you would have said a yes to that. But then that’s because we all think we all deserve a better life. Come to think of it, is any of us happy with what we are in life, or what we have achieved. Right now you will all say a yes. But how many times have you complained in the last few days? A classic example is one friend of mine who got a convert from IIM B and C, alas he was still unhappy because he did not get iimA. Is this greed of what we don’t have, masked under the name of “ambition”.
God dammit go see how many people in a square km around you are better off than you. The very fact that you are someone who has enough resources to read this blog proves that you definitely have a life which is worth killing for. One common way to cheer up myself when I get down is to repeat the last line. Well its time you also did that and gave your life one more chance rather than complaining about it.

Now get lost and do something more productive J

A country of Consultants

This one comes at 330 in the morning with music blaring outside my room, while people are cheering one fellow to finish an entire bottle of some liquid which people tell me has earned Mr Mallaya a few million dollars. So what is so urgent about this post? Well its simple. I went about my usual trip on the google ride and looking for interesting articles on some topic which was eating my head. These days the topic is education in india and how it can be improved. Obviously it’s a very complex question, probably at the same standards of difficulties as the Kashmir problem. But then we need to think about it and come with some solution. So at this point of time I would like to bring to notice some aspects of this which may be worth noticing. The Rights to Education bill with its whole lot of jargon was passed. And this is where you start seeing the bone of contention. Don’t see it?

Well it was these two economists from varsities in the fabled country of America. The land where all our smart guys go, learn some more smart things and then end up working for smart corporate building/researching smart things. Sincerely. Now these smart people while working on these smart things wrote an article on one of the newspapers in the country where they have mentioned what they understand of the Right to Education Bill and they go on to then propose some improvements according to them.

Of course the fact that they have such a impressive profiles means that most of the people who tend to read these things start reading the article with the assumption that they are right, that the research they have done is correct (@Chazz and sathya – note) , that the recommendations which are given in the article are perfect solutions to India’s problems. So after reading the article some of the recommendations seem good. Actually, it’s too good to be true.
Now after so so so long a reading, I will bring you to the main point. We are a country of consultants. We probably were the ones who wrote the bible of Mckinsey and BCG. Am sure you don’t even need to be told why I have made this comment. There are quite a few among you who are right now thinking –

“This guy does not know exactly what to write, I should tell him what he should do” It’s just in our blood. Your mom will tell you what medicine to take, dad will say what bike to buy, girlfriend will tell you what hair style to sport and the list goes on irrespective of whether we have any knowledge or not. My hypotheses is that the lesser you know on the topic the more fascinating are you “advises”. On topics as unimportant as dresses and bikes even I am ready to hear you out. But when people start discussing politics, oh the best example for this is that group of 40-60 year olds who meet up in arbit locations like trains compartments, parks, office corridors etc and start “discussing” what is “wrong” with the country. I mean come on man gimme a break. What is the point if you tell all is wrong with the country’s politician and law&order and then try to bribe the ticket collector because you forgot to buy the ticket?

All that I expected in the article was some solution at some concrete stage man. What was the point of suggesting “we should punish non-performing schools and incentivize the ones performing well” Even the kid in that school will tell you that is a good solution. If to make that solution in the first place you needed a B.Tech degree from IIT and then a MS in some US varsity followed by a PhD then lets compare your efficiency compared to that kids efficiency. He outscores you a million times over. So obviously the correct way to prove the argument wrong is to allow the scholar to go on and present a more concrete solution which has some practical feasibility.

Now that I have vented some anger of mine at the sheer callousness with which our smart people are taking up these opinion spaces in newspapers, I know that the guns are now trained towards me. You say – So Ravi, you also have some of these degrees so why don’t you propose some solution. And the answer to that is – well I have not spent the appropriate time on this and now that me and my few friends are working on this in a concrete manner we plan to come with a working model soon. I assure you there wont be much consultancy in that post.

As always, please feel free to comment on the post and make this a healthy discussion. J