A saga,

An illusion,

An incident,

A trance,

A testimony,

A picture,

A pass-time,

A laugh,

A tear,

A smile,

A frown,

Ha… Life.

the fairest in sight,

unreachable, irresistible.

Forbidden,

the confusion never ends,

resilient, unforgiven.

Solace,

the mind seeks,

freedom, grief.

Among the umpteen things b school teaches, the above three run as a common thread. With one term behind me, being done with feeling bad about grades, uncountable late nighters and meeting amazing people, Kellogg has just begun. Apparently, this is the most busiest term in the time at Kellogg. I finally realised that meeting new people almost everyday and being amazed at how amazing they are is just a way of life. Two years definitely is too less a time at so great a place. Classes are fun, and I’d say sometimes more fun than breaks. The sense of having deadlines and having to work on things is more fulfilling than just sleeping in till noon the charm of which lasts only  a day or two. I certainly blame the weather for the sleeping in part. It’s cold, gloomy, rainy at times and not having to attend class or a meeting only adds to encouragement to sleep. With most people off for the break, Jacobs does seem a lot empty. However all this is just for a couple more weeks and then life’s back to  the beautiful frenzy that it was a couple days back. Breaks are certainly fun. How else would I update my blog. Aha!

Just a random note from the LSR.

The year was 2007 and on a sunny sultry afternoon I was speaking to my Dad over the phone and he told me about this great b-school right in Hyderabad called ISB or Indian School of Business. Well if you have been in hyderabad for a long time you will know that the beautiful cosmopolitan city though a hub for quite a good number of industries has no ‘national’ institutes. As in, no IIT or IIM. The closest we had was a IIIT. Not that I was intelligent or smart enough to get into either of these, it is just the hyderabadi in me. Anyway, today there is an IIT Hyderabad.

And so I visited their website and was pretty impressed. And for the ‘What next?’ question, I had my answer – work for two years, get a taste of life, give the GMAT and try and get into ISB to push my career. Now, I was oblivious of the fact that Harvard and the like were the Godfathers of b-schools and ISB might as well be termed as the Harvard (or Wharton?) of India. All I knew was I wasn’t hardworking enough to bell the CAT and the prospect of being evaluated by the two digits you score over a three hour exam while competing with peers who are giving this their third shot was not attractive. And weighing all these I decided that I was giving the GMAT and applying to a school that looks into ‘me’ and not my percentile and takes my work ex into account. Ambitious ain’t it? Oh yes, it’s just the age.

Then Interaction Design happened and I liked my job and life was all well with the GMAT thing almost taking the backseat until a wake up call which opened up a plethora of questions in the likes of ‘What next?’. Answers to such questions were sometimes evaded, delusional or as blunt as ‘Let’s see’.

And after pushing registering for the GMAT for weeks, I finally pulled my socks and registered and now that I had registered, I thought I should give it my best shot. And as expected I was swamped with work from the next day onwards leaving very few waking hours at my disposal. Banking on my not so great profile and my not so great score I applied to ISB in round 1 in 2009 even before I researched other schools risking the fact that I belonged to one of the most competitive pools of b-school applicants – Indian, IT, Male . Actually, no other school was as attractive as ISB was to me or at least that is what I thought. Result from ISB – dinged without an interview. By the way ‘dinged’ means ‘rejected’.

Meanwhile though I knew other schools existed, some better than ISB, none really were as attractive. Surfing the web, reading blogs by fellow applicants, looking up countless sites, meticulously reading through entire forum threads in pagalguy, talking to friends – all introduced the world beyond ISB to me. Now that ISB had refused to include me in their class, I decided to explore and apply to other programs as well. In the meantime, I discovered the concept of ‘Design Thinking’ in business. Intrigued, I scoured the web for more information on this and landed on couple of articles by interesting people across the world on the edge design thinking could bring to business education. Nailed it – that is something I want to do given that my current work experience does this in a tiny way and this path would be the best possible extension and a great way ahead.

The MMM program was one of the very first such programs I came across. After reading the description for the first time, I knew I was going to apply. All this while I was ignorant of the fact that Kellogg is in the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Wharton in the US. The other school was Tepper School of Business @ Carnegie Mellon University. Now this is again a great school in the US. Their MIPD track is what attracted me. Rotman, in Canada, was another interesting option, since their dean Prof. Roger Martin is the author of ‘The Design of Business’, an interesting take on business and a book I happened to read. And their program had a business design focus as well.

So finally my list looked like Kellogg MMM, Tepper MIPD, Rotman and ISB. ISB, because it was my first (and unrequited) love and is the most cost effective option and plainly because I refused to give up on it. Unfortunately Rotman’s deadlines were too close for me to apply and that left me with Kellogg MMM, Tepper MIPD and ISB.

Before re-applying to ISB, I wanted to improve my GMAT and started off and even blocked my exam dates. While figuring a way out of my very early burn out, I had a call with one of the admissions personnel at ISB and he advised me that I should consider giving GMAT once again only if I was sure to get above 750. Now, that was comforting and so I shelved my GMAT plans and started working on ISBs application. Took me around two months with tones of revision and input from a college friend to submit the application for R2. And the result – dinged without an interview – again! Argh!!

Tepper’s deadline was close to Kellogg’s with just a week in between. And three more essays took me a month and a half to complete with the umpteen revisions and re-revisions. Finally submitted my app in Jan 2011. Kellogg had a two part application and I finished the easier Part 1 even before submitting Tepper’s application. However, Part 2 is the chunk of the application with the essays and within a week after submitting Tepper’s application I closed the essays and submitted Kellogg’s application. The introspection and early versions of the previous essays did help me a lot and I did learn a bit from the many revisions.

Now the wait started and I was invited to interview. Whoa! Finally an interview call. Yes, Kellogg interviews almost everyone who applies and so it was not a great achievement, but certainly a morale booster. And the interview, my first ever b-school interview, went well after being postponed once thanks to Chicago’s worst blizzard in 25 years. ‘Decent enough but not wonderful’ was my first feeling as I stepped out of the tavern. My end note – ‘Could do better’. Anyway it was done and I headed back home fingers crossed.

The next surprise came in February when I was invited to interview with Tepper. I chose to visit campus and interview in campus. I flew down to Pittsburgh and spent the first half of the day touring the campus, talking to current students, sitting in a lecture and understanding more about Tepper. I was impressed and felt this is one great place to live and one great school to get an MBA. The fact that I had lived in Pittsburgh for a month sometime back was only more comforting. The low cost of living and the proximity to the one of the best design schools in the world were a big plus. And then the interview happened – casual, cool, no pressure and very conversational. I enjoyed every minute of our discussion and the interviewer even helped me find my way back to the airport. Stepping out of Tepper, I felt good.

And then Tepper announced its results. Dinged!

Two down, one to go. With a month to go before Kellogg announces its results, I decided it would be another ding. The simple rationale being – ‘If Tepper and ISB rejected me there is no way Kellogg is going to accept me’. So after brooding over this for a couple of days, hitting rock bottom and rising back, I decided to sit for the GMAT again and started preparation too. Shortlisting schools was in progress and I even wrote to a couple of schools getting my profile evaluated and queries answered. CR, RC and PS basics were almost done and preparation for GMAT was in full swing.

And then with a week more for Kellogg’s results, I get a phone call from the admissions office congratulating me on my admission to the MMM program, Class of 2013, at Kellogg School of Management.

Providence.

So, the last time I posted something was on May 23 and there has been a lot going on since then. A lot of introspection and lot more deep diving into self. My mind somehow does not like to take a break from thinking. Even as I am typing this my mind seems to wander between the HJ composed MJ rip off ‘Naanghai’ song from ‘Engeyum Kadhal’ to the name of the planet where Superman came from.

Figuring out what one wants in life is a crazy thing to do especially when there’s a lot happening around. As life seems to move on, priorities keep shifting. What was ‘the’ most important thing yesterday does not make any sense today and what sounds great today will make no sense tomorrow. A couple of months ago I thought I had figured out almost everything and over the past few weeks I only get to realize that I had been all wrong. All this leads me to one seemingly straightforward but highly confusing question – ‘What is life?’ or in other words ‘Define life’.

My Dad put this question to a bunch of 10th standard students of which I was one way back in 2001. The intensity of this question failed to strike me when he told us that he, after all these years, couldn’t find an answer to this question which struck him when he was in his twenties. After giving this question a ten minute thought I came to a conclusion that ‘Life is defined but irrational’. Ha I even went ahead to conclude that ‘Love is undefined but rational’. Blame it on the beauty of numbers and equations that enticed me and still continue to hold a darling place in my heart. Mathematical as they may seem, these two phrases, I thought translated well into simple language. Life – can be explained but can rarely be reasoned and Love – may be reasoned but can barely be defined. Maybe it is the wicked charm of English that tricked me into believing that I was right and that I had figured it out. However, like almost all things with me, I never shared this with anyone, thus discounting the prospect of validating or even debating this deduction which was based on pure intuition.

So all along, since my 10th standard, there came a great number of twists and a nicer number of turns and I suddenly find myself studying Electrical Engineering in Chennai. Now for a guy whose worst nightmare was Unit 9 in 10th Standard Physics Textbook – Electricity, this was enough a twist to understand that the best he could do is stop expecting. The fact that I still remember the unit no. in the physics textbook should stand testimony to the relationship I had with it. As college progressed, life moved on and everything just seemed to happen. You don’t why, you don’t know how and you don’t even know if you want it, but it just happens and thus I landed in Cognizant.

Come July 9, I would be finishing four years here as an Interaction Designer dabbling away about user perspective, business goals, usability and design while I graduated as an Electrical Engineer who found his second love in Control Systems.

Now, design continues to fascinate me. Yeah right, they call it Life.

Looking back, living a definitive formative phase of my life in a college hostel in a campus that was 3 kilometers away from the nearest civilization and a mess that sometimes had grasshoppers in food did have its impact on me. Being brought up as the only child pampered with all sorts of delicacies churned out by the world’s greatest cook have almost enslaved my taste buds. However, those 4 years did bring a change, a change in expectations, a change in wants and a change in threshold altogether. So all I look for now is edibility in food. Eating out in Indian restaurants is more a decision out of time crunch or need for change rather than attraction to the quality of food itself.

Being a Hyderabadi, cravings for Nanking, Biryani and Mirchi Bhajji are at an all time high alongside the craving for a leaf meals at Saravana Bhavan in Chennai. I haven’t had better biryani or better avial elsewhere. My attempts at biryani remained attempts and never really turned out great. And I did not dare try avial.

I was standing by her side, happy, nervous, conscious with people all around me, all at the same time. Confused I looked at her only to see my reflection in her eyes. Emotions dancing over our heads just as she did on the stage when I first saw her. A trance. Amidst a sudden muted commotion, I heard, ”… I declare you man and wife.”

Ten years had passed since that precious moment. Me, the sole survivor. Aradhana, the testimony.

A dark morning. The sun was being overpowered by the clouds. Calm and gloomy, a perfect setting which went unnoticed. ”Are you ready?” I asked, “It’s time we started”.

“I’m not going”.The tone in which she said that reflected how serious the decision was. “It’s important and you know it.” I said.

“But we can’t leave Aradhana alone with her fever,” she protested.

“It’s difficult for me too, but he’s serious. You know that the hospital’s not far and it shouldn’t take more than an hour, we’ll try and be here soon, moreover mom’s coming here to take care of her.” I said.

An eerie silence followed.

“Please”, I thought.

“No”, she thought.

“This is the last time we are leaving her alone” she said all of a sudden.

“I promise” I pledged.

Tears blurring our vision, we started. Me at the wheel, she by my side. With thoughts ruling our minds we drove along.

Air hitting hard on our tear stained faces, a sudden blindness followed and a few seconds passed. I opened my eyes only to see her blood stained face. Shocked! Helpless I try getting closer to her. “Aradhana….”, her voice died.

It’s been two years since.

“Aradhana”, I called, “Are you ready? It’s time for your dance class.”

“I’m not going….”

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I wrote this story a long while back for a short story contest. Found it in my almost orphaned Google Notebook and cleaned it up and put it up here.