Memoirs of an year

As the entire class huddled up shouting and cheering after the end of the last session which ironically belonged to HRM, it all came back to me. The first day of first term here was similarly drenched in water and marked by thunders as if it was an ominous sign of things to come. Things came and things passed by; acquaintances became friends; professors came, spoke and went; exams and quizzes became a part of life; in a way things changed, for good or for bad, depends on viewpoint.

The sky is pouring as if it wants to wash away all the pains and miseries we went though over the last three terms, supposedly a year, here at IIM Kozhikode. The rain Gods are pleased to see us through and are making this day as cool as possible for us. It may be the weather only which is making us all so happy on reaching this small but significant milestone. It was nice to see all the supposedly serious and crème-de-la-crème future MBAs forgetting everything and cheering together for that one momentous group photograph. It looked very innocent to see people running and shouting pleading to the camera man to click one photo of them in that one unique and arbitrary pose which they are gonna see 1000 times in their lives and laugh nostalgically.  Even the professors joined the fun and posed for the group photograph in their own unique ways, some even doing it just during the quiz. Never seen a crowd of 66 people running rout in the campus during a weekday right in broad daylight, so much so that we even gave bumps to someone in the administrative block itself…

What is this or why is there so much euphoria on completing just one year when all of us know that the next year will be much more eventful? Probably this has something to do with the belief that all of us now have, “Surviving this, we can survive anything coming our way”. And of course the end of this year marks the end of some of most ridiculous (for someone or the other) courses taught by boring professors who take pride in stretching the class just to show how much they want to give to their students. Whatever maybe the reason, everyone is happy including the rain Gods, so have fun and party…

Life as exponential functions

 

A weird thought crossed my mind while sitting and lazing around; the exponential growth/decay function which almost all of us studied in our high school for the first time and forgot then and there is so much prevalent in everyday life; the effect of which is much more visible in case you are an MBA student. Let me start by defining an exponential function in a true layman language: Anything which grows or decays at an alarmingly fast rate is said to follow an exponential function. We will see the variants of these as we go along.

Let’s start this intellectual discussion with Exponential growth function. Many things follow this growth function but I will limit the scope again to life in a B-school. The capacity to complete assignments just before deadlines, the capacity to present a presentation which you have never seen in your life before, the capacity to be prepared for a quiz are very simple examples of this. When you start in a business school, an assignment due next week is completed at least 2-3 days before the deadline. Similarly, when you know that there is going to be a presentation which you are supposed to make in front of the class/teacher, you at least look at it once before going to the lecture. A simple 5 or 10 marks quiz would have generated some interest in the first term. Now the assignments are done Just In Time, the presentations are made On The Spot and the quizzes are taken Business As Usual. There are some other things which may follow an exponential growth curve, some of these might be debatable and highly person dependant. Ability to doze off in the class, ability to ask irrelevant questions in the class, ability to gossip, ability to get up just in time for the morning class, the attraction towards the opposite sex (among the sample available in campus), the desire to get out of the B-school with that elusive job; all increase exponentially as you progress from Term 1 to Term 3. The ability to be practical in life would increase exponentially once you are done with your summer internships is one thing seniors have told me though I need to verify it myself.

A few examples now of the exponential decay function. Just notice the number of people studying in library in term 3 and compare it to term 1 or compare the number of students attending the morning class or the number of student actually reading the case/chapter scheduled for a class; they all follow an exponential decay function. The library looks deserted and the morning class resembles a morgue with half empty seats and half seats occupied by sleep deprived zombies, though only 1% of these zombies actually lost their sleep over some constructive work. Other things following this function can be the level of tolerance, the respect for fellow mates, the respect for system, the inhibitions about the three letter word, the fidelity towards your “already engaged” partner. Again, these are effects that are highly person dependant.

So if you see, I have classified almost everything people do and learn in a business school by means of exponential curves but still there are some things which don’t follow this function. And if by chance you noticed, I did not classify “the actual learnings of an MBA” anywhere, neither in growth nor in decay. For some it’s learning and for some it’s destruction of common sense and logical reasoning and I have no intentions of hurting either of these two groups. You see, one more thing follows an exponential growth function, the art of being tactical and diplomatic

 

 

The burden of past

The biggest question in life faced by almost everyone is how and when to forget the past and move ahead in life. How long somebody is ready to carry the burden of his/her forgettable past and people who made that past is totally a personal question which nobody is comfortable facing or answerable. People for the sake of being or showing courageous and strong, pretend that things happened in the past are gone and they totally have started to live in the present but, is that totally or even partially true? Most of the normal mortals unwillingly go on carrying the burden of their past which either they invented themselves or was gifted to them by someone else.

This burden of past goes a long way in making sure that the individual suffers a lot in the present thinking about people and things that were a part of the past and are no longer a part of the current and future picture. He keeps on thinking about the possible ways he could have reacted or behaved which could have modified the past and may have been more beautiful. He thinks and tries to analyze the possible reasons for a particular behavior of his or of someone else which affected the normal functioning of his daily life. Doing this, he generally goes overboard and ends up scratching the uncalled for moments in the history and more often than not, too strongly.

There is no doubt that the mistakes done in the past are the best possible way to learn about yourself and improve your life unless you are a compulsive repeater of them and can’t breathe without doing them again. The only caveat in this self-learning cum introspection is that people generally over analyze things and ultimately end up making things more complicated in the present. It also happens that if things in the past did not go too well, people may altogether forego that particular action once and for all which might inhibit the natural instincts that a particular person possesses. The fear of repeated failure makes them take this path of abstinence, again making their present life pay for the past.

I am not giving any arbitrary gyaan about some random topic without a reason. When to chuck the fear and inhibitions imposed by the past is a question most of us find unanswerable. What should be the best possible way to forget it, I don’t think there is a particular correct answer. Had there been something of that sort, life of millions of people would have been better who otherwise continue to suffer burning in the fire that something or someone set them on sometime back. I wish there was a rewind and delete button in the human brain that would have made this possible but since that is currently impossible, is there another way to get rid of the past??