Perceptions of IIM

I figured out a crack-ass way to spend my weekends in Bhubaneswar so that I didn’t have to feel bored and lost. Last month I picked up some dope from T.I.M.E and also enrolled in their test-series. Personally, I don’t see myself cracking CAT because I am too slow to figure out how many red balls does Akbar have when 78 balls of three different colours – red, blue and yellow are divided between Akbar, Birbal, Chudail and Dracula such that the number of yellow balls with any of them is always the average of total of remaining balls and Dracula has the least number of total balls and given that Chudail and Dracula are seeing each other and that Birbal cracks jokes about how ugly they look as a couple to Akbar who in turn laughs like nuts. But I have the dope anyway and so I do take few tests once in a while. So far it has proved to be a good time pass. Six years ago, I wasn’t prepared even for IIT and yet -  even after screwing the exam up, I landed up in IIT Madras – so I never know how ill-fate may work for me.

I feel that there is nothing too cool about being in an IIM except that once you are inside it, many think that you are really in some cool place and since many think that way, they make it easy for you to believe that you actually are in a cool place. But what is the inside story? Once inside, you are fighting every day to be above the rest. Every moment you are trying to score bullet points for your resume. You are awake all night and crashing in class-rooms. Sometimes you feel like fucking it all but then you realize that if you do that, it wouldn’t be so cool. You are inside a trap and you better wait for your chance to escape. Because you know that when you do get to escape – after two years – you would be valued by the world at large. You will get a good job and a fat pay cheque. That very feeling keeps you going on – through ups and downs – through the bouts of loneliness to the periods of elusive excitement. So well, the point is – its just a regular fucked up crazy life out there inside IIMs – nowhere as cool as IIT used to be simply because in IIT, you could still get to make real friends – chances of which fall down drastically later.

Ideally I should have spoken the above only if I had myself been through an IIM. So what you read above is nothing more than ‘my’ perception and this is precisely why ‘I’ hasitate to take that leap towards doing an MBA. I wonder then if it’s a good thing that I am slow at figuring out which ball of Akbar is red and which is blue.