The year was 1997. I was working for IMRB for some time now and making reasonably good money. My assignment can today be classified as a KPO/ BPO job but this was a time when no one had any idea what out sourcing was.
Although I worked in the Esplanade Mansion office of the IMRB in Bombay, my work was assigned from an office in Hong Kong. The job was all about analysing market research data that would come via email from Hong Kong. The problem was that the emails were generation next technology at that time and we had to go to our Nirmal Towers office to even check these incoming packets. Yes, believe it or not we did call these attachments to emails as packets. Once we got the email and the relevant attachment, we downloaded them on to the most unreliable storage devises of the time called floppy disks and transport the data to our desktops. This ensured a few trips between the offices a day and if lucky the data to be analysed would be on our desktops only by 6 in the evening. As the processing started after that, I had to stay back nights in office. With firm regularity, I travelled home only in the wee hours of the morning and thus returning back to work by 9 am to sign a muster was almost impossible.
Moreover the work I did was complex, used yet to be relied upon technology, subject to rejection, time consuming, tedious and most importantly not understood by anyone in my reference group. For example, the timekeeper (yes we had one) at the IMRB, employed by the HR of the company never understood that it was impossible for me to come at 9 am to sign a muster when I had just left office at 5 am. The timekeeper would insist on a ‘red mark’ on the register and three such marks would mean a causal leave (CL). Exceeding the number of permitted CLs per week which was 3 invited a Memo. Not replying to the Memo would mean a remark in the service book and no pay until justification. It was only during the clarification interview that the HR head would realise what was going on and for some strange reason even though the pay would be released no corrective procedural action for the red marks or the Memo would be initiated from his end.
More than me it was my parents who were impacted. My parents in their line of work took their service book and muster remarks very seriously. A Memo for them would mean some grave crime committed against organization like neglect of duty or embezzlement of funds. Also my family was a close knit one. Each one of us would usually comeback from outside and sit together and discuss what happened. This ritual though time consuming and almost an invasion of privacy was the binding force in the family. Eating out every day with hardly any physical exercise had now made me 145 kgs. I was finding it very difficult to move the ton around. With my erratic timings and my weight problem I was drifting apart from the family.
I think this is what they call pressure and thus the cookie crumbled. Suddenly one day Mum got palpitations. Not that this was a new sickness as this kind of a problem with mum’s Blood Pressure had happened in the past when I was in college but the difference here was I was not free and available to do the legwork. So dad was stressed out a lot. Almost a month after mum recovered, Dad got a heart attack. My dad who is, was and will always remain the back bone of my existence was never so sick. I had no idea what was happening to me and my life. It as if the rest of life took a back seat. I had to become the man of the house. I had to look in to my mother’s eyes and tell her “My father is not dead, he is just sick.” Not knowing want else to say, we had to simply resort to stopping each other from crying.
This episode jolted us out of our comfort zone.
My mum and I would take turns at the hospital vigil. At the hospital one day I met a college friend of mine. He was there because his father too was admitted to the ICU. In the waiting room outside the ICU, I saw him struggling with some math like problems. I took keen interest in what he was doing and after some time indulged myself in solving the puzzles. Soon he told me that the puzzles I was solving with extraordinary easy were not puzzles as such but aptitude testing material that frequently appears in MBA entrance exams. Later in the day that friend of mine told my mum that I was too good at the MBA entrance stuff and should try my luck at the Common Entrance Test. Convinced that I had no future with the job I was doing both my mum and my dad even in that condition forced me to think of an MBA.
An MBA is a big decision in a students’ life. However like many decisions of my life, I took to an MBA ‘Just like that.’
The World around people take up an MBA after a few years of work. The logic is to use the MBA College like a dictionary and refer to it with problems you encountered at work. Using your MBA years to find solutions for the problems you encountered while working makes your MBA sojourn more meaningful.
However in India we do it differently. We first try and finish all our education at one shot. So we go through our bachelors’ degree and then straight into an MBA. At the MBA we equip ourselves with solutions for the business world, which we have no idea how or were to apply. Then we go out into the big bad corporate world ‘looking for problems’ which would help us apply our knowledge. Now I always thought leading a life looking for problems is not such a great idea.
Once dad was back from the hospital I went back to work and got myself re engrossed in the routine forgetting the MBA preparations. My routine was tough and my schedules were punishing so there was no time to think of anything else.
I still remember the day before my entrance test; I was working till 2.30 in the night. I don’t know how I managed to get up the next morning and go to the examination centre. At the centre I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of people that had come to give the test plus the fact that each one of them was preparing for the test vigorously till the last minute. After the test too I met a few acquaintances furiously debating some college ranking. All this puzzled me as I had not taken my MBA decision seriously.
Once I went back to work I made inquiries about an MBA course and its prospects. Even though I was an educated son of educated parents, I had no idea about how admissions to an MBA work.
The scene was very complex. There were some 2 to 3 hundred MBA colleges in Maharashtra affiliated to the various universities. The admissions to their MBA programme were centralised. Which means a common entrance test was taken and then a group discussion was held and then we were subjected to a personal interview. At the end of this we got a score and a rank. With this rank we were suppose to appear for a counselling session. At the counselling we get to chose from the available colleges from all over Maharashtra. Though the system looks simple, what makes is complex is the stature and reputation of each MBA college and the placement record of the institution.
One day I got my results and I realize I had not done that badly after all. With the kind of score I could comfortably get an admission in a good college in Bombay. However things were made difficult by the fact that most of the seats left in Bombay were ‘paid seats.’ So not knowing the consequences of a bad college, I decided to take the economic option and go out of Bombay to do an MBA….
Moreover what I thought were good colleges were not necessarily the top colleges in Bombay according to the others who were appearing for the counselling. Some of the people who appeared for the counselling ahead of me had taken up colleges in Pune and one had even gone to Nasik. There was hardly any time to think when my turn came. So I asked the polite looking gentleman on the other side of the ‘Counsellor’ sign where would I get a free seat. To my surprise he said Kolhapur. I had once been to Kolhapur so I kind of liked the option. I asked him to tell me which was the number one college in Kolhapur. What I meant was a qualitative numbering implying the best college but he was a simple man and went by the first college on his list as far as Kolhapur is concerned. Bharthi Vidyapeeth Institute of Management was the number one college on extra large register and I don’t think was the best college on any list but not knowing what to do I signed on the dotted line, submitted my certificates (as I had not got the necessary drafts) and took a plunge into the unknown.
