Golden Years at IIM Bangalore

What happens to anyone who goes to an IIM is that his life changes forever. It is a unique environment, where you are forced to do many new things. The residential setup with a cosmopolitan crowd- urban, rural, northern, eastern, western, southern, young, old and so on …the diversity is amazing. The only other place I got to see this kind of diversity was in the U.S. university I went to later on. All the assumptions that you have about yourself have to be re-evaluated, in general, when you land up at such a place.

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To balance the cosmopolitan students and faculty, we had a totally rural ambience of Bilekahalli where IIMB was located. We were the first inhabitants of this new campus, and faced the music in many ways. No street lights-actually, no streets in the beginning, a makeshift mess of a dining room in a shed, no computers (that was not the IIM’s fault, there weren’t any in India then), no sports facilities except open spaces, and so on. Looking back, we didn’t mind it one bit. This is worth thinking about, in the context of material greed that overcomes many of us who graduate from there, from about the time placement season starts. Is material wealth correlated with happiness??I don’t know.

?The atmosphere in the classes ranged from electric and ecstatic to bored and tuned out- depending on who taught and how they taught. The processes and the autonomy of using different methods of teaching (trying to teach?) were truly world class, and in some cases, superior to those I found in the U.S. later. For example, the system of doing course projects in every marketing course was the best thing to happen to us armchair engineers!

?The first term, we did a project on estimating demand for mopeds (the dinosaurial equivalents of today’s Scooty). Off we went to meet dealers of Luna (the market leader then) and TVS mopeds in Bangalore. We were three in the group, and did not have the faintest idea of how to do this project. But amazingly, at the end of the term, we knew a lot more than at the beginning. Learning somehow happens when the responsibility shifts to the learner. In the next term, we again had a project, and this time we decided to estimate the demand for HDPE (plastic) carry bags in various applications. This also turned out to be a great learning experience, going into dusty streets to find sellers, ask them how many they sold, where they were used and so on, and try and put together this weird set of estimates into one whole figure. We might have been wrong by miles like any bad astrologer, but we still learnt a lot!

?There was also my first exposure to the subject we called OB-Organizational Behaviour. I realized how much there was to learn about human beings, including myself, after going through that course. It was of course, the professor (S.K. Roy) who made it so awesome, and that spurred me on to take a few more courses in the area- and each of them lived up to my expectations. This was not always the case in other areas. I hated the finance courses, and could barely keep awake in some of them. There was a very good Indian Economy course (by Prof. Indira Rajaraman), where, for the first time, I could appreciate macroeconomics and India’s economic data- which were not so great at that point, though!

?Some of the marketing courses were good too, particularly advertising where a lot of ad agency guys guest-lectured with their snazzy presentations, and they inspired me to get into advertising as my campus job later on. Industrial marketing (Prof. Thiru) was well taught, with a lot of case studies. The exams were a mix of different types. One I remember particularly well was a take home exam in Org. Behaviour, where we were given a set of statements (10, maybe) and we had to agree with them or disagree with them, with justification. I had to really rack my brains and refer to a lot of books to answer that exam (the copy and paste facility did not exist then). Far more than for many closed book ones. Later in life at Clemson, I would encounter a microeconomics prof. (Swanson), who gave us Agree or Disagree type questions for an entire exam.

The system of electives and registration was new to those of us who came from the university system, but it felt nice to have a choice. Also, the CGPA system seemed fairer than the marks system to me. The relative grading kept everyone on their toes, because even if you were good, others who were better could pull your grade down.

?An interesting thing happened somewhere in term 2 at IIM. I started writing under a pseudonym ‘Observer’, about small events like sports (the few that we could manage to play) on the notice board at the hostel, and found these pieces had a wide readership (later, it became our official wall mag –we called it Mural). So I expanded into areas like film reviews and jokes (PJs), along with Dash, my co-editor of the IIM magazine, and we became a rage. Some movies we reviewed those days included Mawaali, the Jeetendra-Sreedevi potboiler. In one of the movies we saw (at the now non-existent Drive-in theatre to which we usually rode on a bicycle), Shakti Kapoor played a character whose name was ‘Khoya Khoya Attache’! The movie was called Inquilab, and starred the Big B. Takeoffs on faculty were quite routine in these articles, and a new dimension was added when we discovered a guy in our batch-Vijayaraghavan, or Vijjy (an XLRI prof. now)- who could draw cartoons. Serious comments also happened on events at times, but the dominant theme was humour.

We also had the unique tradition of coining nicknames for everyone. These were usually (not always) anglicized versions of our original names- Gunds for me, Paddy for Padmanabhan, Jockey for Narayan Das ( now a Harvard prof.) and the graphic ‘Toote Chappal Gande Paon’ for V.K. Ravi (a retired market research honcho and golfer today). We also had nicknames for faculty. Rajan (who was called ROI or Rajan of India) was very creative, and coined many of these. Among the ones that stuck was Cadbury, for a prof. who resembled the butler in Richie Rich comics.

(Excerpt from my autobiography-My Experiments With Half-truths)