Chapter 1: My College Years..

An extract from my unpublished 'memoirs' titled ' The Adventures of an Itinerant Executive ' that contains vignettes of my time at Elphinstone College, Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad.

I joined Elphinstone College, Bombay in the summer of 1971. It had the usual assortment of quirky professors. One Professor Swamidasan taught the esoteric subject of Deductive logic where we studied syllogisms and other such trivia. He was a tall, articulate, urbane man who introduced himself in his first class of the semester with the words “I am Swamidasan. I am tall dark and handsome”. And of course, he was. Swamidasan always managed to make his classes entertaining though his subject was deadly dull. The complete opposite of Swamidasan was a Prof. Patel who taught Inductive Logic. He was short and stubby and hopelessly inarticulate and mumbled incoherently through his lessons. Swamidasan’s classes were always well attended by over a hundred students. Patel’s classes were attended only by those who had lost their way in the corridors of Elphinstone or had no where else to spend a few hours. On one occasion, their classes were interchanged without the knowledge of the students. Patel entered his classroom to discover a full house of students expecting a vastly entertaining lecture from Swamidasan. Beaming broadly Patel turned to the blackboard to make a few notes. Behind his back an avalanche of bodies were leaping across desks and benches frantically trying to escape to the more comfortable confines of the college canteen. When Patel wheeled around about to launch into his lecture he was confronted with a vast sea of empty desks and a couple of students asleep on the back benches. 

Life at college was uneventful and quite frankly a waste of time. I could have learnt my subjects without spending much time in class. Becoming Chairman of the Debating Society and winning a few debating trophies, were among my more laudable accomplishments. I also managed to rank 6th out of about ten thousand students who sat for the Intermediate Arts exams in Bombay University in 1972. Apparently only four thousand students passed the exams. The rest were doomed to repeat a year or drop out of college. Because of this academic feat, I was awarded the Bombay Municipal Merit Scholarship which enabled me to complete my B.A (Honours) in Economics and Political Science, free of cost.

It would frequently occur to me that this education hadn’t equipped me for much to do in later life and the options seemed limited to sitting for the civil services exam or MBA entrance exams. I opted for the latter. The telegram asking me to appear for the IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) entrance exam was received at my previous address in Bombay. It was redirected to the National Defence College (NDC) course in Delhi to which my father ( by then a Commodore in the Indian Navy), had been selected. My father’s friend, Brigadier Cheema who was also doing the NDC course discovered that I had missed the interview. Dad telephoned the Director of IIMA who agreed to send a special team to Delhi to conduct another round of interviews since I was not the only one who had missed it. This involved doing a written IQ test , trying to be heard in the din of a ‘focus group discussion ‘ and being grilled by three dour professors at an interview. As luck would have it I got through and was admitted to IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) which was and continues to be India’s equivalent of Harvard Business School. It turned out that sixty thousand aspirants applied for IIMA which admitted only 160 that year. While gaining admission was a big achievement it is nothing compared to the fierce competition for the IIMs and other top business schools now where hundreds of thousands of students compete for a few thousand seats.

Getting in to IIMA was the easy part. The hard part was dealing with the realisation that one was not among the brightest students on campus. I was surrounded by colleagues who were all toppers from their respective universities and were very bright indeed. This was most humbling. Many classmates were much older having done five years of education at the IIT. Some had worked for a few years before coming to IIMA. Most were quite adept at Mathematics.  

The IIMA campus had been built by Louis Kahn in the 1960’s and the buildings which had large circular openings to let in air and sunshine were made entirely of exposed brick. Even the walls inside the rooms were exposed brick walls. This gave the campus a somewhat stark and forbidding air. The surroundings of the campus were not particularly green so this did not do much to relieve the monotony of the buildings

The few entrants who joined after a degree in Economics were asked to attend several sessions of ‘remedial ‘mathematics before the classes actually began. To my surprise I was not invited. Mathematics was not my strongest suit and I found that some classes in subjects that I thought I was familiar with e.g. Economics, were completely incomprehensible. Professor Dalip Swamy who taught Economics in the first semester converted the entire subject into a mass of differential equations which made little sense to me. Another subject which I found hard to grasp was Accounting and the principles of double-entry bookkeeping. To this day, I hold accountants in great respect.

A few days after I joined IIMA in April 1974, I went to the girls’ dormitory (D-11) in search of Meenakshi Watwe, a lady student who was a year senior to me at Elphinstone College. When I reached the first floor of the dormitory, I bumped into a tall dusky beauty from Kerala with beautiful light brown eyes. She had the improbable name of Kartyayini which she shortened to ‘Karti’. We said a quick hello and I explained the purpose of my visit. Since Meenakshi was nowhere to be found, I said a perfunctory goodbye and left. Little did I know then that I had been speaking to my future wife!

The first semester at IIMA is designed to make mincemeat of even the most hardened of scholars. The case load is staggering and deadlines for submission of projects are so tight that there is barely time to complete the assigned reading material let alone analyse and write a coherent report on it. Burning the midnight oil was a regular affair and resulted in lack of sleep and a fuzzy head the next day. My grades in the first semester were less than inspiring and at one point I almost decided to pack my bags, go home and try for the Civil Service exams. However, better sense prevailed and I stuck it out. Eventually, my academic performance improved dramatically and in the second year, I won a Government Merit-cum -Means Scholarship. This turned out to be a pyrrhic victory since my father’s meagre income was deemed to be above the qualifying level for the scholarship.

During my time at IIMA, I learnt at the feet of intellectual giants like C Rangarajan, later to become Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Vijay Govindarajan the management guru who taught us Managerial Accounting. Govindarajan had the disconcerting habit of stalking all over the classroom, pausing next to a student, looking in a completely different direction and asking the student a question in a loud voice. The hapless student would generally be caught napping since he was under the impression that the good professor was addressing someone at the other end of the room. This went on for a few class sessions until everybody realised that it was unwise to let one’s attention wander during Vijay Govindarajan’s classes especially since ‘class participation’ was graded. Other brilliant professors included John C. Camillus and Paul Mampilly both from the Finance area.

The late Professor VL Mote who taught Operations Research was my father’s childhood friend from his days in Amravati. He was an obviously brilliant man who was impatient when his students couldn’t keep pace with him and expressed his frustration by throwing a chalk or blackboard duster at his victims. This too ensured that we were wide awake in his classes

The late Professor M.N. Vora was our Professor of Marketing. He was a short, swarthy, bespectacled man with a slight stoop and had the habit of looking at one sideways. He made it his mission in life to make his students think logically about marketing issues and he achieved this by the simple tactic of asking only two questions during a case discussion – ‘Why ?’ and ‘Why Not ? ‘. So to every argument or proposal put forward the professor would snarl ‘Why?’thus forcing the student to think hard about why indeed he had suggested the solution that he had. Upon which the Professor would ask his “Why Not? question i.e. why did the student not consider a certain alternative solution. After several such ‘Why’s’ and ‘Why Not’s the student came to the sad realisation that he had really not thought through all aspects of his response and was reduced to a stuttering quivering mess. To this day many of his students remember the man with awe and thank him for teaching them that one should question everything and take nothing for granted

One of the most useful courses that I attended in my first year at IIMA was called WAC – Written Analysis and Communication. We were handed a case study usually on a Friday evening around 6 pm. The case would consist of at least 50 pages with a large number of numerical annexures and described a company with a management problem. A lot of the information in the case was irrelevant to the problem at hand. The case study ended with the question ‘what should Mr. X (the protagonist) do and why?’ We were required to read the case, sift through all the material and determine how Mr. X should go about solving the company’s problem(s). All of this had to be done before eight am the next morning which ensured that there was no sleep to be had that night.

The case had to be analysed in a special format under the following headings:

- Problem Definition

- Objectives

- Alternative courses of action

- Action Plan

- Contingency Plan

For each section we were required to provide evidence of our reasoning and defend our conclusions. The overload of information provided, the time pressure and the rigorous analysis required to defend one’s conclusions taught us to several things including the ability to think calmly and logically under pressure and to communicate succinctly and to the point. These are lessons which have stood me in good stead throughout my career.

I did not have the good fortune to learn from CK Prahlad, the other management stalwart who was also a professor at the Institute at the time but have followed his meteoric progress in the world of management and have read all his books.

After the end of the first year each of us was do a six -week summer internship with a company. I had applied to and was selected by V.M. Salgaocar and Company , a Goa based Shipping and Mining company, along with my classmate Shyam Ghate. My father arranged through the Naval Base in Vasco-da- Gama, Goa for us to be accommodated in some empty sailors’ quarters. The company had a large fleet of trucks and dumpers used for their mining operations. Due to high wear and tear of their vehicles’ tyres and the high cost of retreading them through outside suppliers, they wished to explore the possibility of setting up an in-house tyre retreading plant to cater to their needs. My job was to examine the feasibility of this project and provide Management with a report on my findings. Shyam had an even more interesting project. The Company was losing large sums of money as fuel supplies used for their vehicle fleet were being stolen from their fuel trucks. His job was to play detective and find out how this was being done and suggest remedial action. 

Shyam and I were given an attractive secretary to help us with typing up our reports, who wore distractingly short skirts and sat opposite us in our temporary office. For some reason we found ourselves spending a lot of time looking for pencils and other stationery that had mysteriously fallen to the floor. One day a carpenter came and boarded up the lower half of her desk.

I spent a lot of time on the road meeting with the Company’s truckers and owners of other tyre retreading units in Goa and their equipment suppliers in order to come up with my report. Shyam turned out to be an astute detective. After chatting up various drivers he discovered that the method of stealing fuel was quite simple. The fuel trucks had a dipstick to measure the amount of fuel in the tank in the middle of the truck. To check the fuel level on had to clamber up on top of the truck, pull out the dipstick and check the fuel level. These trucks had large tyres. While re-fuelling at company owned fuel stations, the driver would deflate the front tyres fill in excess fuel , reflate the tyres and siphon out the excess fuel to be sold at a tidy profit in the ‘secondary’  market

At the end of an interesting six weeks, the day to present our findings to the Vice Chairman of the Company had nearly arrived. I put my handwritten report two days ahead of time on our Secretary’s desk late in the evening with a note saying “ Tina – please type this report. Please also put a border on the title page to make it look nice” . The note was written across the title page. I  was out of the office for most of the next day making travel arrangements. When I returned to the office , the report was on my desk, beautifully typed, with a nice border around the title page. There was also a beautifully typed sentence written across the page that read ‘ Tina – please type ……………….nice’ !!

After the gruelling first year at IIMA, the second year was a relief. I could pick subjects of my choice, play some sport and even indulge in theatre. The courses I chose were largely in the areas of Marketing and Finance with a smattering of others such as the relatively obscure ‘Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation’ 

One of the most interesting courses was Interpersonal Relations which was taught by the legendary Prof. Pulin Garg. The course was designed to explain how one should see situations form the other person’s point of view. This is only possible if one can understand an indivdual's needs, desires and motivations. Pulin’s aim therefore was to get his students to reveal their innermost desires and explain them largely through experiences that we had undergone in childhood, especially with parents. Very few attendees at his sessions escaped without breaking in to tears at least once, their confidence completely shattered by his relentless probing and his exposing the innermost depths of their souls to their class fellows. Somehow, I managed to go through the process without either revealing much or breaking down. This led Pulin to make a comment about my being a ‘Prince on a White Steed’ i.e. being aloof and somehow above it all  

 In year two, I represented the Institute in tennis and badminton tournaments against other IIMs and at some local events in Ahmedabad, directed and acted in a three -hour English play called ‘Secretary Bird’ with my classmates, acted in Ionesco’s ‘Improvisation’ and compered the welcome entertainment event for the joining batch of 1975-77 along with Gaurav Bhalla , my batchmate, during which he and I told a number of jokes. During the first year, I had not seen much of Karti since she was in a different ‘section’ to mine. She came to audition for a role in 'Secretary Bird’ which I decided to award to someone else. However, she did not hold this against me and I had the impression that we had clearly registered on one another. Soon thereafter , Gaurav suggested that the three of us go out for a movie together and allowed us to sit next to each other in the darkened theatre. To my recollection, that was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted 44 years!

The second year was thoroughly enjoyable in all respects and it was soon over. The time had come to find ourselves jobs and company representatives arrived on campus to recruit the best and the brightest. I had had myself a suit tailored in Delhi (my first) by the famous Vaish Brothers in order to impress. The policy around campus placements was clear; we were allowed a maximum of two job offers. If we rejected the first we were required to accept the second. If we rejected two, campus placement services were no longer available and we would have to find jobs on our own.

In order to hedge our bets most of us applied to more companies than was strictly necessary. IIMA was only ten years old and the demand for students was good but not as ferocious as it became later. Hence there was greater uncertainty among students about the type of companies that would visit the campus and the jobs they would eventually land. Most of us had little experience of the corporate word and did not know much about the companies that we applied to. I had applied among others to the erstwhile DCM Group, Johnson and Johnson and Hindustan Thompson Associates (now J Walter Thompson), the country’s largest advertising agency and Madura Coats the textile company. As luck would have it, DCM came to the campus first. By this time we were better informed about the reputations of some of these employers and I realised along with several of my colleagues that DCM was not the best choice. Unfortunately, after an interview at which I tried not to shine, DCM made me a job offer as a Management Trainee, which I refused.  

I then attended an interview with Shiv Nadar who was just starting out as an entrepreneur and ran a company which sold calculators called Microcomp. By now, I had little interest in joining a new and relatively unknown company and deliberately performed in a lack-luster manner during the interview to avoid being offered a job. Half way through the proceedings, Mr Nadar said “ Mr Inamdar, I think we are both wasting each other’s time, don’t you ?" . I agreed and beat a hasty retreat. Little did I know that he would eventually go on to set up one of India’s largest and most successful IT companies, HCL Technologies.

The Madura Coats interview process was one of the finest that I have been through. The entire process was conducted at their HQ in Madurai, a small temple town in Tamilnadu state in South India. I had to take my first ever flight in an Indian Airlines jet to get there, so that was the beginning of a novel experience. As I recall, I was the only candidate from IIMA. All the others (about eight in number) were from other business schools in the country. On arrival in Madurai, we were transported by car to the Madura Coats campus and shown our individual rooms in their guest house. That evening we attended cocktails and dinner and our every move was watched closely by observers who were judging our etiquette, table manners and general savoir -faire. The next morning we were quizzed by a resident psychologist who showed us ink blots and various pieces of coloured paper and pictures and asked us what they meant. On the assumption that we were not near psychiatric cases we made it to the next round which involved a focus -group discussion , with a difference.

We were each handed a small sheet of paper on which a ‘case-let’ describing a management problem, was printed. Each of us had a different one. We were asked to place it face down and not to look at it until our turn came. When it did, we were required to turn the page, read the case-let silently, explain it to the assembly, get them to discuss the case, shut them up before the appointed time, summarise the discussion and then present our own conclusions and recommendations to the interview board consisting of four company managers and the psychologist – all in the space of an astonishing 7 minutes.

The process was an efficient way of measuring the ability to read, comprehend and explain complex issues succinctly, to lead and manage a discussion and to think on one’s feet and provide a cogent solution to difficult problems, all the while keeping one’s poise under extreme time pressure. Following this brilliant test, we were interviewed individually by the interview board. I must have failed on at least one of the above counts since I was not selected by them. Another friend, Deepak Gursahani, who was from the Bajaj Institute of Management, was. I knew Deepak while he was in college. He was a tall strong silent type and during raucous dance parties would be seen standing silently in a corner of the room , motionless. If one looked closely, however, his foot would be seen tapping in the dark. This was the maximum movement one could expect from Deepak, regardless of the provocation. I guess Madura Coats found his rock solid demeanour endearing. He rose to become a senior executive and ran their company in Brazil

In the meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson (J&J) which had a formidable reputation as a consumer product company sent its representatives to the campus. During the introductory presentation about the Company, the Human Resources manager made certain comments which made those attending wonder whether they would be wise to join such a company. The manager threatened that the training period would involved several months of hard sales labour in the backwoods of Bihar and UP and leave would not be granted for a whole year even in dire circumstances such as the birth of a child ! We were horrified and left wondering if this would be the right employer for us. 

The interviews were to comprise a preliminary and a final round in Mumbai at their corporate headquarters. I went through the preliminary round and attempted again to downplay my skills in the hope that I would not be called for the final round. This was not to be and I was invited to Bombay for a second round a few days later. The second round involved answering a few desultory questions from their Marketing Manager who tried to assess whether I could do sums quickly in my head. I returned to Ahmedabad fervently hoping that my lack-luster performance would deny me the opportunity with J&J

My next interview, a few days later was with Ram Ray of Hindustan Thompson Associates Ltd or HTA (now J Walter Thompson) – the manager of their Calcutta branch. He was accompanied by KMS (Titoo) Ahluwalia, the head of IMRB ( Indian Market Research Bureau) their market research division. The interview went extremely well and I could tell they were interested in my candidature. The advertising industry had an aura of glamour and I felt that HTA would be an exciting place to work. I left the interview room and as I stepped out the Placement Officer handed me a telegram from J&J to say that I had been selected for the job with them. This meant that I had to accept immediately and could not pursue the opportunity with HTA!

I had to think on my feet!. I returned to the interview room before the next interview was due to begin and rapidly explained the situation to Ram Ray. I told him that he would have to make me a job offer on the spot or I would be lost to J&J. He said that he needed to check with his boss – the legendary Subhas Ghoshal, who was the Managing Director of HTA, since he was not authorised to take the final decision. I told him the choice was his. To Ram’s credit, he took out his pen and wrote a hand-written job offer which I presented to the Placement Office.

This was the somewhat dubious beginning of my career in the corporate world.