A year that was ....

The first year at at IIM Ahmedabad (or WIMWI, as we lovingly call it is about to end, and the progression from the least form of life on campus i.e. fachchadom to to the highest form i.e. tuchchadom is almost on the anvil !

If I look back at the last one year spend at WIMWI, the journey has been full of learnings’. Every single day made incremental additions to my wisdom, knowledge and skills, but lacked terribly in the number of hours it had. I still get surprised when I think how it happened because the last year has been full of days packed with assignments and cases, when the workload for every next day felt impossible and the number of hours in a day never added to twenty-four! But then this is how it has been designed to be, every minute spent in the classes and every day at the campus is compressed with learnings’. I feel proud to say the kind of support we get from the faculty and the collective learning we experience with the peers is indeed commendable, and makes the stay at campus more valuable and enjoyable. I find myself substantially enriched in the last one year, and surprisingly the best is yet to come in this journey towards intellect!

A Holy Holi - Time for retrospection !

Just came back from the Holi Celebrations @ IIM Ahmedabad. Thought about penning my feelings down, before they are washed away like the colour of Holi !

Being born,brought up, educated and worked in Uttar Pradesh before coming to WIMWI ( Thats whats IIM A is lovingly known as amongst us - Well Known Institute of Management in Western India ). UP has always been known for the most horrendously innovative ways of playing Holi - be it using "colourful" chemicals, "long lasting" paints, "darkest" warnish, "incensed" glue or even Mud ! However, having being belonged to the so called affluent class, and thereon educated in a good university, I preferred staying away for all such ways of playing Holi for the last many years. I always commented that "this is not a festival worth celebrating by the educated".

As Holi was approaching in WIMWI, the same thought engulfed me- How to avoid playing holi here also. But then I thought that this is Asia'a best B School, and the chances of the sophisticated "would be" managers and I Bankers playing are very very minimal. And even if they do it, the maximum they would resort to is Dry colours ( Gulal, for those who know it).
Few days back, as the festival approached and the declarations started coming from second year-ites and Cultural Committee members, I realized that some action is bound to happen....but, obviously can not be close to what I have already seenn in my home state !

However, as I reached the central place today, I realized that this is the most charged and energetic crowd I have ever seen. There were all our "managers- to - be " , geared up in dozens and scores, lovingly putting person after other in a central water tank with a capacity to host at least 3 people at a time ! I beleive the capacity planning was excellently done by some expert on operations . And this was not the end of it, in the corner we had the lawns converted into a mud swimming pool, where everybody was being dropped one after the after, with utmost care, so that the roughness of macadam would not hit the person. And this was being done with utmost sincerity and regularity for everyone who was coming, just like a typical assignment at IIM A.

So, now that I have been able to survive the "Mud Bath", I feel it was great fun. However, more than this, what is most pronounced is the spirit of celebrating a festival with enthusiasm in the company of people I love the most- my fellow WIMWI'ans. Never realized this how much one could miss college days when I was doing my engineering. However, when I joined my first company, it felt that I missed every small moment of college - the welcome party, those days of ragging ("introduction" to be precise), the numerous evening Chai, mugging for exams and quizzes that never ended, Valentine's Day celebrations, and a lot of other big and small things. Coming back to WIMWI and this day of Holi is a revisit to the memory lane. to the nostalgia of college days, and I am thankful to god for giving me this oppurtunity, to live for the last time before I finally die in the corporate world !