Nostalgia

Hailing from a small village in the Southern tip of India, dreaming about an MBA is some nightmare. And appearing for CAT? Forget about it!

When I happily went and informed my friends about my endeavour to bell the CAT, I was in for a surprise. Some looked horrified, some wondered whats CAT??? and some concluded that I am insane. And there were some inquisitive peers who interrogated my plans for training because there are no training institutes in our town. After lots of (brain)storming at home, I decided to move to Chennai and join an institute which claimed 30% of the students in IIMs were trained by them (why does every institute say the same!). The way these institutes train and the funny little tactics they adopt are unforgettable.

First day into the training institue...I was asked to take a mock test along with some 30 people. Somebody told me that it was to categorize the candidates according to the level of training they require. Unfortunately or fortunately all 30 who took the test with me were put up in the same batch! Shucks, all those 29 are dumbos/brilliant like me ? ;) Then the so called training classes started for honing our quantitave,verbal and logical skills. We were put through series of mock tests everyday at various levels; I always had this feeling on my mock CAT question papers 'are you mocking at me?' After the rigorous mocking sorry mock CATS, we were put into verbal training like JAM (just a min), extempores,etc to meliorate our GD skills. And the topic I got in my training session was Orange! And I have to talk for 5 mins on Orange(oops somebody got 'Pumpkin' it seems )Next topic was 'Imagine you are the current Miss World!'...Shoot! I dont need to talk but just cry and wave hands...lol...And then came third round with the topic "What would you feel if you are a crow now!!!'. My God everytime the topic is getting worser!

And finally the D-day came...as expected the feline was not friendly and pounced on me leaving traceable marks. But somehow I managed to get into an institute of some repute in Bangalore. IIMs are not lucky enough to have me.

My first day into the institute...first time out of home, first time in co-ed, first time in hostel..lots of first time stuff. One of my classmates said "oh u look like a frog outta well!", another exclaimed "you look like a frozen duck!"... Its high time you guys visit a zoo buddies...its noteworthy to say that they became my good friends lateron. Then came our first prof who started teaching the fundas of physics...pull mechanism, push mechanism blah blah...I got fuzzy thinking if I am sitting in the right class and my total mechanism stopped. It was more than half a decade since I left Science and so I did not understand head and tail of what he was talking. By the way it was supposed to be a quantitative analysis class. Thank God he never taught us after that!

And came the freshers party from our seniors; for someone like me who was not aware of the word 'booze', for whom dancefloor is totally alien... It is good that they flicker and dim the lights. Thus begun the business school life with lots of fun, partying, enjoyment, unforgettable holi, hard(ly) work, studies, presentations & assignments, projects,funny testpapers,grades, viva,campus interviews,so on and so forth.

I am not sure if it served the purpose of preparing the students for tomorrow's leadership but indeed it served as a platform to live independent, understand the value of people, seriousness of money (especially when it came to campus interviews it was a warfare), teamwork and spirit and thereby manage organised chaos. Naturally there were some thorns in the corsage but together we bloomed as a beautiful bouquet hiding all the thorns!