The MBA types

Haven't posted here for a while, and the short hiatus was due to the end of the semester rush. Now that everything seems to be all set for my graduation, I have time to sit back and look back on the time.

From my time at Tech (as well at IIT), the classes that I'm going to remember are surely all the management and the humanities classes. While both my grad and undergrad degrees were at 2 of the techiest (I'm not even sure if that's a word, but that sure conveys the meaning!) schools in US and India, the management and the humanities classes were supposed to provide enough spice to balance out the geeks. While I'm not sure if we really had that many geeks (considering the varied professions my batchmates from IIT are into right now), the courses still did a very good job.

Apart from their apparently important role as discussed above, the management classes were a very interesting ground to observe the students who came from varied backgrounds. Even though I'm not a big fan of generalizations, preliminary observations in a couple of classes could help you figure out the background of a particular student (if you were a keen observer :).
For example, the students in a management class (atleast at Georgia Tech) can be (roughly) divided into the following categories:

1. The engineering student taking his first management class: Most innocent and naive of the lot, this student can be seen looking with awe and amazement at the other more experienced students in the class who are raising their hand at every other question that the professor asks to provide their opinion on and participate in the "class" discussion. The student is wondering where he has been all these years, whether he's been living in the same world as the others who seem to talk of product-process lifecycle, NIBT, ROI's etc. as if those were their first words when they were born instead of mama-papa. The student is making notes so that he can look up the terms on wikipedia, while also making resolutions to start reading the economist, the wall street journal and any other hep sounding business magazines on a daily basis, devoting 30 minutes to each magazine.

2. The engineering student taking his nth management class:
More experienced than his other engineering counterparts, this student has started participating in the class discussions, throwing in his "comment" or "observations" on the case-study in question by pointing out some technical aspect of the issue, while trying to embellish his comment with some management buzz words like "portfolio", "economies of scale" etc so that it is more palatable to the majority. This student usually provides his invaluable contribution only once or twice during the class, after which he gets back to the research paper he was reading for the meeting with his advisor, or the novel that he had to look up from at the most thrilling climaxes.

Observe that the gender used for the engineering student in general is not coz of a bias in my mind, but a safe assumption on my part that the engineering student in question would be male nine times out of ten (because this is Georgia Tech!!).

3. The MBA student who was a techie in some previous birth:
This student appears to be the most attentive in the class, coz to him it's obvious that he is probably the only one who's following the discussion in it's totality. It is not sure why he left engineering (probably the people at his old job told him that he was upper management material, coz he was spending more time hanging out with his boss than working on his seat!!), but he considers himself as an authority on all matters technical, and all things relating to business. Never the one to forget manners, this type always starts its monologue with "In my *humble* opinion blah blah blah ....." to go on and completely destroy everybody else's argument, albeit not so very humbly. Having conclusively proved themselves the master of that issue, this type does not sit back and relish the victory. Rather, they will wait attentively to jump on the next opportunity to tear apart any argument, like a hungry lion devouring a deer.

4. The MBA student with a business background:
This type speaks a language that most people don't understand, but it gives an impression of knowledge. Majority of the listeners just hear the keywords like "second-degree price differentiation", "forecasting", "market research" etc brought together by conjunctions that make them sound like intelligent sentences. A lot of people will nod when this type speaks - a sign of support, that no matter what you say we are with you. Usually very active in the class, they become a little reticent when one of the engineering majors starts speaking for too long, and sometimes have to interrupt them with "can you speak in a language understandable by normal people?", usually meaning that you haven't really adorned your sentences with enough management jargon so that it sounds boring (and complex, and over-the-head!!) for the to-be managers.

Apart the above 4 types, there is another kind - these are the ones who come to class a little late, a laptop in hand, and give you a look of coolness like they've just landed from the coolest club in Atlanta while you were wasting time on the stupid case-study deciding what a fictitious manager Joe should do about his fictitious company AlmostBankRupt to save it from going while his fictitious superiors have given him a fictitious deadline to turn things fictitiously around. Even though they aren't interested in fictitious stuff, you know they are going to be surfing the virtual world for the next 1 hour looking at weird posts and videos from anonymous people from around the world!!

So really the management classes have taught me more about psychology than business, but neverthless, they have allowed me to get through all the technical classes by providing that much needed spice every day :D

The Spring Wedding II

Continuing the saga of love, emotions and melodrama, aka, my brother's wedding, I would like to recall a famous statement by someone - "Every wedding has a drunkard, a jerk
and an asshole!" Well my brother's wedding was no different - it was the real deal in that sense :) I wouldn't elaborate on who played those three roles, but I just wanted to point out that the above statement is a very keen and accurate observation.

Well with 4 days to go for the marriage, the guests started arriving. The first to reach was Mike - my brother's friend from work who flew in from the US. I went to pick him from the airport in Delhi, and as his flight was supposed to reach in the morning, I had to make the drive overnight (it's roughly 6 hours from Ludhiana to Delhi, depending on who's driving of course!). So the taxi comes to pick me up at 2 am, and it's the most run down Toyota Qualis that I've ever seen! Well,there was nothing that I could do at 2 in the morning, so I swallowed my anger and got in the backseat. In spite of the rickety car, I slept pretty much the whole way - you can tell when you are tired! Mike's flight had already landed by the time I reached the airport. As he came to the arrivals section, I waved at him, and it took him a couple of seconds to recognize me even though we had met a few months back in California. 30 hours is a helluva long journey, and that too for someone stepping foot outside the US for the first time. Poor guy, little did he know that the most trying part of his journey had just begun!

He had asked to stop at a hotel so he could get a shower before we drove to Ludhiana, and from the little survey I had done, people had told me to get out of Delhi before getting a hotel, and also that there were decent hotels right out of Delhi on the Delhi-Ludhiana highway. Well, we stopped at the first hotel after the bypass as it had been over an hour since we had been driving, and it turned out to be one of the most rundown hotels I had seen - more like a youth hostel. I had to make a decision here - whether to shop around for better hotels and end up with something better (which I wasn't sure of after I saw this one), or to take the darned room and let Mike have a shower (or a bucket-and-a-mug that he calls it now :) ) so we could start for Ludhiana sooner. I decided in favor of the latter, but only when I actually got into the room, and Mike got into the bathroom, that I realized how bad the hotel room actually was! The curtains and the carpet were torn, the TV remote didn't work, the sheets were dirty, and well, in short, it seemed like the room hadn't been used in weeks. I didn't know then but I came to know later that even the water in the restroom wasn't clean. But well, I played along as well as I could, explaining to Mike that this was a decent hotel, and even though he must have been disgusted, he took everything very sportingly. I figured - if he takes all this on his first day in India , then he can take anything that follows on the trip :) Good reasoning, but I bet he wanted to kill me that day!!!

And did I mention - the air-conditioning in the taxi didn't work either!!

Anyways, 6 hours of a rickety ride in a rundown Qualis with no air-conditioning, and Mike was all set for his first Indian experience. I had taught him on the way how to say Sat Sri Akal, hello, hi, thank u etc., and of course some curse words in Punjabi :) Back home, he greeted my parents with a Sat Sri Akal in perfect Punjabi accent. It was funny coz they were kinda unprepared for this, and were gonna say hello how're u etc. - stuff that they aren;t used to at all. That night we went for some shopping, and didn't let Mike sleep so that he wouldn't be jet-lagged. Some day it was for the American!!!

So this was Wednesday night, and time for the first ceremony of the wedding - a kirtan that was supposed to start at 2 am!! Now I know that the Gurus recommended the Amrit Vela, early morning twilight hours before sunrise, for meditation, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't the way they intended it to happen. Most people who made it to the kirtan didn't sleep the whole night, and would have gone home to sleep for a gud 4-5 hours before going to work. I myself wasn't up till 11:30 the next morning. Probably having something at 6-7 am would have made more sense - but then I'm not the authority when it comes to decisions like this :p

I think I'll need a good 4-5 blogs to actually reach the wedding day!! Seriously - after the trip it felt I had been away for more than a month, just cause of the number of things that happened, and the emotional roller coasters that it made me go through!!!