The Chronicles of a Happy Life

A very long overdue post. Hope this helps someone.

The CAT consists of three sections – Quantitative Ability (Quant), Reading Comprehension and Verbal Ability (English) and Data Interpretation (DI). Each section has equal weightage and so far, all papers have been of 120 minutes duration. Each section has a minimum cutoff.

 Among all the sections, I’ve observed that English is the most difficult for people to master in a short period of time. It’s simply impossible to build vocabulary, increase reading speed and learn all the rules of grammar in a few months after you’ve spent years speaking, writing and listening to bad English. Hence, I suggest everybody who intends to take CAT to start reading voraciously as soon as possible. In our institute, our English faculty, Dr. Marathe asked us to read a minimum of 50 pages of good English everyday (Sidney Sheldon does not count) to develop a decent level of English. Since, CAT candidates are supposed to have an above average command over the language; I suggest that you set a target of at least 75 pages everyday. Also try to force yourself to communicate only in English.

 The Quant and DI sections should be easy for an engineering student but they do require a minimum amount of work to master. Joining a good coaching institute should take care of that but it’s not at all necessary. A good test series is necessary though.

 There are basically three big coaching institutes in the country – Career Launcher (CL), TIME and IMS. I fully recommend CL, especially the Hyderabad centre. Of course, I’m biased towards them because it’s my institute but I also think that only CL provides a great level of personal attention to each candidate which makes a huge difference in the long run.

 I joined CL in January ’05. I missed several classes but I learnt a lot from the ones that I did attend. VK sir taught us speed reading techniques and Prashant taught us some tricks for doing complicated multiplications and divisions very quickly. I tried to practice these tricks in my daily life. For example, I practiced speed-reading tricks on my daily newspaper and those number tricks on vehicle license-plate numbers.

 It was only in mid-July, after my summer internship ended that I started preparing seriously for CAT. CL’s material was perfect! There was a lot of it and it was very nicely organized according to the level of preparation of the candidate. For example, in each section, we had a set of ‘Funda Books’ that beautifully explained all key concepts, ‘Sprints’ that were short (up to 15 minute) tests that helped to build speed and finally lots of ‘Take-offs’ which were standard 40 minute tests. Then there were full-length tests which were ‘Mocks’ that were to be attempted at home and about twenty ‘Mocks’ which we attempted at the centre.

 I was able to start on the Take-offs by mid-September and in a little while the mocks started. The CL website gave a wealth of data about each student’s performance in the mock and that really helped me to identify my strengths and weaknesses. During this period, I aimed to spend about three hours per day on CAT preparation – typically, I would do two takeoffs and analyze them. Each mock was like a morsel of the Bombay Bhelpuri – one never knew what to expect. I’m really grateful to the CL paper setters for they gave me the confidence to perform optimally no matter what the paper pattern.

 At several times, some of us would be tempted to slack off. Thankfully, we always had Prashant sir to get us back on track. He would visit the campus almost daily for some weeks. We could go to him with all our problems, even those unrelated to Quant, DI or English and more often than not, he would have a solution.

 By the last month of preparation, I was doing at least one full length paper everyday – sometimes more. Fortunately, I had a big group of friends in IIIT who were preparing for CAT and we would often take the test together at 11 AM (actual CAT time) in the reading room, simulating exam conditions. I also ensured that I spent a lot of time analyzing my paper. I finished with the CL FLTs very quickly so I attempted quite a few TIME and IMS papers too. I also attempted almost all previous year’s CAT papers. I felt that CL papers were closest to the actual CAT.

 On 20^th November ’05, I took the exam. It was not a CAT paper; it was more like a TIGER paper :) I didn’t think I had done very well.

 In January, I found that I had a percentile of 99.99 and interview calls from all 6 IIMs. The GD/PI stage had started. It was then that I was really impressed by CL. There were a series of computerized lectures and self-assessment tests. Almost every evening we would get together for mock group discussions (GDs). We would cover a lot of topics and Vimal Sir, Sudeep Sir and Dilip Sir would give us group as well as individual feedback. A few comments would sting a little, but they definitely made me work harder.

 The group discussion basically tests your assertiveness, general knowledge / business savvy (depending on if it’s a current topic or a case study), leadership skills and selling ability. The duration varies from IIM to IIM – the average is about 15 minutes with about 5 minutes for preparation.

 The personal interview (PI) tests your ability to think logically, handle pressure and degree of commitment. It is here that the CGPA and engineering projects matters. Another way of looking at it is that your interviewers expect you to be able to connect all the dots in your life – everything you do should hopefully be leading towards a particular goal. Your reasons for doing an MBA at that particular institute should form a very important component of your strategy for achieving your goal. Of course, you should have a Plan B (and preferable a Plan C too) for achieving the same goal. Also, it is very easy to lead the interview. Most questions derive from your previous answers. The duration could vary greatly, even in the same institute. The average is about twenty minutes.

 I prepared for the GDs, by participating in as many mock GDs as possible and spending a lot of time on wikipedia and the two thick books, CL gave us to go through to build up our GK. There is no need to mug up stuff on the budget, obscure political/global issues or sports-related stuff. The topic is chosen so that no candidate has an unfair advantage over the others because of his background. I prepared for the PIs by the mock interview and spending a lot of time thinking about all my answers – a lot of people who get calls are actually not very sure of why they wrote CAT in the first place and no interview panel likes a candidate who wants admission just because he read about some high salary figures in the newspaper.

 CL also organized a three-day boot-camp for us at Nagarjuna Sagar. The rooms and other arrangements were so fundoo that I remember thinking as if I was already an IIMA grad and was being taken to an executive retreat by my new company :D The trip was a perfect break and we also managed to do a lot of prep. It was on this trip that I met Shivku sir and Chari sir. After I talked with Chari sir, I was perfectly clear in my head at least about what I was going to say in front of the panel, if not what I wanted to do in life.

 Some people say that you should have a very deep level of contextual knowledge. For example, they say that if you studied in a particular school, you should even know the life-history of the school’s founder! I don’t really believe them. I was never asked a deep question at any of my interviews. Some say that the interview could be a stress interview and that sometimes the interview panel asks the wackiest questions. They are right :) I had a stress interview in Indore where my every answer was met with a ‘Don’t guess. Tell us only if you really know the answer’ and when I insisted that I was not guessing, they would tell me that my answer was wrong and that I was unfit to be there :) In the Bangalore interview, I was asked – ‘If you were invisible and you could do only two things what would those things be?’

 On 12^th April, I found that I was selected for admission in all 6 IIMs. I chose to join IIM Ahmedabad. My dream had just come true.

My final piece of advice to future candidates is to enjoy the whole process. That way, even if you don’t make it (and unfortunately a lot of people don’t) at least you’ll still have had fun.

Rama (not Lord Rama, my friend Rama/d0d0/mythalez) once observed that people like us usually blog only when they have lots of work to do. I think I blog only when the work I have lies between a narrow zone between minimum work levels and maximum work levels. Too little work and there is just no motivation to blog. Too much work, and there is just no time to blog. Having or not having stuff to blog about is completely irrelevant.

Thanks to Dr. Kamal (my fyp guide), my work-level is now in this 'divine-blog-zone'. I'm in Hyderabad now working on the fyp. A long time ago, somebody I know drew a graph of the high and low points of my career uptill then. The high peaks were 'getting As in tough comp sci subjects' (hey, this was his judgement, not mine) and the lowest point was that moment when I was writing php scripts to fetch and display data from a database. Right now is a fine Sunday morning, a few days before I join the best management institute on the planet (I'm sure that every single one of my future classmates is having the time of his/her life right now) and I'm working on making the design documents for my software, which serve absolutely no purpose but still have to be made for bureaucratic reasons. So, people, if in the future, I ever groan about how pathetic my work is, feel free to remind me of this lowest point :(

Things people expect me to blog about:

1. I converted all my 6 IIM calls. I'm joining A because: (i) My Dad graduated from that very institute 26 years ago. (ii) It has the biggest brand according to most popular literature (India Today/ Businessworld) on the subject (iii) There is really no correct way to rank A, B or C (junta interested in advantages and disadavantages of each can refer to pagalguy) which make reasons (i) and (ii) enough to justify my decision.
2. A lot of my friends are gone. I miss them a lot.
3. This was my longest summer vacation in three years, but I feel sad that I spent too little time in Mumbai. On the brighter side, I felt great after meeting lots of friends after many years. Way too many of them are going to the US :( God knows when we'll meet again.

Things I wanted to blog about but then didn't:

1. Catch-22, the best book I've ever read in my entire life - I wish I had read it before this guy.
2. How people change! I met this old-school-friend who I remembered as the least hard-working person on the planet. And today, he works 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, _standing_, as a worker in a small manufacturing company. On Sundays, he works at his Dad's company learning the business from him. His dad will let him take over the family business only after he knows everything about it from top to bottom.
3. Several random deep observations about life - Nature designed a very buggy data storage and retrieval system :(
4. Bitch about how there is no blogger-like plugin so that I can directly post to wordpress from Microsoft Word.
5. On wriitng - TheSophist already put it better than I could ever have - "Writing's like penance - a very introverted activity, cleansing, cathartic, embracing lucidity. Honoring images with words can be fullfilling; it can also be frustrating if the translation isn't faithful, and the contrast between the picture in one's head and the one painted by one's words is there for one's sensibilities to wince at. But I suppose it is enough in most instances that the picture is remembered."

This was my last interview. This ends about three months of gd/pi prep days – basically involving little preparation apart from keeping in touch with the news (including political news *yuck*) and getting nervous about being unprepared before every interview. Thankfully, I wasn’t asked the question I was dreading the most - “Do you watch pirated movies? Don’t you think that’s unethical?" If I answer yes, I’m unethical and no IIM wants to produce unethical business leaders. If I answer no, I’m screwed again because I’m clearly lying. I don’t think I possess the ability to lie convincingly yet. Ask my friends.

The IIM Bangalore interview was my best ever. It didn’t start off very well. I was as tense as I was for the IIMA one. In fact, I gave only monosyllabic answers (a strict no-no according to CL) for the first few questions. There were two profs – one of them was the Chairman of Admissions – I recognized him from his photo in the brochure. The other was a really young guy – I half thought that he was a Ph.D student.

They started quizzing me on Fordism, Taylorism, Post-fordism and I just knew all the answers. It was like an episode of Mastermind. After a while, the young prof said “You know so much about management already. What are you doing here?" That instantly put me at ease. It was like BCing with friends after that.

The old prof then asked me about Probability – how discrete probability was different from continuous probability. He said that for any value that you pick, you can always define a continuous probability case and also a discrete probability case for a probability of that value. I tried explaining him via one approach. When that failed, I backed up and started from the beginning – from the definition of probability. Big mistake! He succeeded in trapping me, but then let me off with a laugh. Moral of the story - be very sure of what you're talking about. IIM profs love probability.

Then the weirdest question of all ‘Consider this hypothetical thought experiment – suppose you are invisible and you can do only two things. What would those two things be?’ I’m sure every red-blooded male knows the first answer that came to my mind. Unfortunately, though we had built a really friendly rapport till that point, I couldn’t tell them that. So I thought about the closest thing that came to a WPA (World Peace Answer – immortalized by Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality – means an answer which you don’t really mean unless you’re a saint, but you still say it in beauty contests, interviews, etc. The interviewers know that you’re giving them gas, but that’s precisely what they’re testing – your ability to generate gas on the fly and deliver it with confidence. Probably it’s useful in some business situations ;)). I told them that I would try to find out what industrialists and politicians really talk about in private – you know, expose corruption and all that stuff. I didn’t want to say that I would kill corrupt politicians because I didn’t want to take an extreme view (another strict no-no according to CL). They told me I was sneaky. And then the young prof told me that he would’ve gone and watched the world cup, because otherwise it would be too expense. I then did the best I could do in the circumstances – grinned stupidly while they shooed me away laughing. So much for ethics.

I’m leaving tonight for Bangalore for my last IIM interview. This time it’s for IIMB itself. Having IIMB last is bad and great at the same time. It’s bad because this is one of the important interviews and I’m too chilled out after five interviews. It’s great because now I’m completely at ease with the whole process. Waking up on your own, getting dressed (I’ve even started enjoying wearing a tie), meeting familiar strangers (by some logic, I’ve always find some people that I’d met in an earlier interview), ‘being welcomed into the second stage of the admission process in IIM[X]’, participating in a GD (oh, this deserves a separate post), BCing with everybody around while waiting for my turn and finally facing the panel and always stepping out thinking that I should have been better prepared. Though, I haven’t slogged as much as ‘some people’, I try to keep abreast of the news and I’ve read up a bit about the institutions and the cities that I’ve been associated with, the Indian economy and of course, technology. However, in each and every interview, the professors manage to ask me a couple of questions that are just beyond the limits of my knowledge. IIM professors are truly amazing.

A perk of getting through to the second stage is getting to meet all kinds of people there. I’ve become quite friendly with a rock-star from BIT Mesra. I didn’t believe him when he first told me that he was the lead vocalist of a rock band and has won a lot of prizes in many fests. After all, he’s very polite, speaks very cultured Hindi and is always wearing specs and a tie when I meet him! I’ve met a guy who acts in street-plays for fun and a guy who’s the HR head of a major IT company in Hyderabad. But almost everybody is an engineer and working in or placed in an IT company. And strangely, so far I’ve not met anybody there who really likes technology or has a passion for it. Maybe some people do have a passion, but like to act as if they don’t (I know some such people). Why they would do that is beyond my understanding?

Another plus of giving all these interviews is the mini-vacation I get to take each time I go for an interview. As long as it’s short (nice usage eh?), I love getting away from all the worries of IIIT (i.e. my final year project which is only inching towards completion. I hate Java!). Bangalore infrastructure sucks but life inside IIM Bangalore is fantabulous. I get good food, a very nice room and the best part is the computer centre. There is also that nostalgia bit – Kitty and I stayed in the IIMB hostel for a couple of months two years ago while I was interning at Novell. The weather is beautiful and so are the girls :D. That’s another thing I find strange there – the girl/boy ratio in the GDs is about 1:9 whereas in the IIM student mess it’s close to 1:1. :-S

Results should be out in the first week of April (I’ve only heard rumors, nothing official yet). Wish me luck.

No, not the city. I’m missing IIIT Hyderabad. I had the A interview on 1st March. It was ok. No stress. No acads. A few questions on math (after all I was the TA), some on blogging and the rest, bas idhar udhar ke question - like political situation in andhra pradesh, entrepreneurship in iiit, patents, etc.

I’ve the Indore interview tommorrow. Going back to Hyd and coming back didn’t make sense for such a short duration so decided to stay here. The rooms at IIMB are awesome. And the PCs in their computer centre are mind-blowing - AMD Athlon64, 1 GBps LAN, Black monitors with thin black CPUs… beautiful!

Initially, it was fun being alone. I read the Wodehouse (Jill the Reckless) that I had brought along. In ‘A Suitable Boy’, a character said that it was impossible to be sad while reading Wodehouse - perfectly true. I realized that if I had been back at Hyd, I would’ve been forced to stand with my project. Bechara gautam is doing that now. Sorry buddy, will make it upto you.

But now after four days, I’m really missing iiit. My friends.. DC++.. My PC.. Elisha Cuthbert on my wallpaper.. :((

Thanks to all my friends who helped cheer me up, especially Divya ;) meebo is an awesome site. It enables you to chat without downloading any client. Thanks also to Abhinav for writing his blog. I read all his archives except 3-4 months today. The guy writes really well.

A few more hours and then I can go back to iiit sweet iiit. Waiting desperately.

GD - Very peaceful. We were given an article on Sting Journalism. It was 8-10 minutes and everybody got a chance to speak. I would give myself a 9/10 for GD.

Interview - Longer than I expected. The people before me had 10 minute long interviews. When I came out of the interview hall, people waiting outside told me that I had been in there for 40 minutes! They asked about my final year project for a while. Then we started talking about globalization. They kept bringing out factual info (that I hadn’t heard of and apparently neither has google!) to prove that globalization was actually bad. We also discussed the effects of corruption, direct and indirect subsidies, etc. I stuck to my guns throughout, trying to prove that in the long run, globalization was good eventhough it had some short-term negative consequences. I think I should have mentioned IT, BPO and some more good effects of globalization for India instead of going on the defensive. :(

Then we discussed applications of IT in the real world. They asked me to tell them the difference between a PDA and a Simputer. I gave some answer, but they were not satisfied. Then, we talked for a while about ITC’s e-choupal initiative and e-governance. Here again, they brought up examples of how IT was entirely useless without adequate infrastructure like roads, etc. and again, I maintained that IT was good even though roads were more important now. It wasn’t a stress interview as they didn’t cut me off and were very polite. They called me idealistic as I stood up to leave. I must have looked dejected because they immediately added, “…but it’s good.”

No questions on acads or on ‘Why MBA’. They didn’t even ask me to introduce myself. I guess that makes sense since all these questions were in the form anyway. One panelist asked most of the questions while the other browsed through my file.
I would give myself a 7/10 for PI.

It was a hard paper. It was not a CAT paper. It was more like a tiger paper! I didn’t do very well. Noone who I know did very well. I suppose that makes things okay. Parents, friends, relatives have all been very sweet in asking how I did. They appear to be more anxious about how I feel right now than about the final outcome. It would suck to let all these people down. I know that some people must be anxious to know my scores. I’ve decided not to compute them for now. Not because I’m depressed or sth but for other reasons. Hope everybody understands.

It’s been a helluva ride. We’ve been together for ages now. I can’t even remember the first time we met. They’ve been very nice to me as I try to be to them. I’ve been late for our meetings once in a while and of late, I’ve been leaving before our time is up, but I hope they understand.

Of course, we’ve had our share of tiffs and misunderstandings but we always make up (sometimes their close relatives, ‘the results’ help, and sometimes they don’t). After all, I can’t do without them, can I?

They’ve been extra-nice to me since the past three and a half years. I guess they wanted to make up for that one big misunderstanding we had) Obviously, it’s all forgiven and forgotten now), or maybe it’s because of the greater numbers of ‘Best of Lucks’ that I get.

I just realized that tomorrow’s date will determine if we continue to see each other, in the near future. I, for one, would like to do so. Hope they do too.

Special thanks to Nappy, Mr. Appaji, Indian Post and IIMB PGP Admissions Office. Thanks are also due to all the people who told me not to worry and kept me from gnawing my own brain off!

Midsems. Royally screwed them. I had just two exams this time - VLSI Algorithms and Linear Algebra so there was not even a lot to study. I’ve simply lost even the slightest inclination to study for exams. I guess this is what happens when you’ve spent enough time interning in companies. Not fifteen minutes would pass after I pick up a book, and a little voice in my head would whisper, “What’s the point?!”, “marks don’t mean anything anyway”, “you’ve got by before with lesser preparation. Why be tense? After all, this is your fourth year” and so on, destroying any chances of me studying for the next half an hour. I actually read the ebooks - ‘Andromeda Strain’ and ‘Disclosure’ by Michael Crichton during the exams! And I watched innumerable music videos, a couple of documentaries and even chatted more in the three days than I had in the whole of last week.

FYP. met the people from CDAC. In the beginning all we had to do was to build the General Ledger module. Now, we find out that we need to build up the entire accounting system and even generate invoices and bills for the purchases and sales people. What the hell are the purchases and sales modules of the project for then? Luckily, we do have an open-source software (Lazy8Ledger) that we can customize for our use - but this is no easy task. In the past two weeks, we’ve been cracking our heads to even come up with the development environment for it. You see, the software we are modifying is actually not a stand-alone software but a plugin for jedit. And the jedit code is agnostic of any plugins present. So we don’t even know how to load both the codebases together in an IDE to enable us to set breakpoints at the correct locations.

My CAT application got rejected. It was an otherwise ordinary evening when I got an im from Nappy with the weblink to check the status of my CAT application. Check I did and it said that my application had been rejected since my photo was not affixed correctly. “This is insane”, I thought. I was positive that I had affixed the photo. Then I thought that it must be some kind of joke, though I knew it was highly unlikely, as Nappy wouldn’t joke about something like this. I went to their website directly, and dug out the link on my own. It was genuine. My application had indeed been rejected. Luckily, all was not lost. I could still submit a recitification form and attested copy of photo-id by the 7th and fix the problem. Then began the hunt for gazetted officers, or more precisely, batchmates who are children are gazetted officers. Found Riyaaz who assured me that his Dad could attest it for me. I also found that all university professors are qualified to attest things like these. The next morning, I rushed to the academic office. Mr. Appaji was really, really helpful. He got me a bonafide certificate with photo-attestation in one hour! We must have the most helpful administration in the whole world. Sprinted to the gachibowli post office where I speed-posted it. All of this was on the 4th of October. Meanwhile, I had also communicated with the IIMB admissions office (they answer emails very promptly and are also very helpful). Yesterday night, I emailed them asking if they had received my post and whether all things were in order. Today morning I got a reply saying that they hadn’t. In a state of panic, I rushed down to call them up. The man on the phone was patient with me. He asked me to hold while they checked to see if my post had been received. The answer was no. I was scared to death. I asked him if I should go over there to fix the problem. He excitedly interrupted me to tell me that my post had just reached them - that very minute! Yalk about luck! I asked him if all the documents were ok, but he said that he could not answer that now but that it most probably will. I’ll be able to rest easy only when I get my admit card. May God help me.

A friend of mine broke up. And her ex-boyfriend is also my friend. So now, I’m forced to sit and listen to both of them bitch about each other to me and I’m even forced to take sides. And it’s all about something so silly, that it gives me a headache. God save me from these lovers!

Winning - A title like that, with Jack Welch as the author and testimonials by the world’s two richest men on the front and the back; makes me wonder if they had just me in mind when they wrote the book! I’m a huge fan of Jack’s optimistic, no-nonsense, get-it-done mindset and the book is extremely well-written. There’s even a chapter titled - ‘Work-Life Balance: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Having It All (But Were Afraid to Hear)’ - a topic that’s conspicuously absent from most other biz books. And it’s not just about abstract business theories that are useful only for CEOs, one-fourth of the book is just for people like us - who are just starting out on their career. Oh! this was entirely a good thing. Nothing fucked up about it :D