Pseudo intellectual RANTS

I feel its time to pen down my thoughts as to what b-school is all about, be it single term relationships, the mad race to get an A, the relative grading- sabotage, or maybe even the occasional "hey you are my buddy so I will let you copy my exam".......

So lets start with relationships, a B-School relationship has a unique character to itself, it tends to last a whole term, now the way I see it, there are 8 terms in all so along with "intellectual wine tasting" (as MR Manish Sabharwal mentioned in his talk) we also have other types of wine tasting "you know what I mean". How can you blame them? I mean come on after all we all have to find the best possible specimen. Think about it, now if we can spend 2-3 months thinking about which car to buy, and all along test drive every single possibility, and then test drive again after comparing and contrasting, it is but natural that we would have to do the same with relationships. Of course, the best ones are those that sample more than just 8....... Now it also gives an opportunity for people already in a relationship to wine taste without getting out of the first one as well....... boy what a "brave new world":)

So grades.... they the elixir of ISB life. The sign of a good specimen at times..... So looks like grades serve two purposes, they are used for signaling the health of the specimen, and also assures that many "cows" will use you for consultations. And thank god for these consultations, many of our toppers probably would have never received this kind of attention before. Why should they not? After all they are on their way to becoming the CEOs of the next Microsoft. I mean, I mean, I mean.......... Apart from the women/men angle, we also have the consulting angle, BCGs and the Mckinseys' of our world only recruit from the top 10 percentile of the students. Now What I fail to understand is this, I did attend a Mckinsey presentation, and what I found was that they don’t really need people who are smart, but they actually need people who can bull shit. So me thinks they need to look at the "bull shit" competence.

Now the best aspect of ISB life is "relative grading" or rather sabotage..... So only the top 10% of the people get As and the next 15% get A- and then we have bout 50% of the crowd getting Bs. So inevitably what happens is sabotage or what we call RG. It is a mad rush to get grades, of course now the good looking ones in our batch end up getting "special" help, be it exams or even homework. Now inevitably I think we are gonna now see huge lines in front of beauty salons and maybe even plastic surgeons.....

Now honor code violations, in reality though they is no honor code at ISB, it can be compromised at the first sign of trouble. I mean come on, after all its consulting at stake (whichever way you look at it). The most amazing violations include discussions in the examination room. Yeah they do happen, and usually ISB turns a blind eye to these, unless again your proctor or your TA doesn’t like you:) (Well we will come to this aspect in the next para). Well if it is a friend its all good cause collectively we need to try to get all our friends to get as........ So yeah you would think that the IITian species would not indulge in these, but you would be grossly mistaken. They are among the first actually, because how can they let the consulting placements pass by??? It’s after all the most important thing in their superficial lives. Oh yeah and cha-ching... if your spouse is an ex-ISBian, you have it made!!!!! If anyone wants to "crack-it" in ISB just make sure you marry an ISBian before joining ISB. Oh yeah and don’t worry about whether your spouse would help you out, obviously he/she will, after all it’s about the 30 lakh loan (15+15).


One of the most annoying aspects of living at ISB is traversing through the stairs.... and talk about ergonomically challenged, so they spend millions of dollars to make these fucking buildings look pretty but can’t spend the time to think about how annoying this shit might be?????? I have been having this excruciating pain in my knee, which I can only attribute to these god damn stairs..... So the "limping CEOs" of tomorrow are gonna be the esteemed alumni of ISB....

Its time for the competent TAs of ISB. Our TAs are so learned that they know exactly how to measure the competence of the students... so it goes like this goes "now if you dance with me in the parties you get an extra point, if you don’t then hmmmmm well -5" god forbid if one of the people in your group is someone who didn’t give her the time of the day. (Maybe a bit exaggerated). The TAs also have an uncanny ability to notice buzz words in our exams, as a matter of fact shouldn’t we be graded solely on the ability to regurgitate inconsequential terms such as boot-strapping regardless of whether we know what it means, or even if it is appropriate for the particular question? So our TA says this during our exam - "Please use terms which have been taught in your entrepreneurship class and underline them, do not use terms that have not been taught in this class"

So my exam looked like this

Boot-strapping, effectual reasoning, social capital, value-driven, core competence (damn it that was not taught in our entrepreneurship class CRAP I am gonna fail!!!!!!)