3 coffee, 2 sandwich and 5 quarter life crises

When you have a 10 day break between the trimester exams, one the best thing to do was to get around with a bunch of friends and chat. On the evening of a rainy day in Mumbai, 5 of us got together outside Dhiraj and talked for over an hour and half, between coffee and sandwiches, on the state of our lives right now, when we are doing II year MBA from a relatively well known institute. The five of us were SS, RS, RK, RM and me.

The discussion started off, when RM said that if we had a few minutes of clearer thinking during the two hours of CAT that we wrote close to 2 years ago; we would have been at one of the IIMs.

True. No denying of this. Life is Unfair - the earlier we start accepting this simple fact the better we are.

Then it turned on to the institute that we have landed ourselves in. If IIPM calls itself the largest b-school on earth, ours can surely stake claim to be the densest one. Most B-schools in Mumbai, barring NITIE have a concern over space, typical of the city in which they are located. But I m sure none of them can claim to have produced more MBAs per square feet of the land that they own than ours.

Education is the starting point of strengthening a nation. The better skilled the students going out of a system are that much better off the nation is going to be. So any anomaly in the system of education will get magnified down the line in the careers of the students. This is all the more true in the case of professional degrees like engineering and management.

This makes it very important to keep the 5 lettered word called G-R-E-E-D away from an educational institute. But we have found only that in ours and more of that as we have moved from the first to the second year. There is no problem with an educational institution making profit, but making profit without providing value for the money you charge is unpardonable.

The discussion moved on the line saying that in the first year of our course we could have competed with any guy from a top b-school. But as we have moved along the course, they have received considerable value added day- by-day and the gulf has widened that it might not be possible now.

It was sad to hear that a lot of guys had come into the institute with fire in their bellies, but as they progressed the fire had been doused and they have settled for a life of mediocrity.

As the number of students admitted into the institute has gone up, the institute has consciously chosen people with prior work experience, to leverage on their work ex during the most important placements. The going might be easy when the economy is booming and the industry is plagued by a serious talent crunch.

Despite all the negative tone of the discussion, a few of them, SS and RM in particular wanted to do something to stem the situation. All of us were left gasping as to what to do and where to start, if we needed to do something to the institute before it became our alma mater.

I m sure that despite all this, we might in the next twenty years see a few solid entrepreneurs and a number of high profile corporate performers from the batch of 2008.

Will this come true?

The HT reports that Kamal, Rajni and Maniratnam may come together for a new movie and have been meeting each other recently on the story discussion. So far the three of them have worked with each other separately but never have all three of them together in a single project.

As far as i know, Rajni and Kamal have worked together in at least 10 movies, excluding the guest appearances. Kamal and Mani came together for Nayagan in 1987, which is Kamal's best performance so far barring, Anbe Sivam. In 1991, Thalapathy brought Rajni and Mani together. This movie brought back on screen the Rajni of 1970s and 80s who made his mark as a 'performing' actor and not just as a superstar who banked on flipping of a cigarette and hair style.

If this does come true, it will hopefully be the magnum opus for all three of them, and the day the movie hits the screen will be marked by a frenzy in Tamilnadu that will overshadow what was witnessed for Sivaji.

Come Be My Light

The cover story on a recent issue of TIME, is about a book called Come Be My Light, which is a collection of letters written between Mother Teresa and her confessors and superiors over six decades from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Teresa had reportedly, requested the Church to destroy all her correspondences, as they might make people to concentrate on her rather than Him. But the Church refused to do so as all the correspondences are preserved and reviewed in course of beatification and canonization.

The letters indicate that for a large part of over 50 years, she found dryness, darkness, loneliness and torture, and couldn't find any evidence of God speaking to or directing her. In 1946, during the break she took from teaching with the Loreto Sisters, to Darjeeling, she claimed that God directed her to the service of the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. After this, she left the Loreto Sisters to start the Missionaries of Charity.

But soon enough her flip-flops had started and continued as late as 1995, two years before her death. The content of these letters seem more or less the same with only the recipient changing as her confessors died.

I feel that Truth is the nearest and the cleanest form of God that one can ever find on earth. With due admiration to the great work done by Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, if she is not convinced of the existence of God herself, why should she go around the town claiming to do service to the poorest of the poor to fulfill God's will. Rather she could have just done things to ameliorate poverty for the sake of it than trying to answer some call which never existed in the first place.

Being an agnostic who goes to temple at times, I have always felt that, there has never been anyone on earth who has been convinced throughout his/her life of the existence of God. Similarly a dozen holes can be punctured into an argument put forth by an atheist to disprove the need of a God. A theist has his own moments of darkness when he doubts the existence of God and an atheist has his equal share of moments, when he feels his rationality crumbling down.

May be, only when the entire world accepts their shares of doubts, on either side of the debate, will God show up, for He knows that day is never going to come.