The Story of My MBA - The First 14 Years

The first time I wrote CAT – the Common Admission Test to the IIMs, was in December 1993. I remember that day vividly. It was NOT a cold winter day. It never is a cold winter day in Chennai. But it was a day I had cold feet. It was like the biggest test of my vitality. Or something like that. I woke up at six as I always did. Everything was murky. Even that hot cup of South Indian filter coffee did not help. A hot bath? No, not enough. My favourite blue, checked shirt and steel gray trousers? Well, they did do some good to my confidence. And then the red vermilion mark (rather trademark) on my forehead. Hmm! I was feeling better.

I can't remember if I drove my dad's scooter myself to Loyola College or was it my uncle who dropped me there for the exam. I was at the venue a good half hour before I needed to report.
I had spent the last six months cramming for this day and for the big test. So what? So had the two lakh (that is twenty million by the way) other people who were appearing for the same test of vitality at a thousand different centers across India that cold winter morning (I hear it gets really cold in places like New Delhi).

My favourite lucky routines, 3 HB lead pencils and 2 and a half hours later, it was over. I did not know how I was feeling? Yes! No. Maybe... Something in the middle. Somehting in between. I was still trying to remember how the exam went and I still don't remember how I went back home, but I know that I went straight back home, for, this was Sunday and Monday would mark the beginning of my seventh semester engineering examinations. Television Engineering it was to be, but as I have already told you, the picture was hardly clear. I had never felt so drained in my life. I felt the world was coming to an end and I had no right to be existing that very moment. I slept.

I barely managed to scrape through Television Engineering and 5 other core subjects in the seventh semester, but what had me jumping for the sky in Feb 1994 was the invitation letter from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (East and Middle of India, I mean, netiher South nor North).

A new pair of black Moccasino shoes later, I was in the same Loyola College campus (like I had not been there for every single inter college cultural competition that had happened in the last 4 years). This time it was a warm afternoon (Chennai, February!) but I was sweating more from the tension of the Group Discussion and Personal Interview sessions that were to soon take place.

There were 14 people seated on either side of two long benches (if have you ever been to dinner at a Tamil Brahmin wedding, you will know what I am talking about.) Luckily the topic of discussion was not the menu. I think it was something like, "Mushrooming of Management Institutes is detrimental to the cause of Management education".

What followed was like a bunch of famine-sticken folks meeting at a Tamil Brahmin dinner table. There was food for thought alright but it was being thrown all over the place and every single of the fourteen starvers was screaming for the lion's share of the meal. So much that the moderators had to soon step in to clean the mess. They granted one minute for each member at the table to express their original ideas on the topic starting at some random person.

Now, what was the probability that I would be 12th of 14 people to get to express their orignial ideas on this topic which could have 98 out of 100 votes in only one possible direction. In my case it was a perfect 1 and by the time it was my turn to speak, the topic had been beaten to death. The coffin had been nailed air tight and so was my fate sealed.

I was not sure if I even needed to attend the personal interview session to follow, but I just hung around. "What do I lose? Even if nothing came out of this, I will learn from the experience", I thought. "Naive", was a word the word lists in the barron's or the CAT basic reference material would use to describe me.

I had appeared for nine other management entrance examinations that winter in Chennai (Oh! there I go again!). Ten in all. I waited by the mail box every day at noon for the next two months for the post man to bring me the next invitation to a group discussion and interview, but soon it was April and it was too hot to stand barefoot on the concrete floor near the mail box, so I decided to give up. Besides, it was time for my final semester engineering examinations, so back I went in to the house to prepare for them.

It was May and the examinations completed, I was on my way to Mumbai, the financial capital of India and home to seven prestigious management education institutes, some of them located at the very heart of the premier business district of mumbai which also included the mumbai stock exchange and the national stock exchange.

This test was also called CAT - Common Admission Test, but with a suffix MMS, meaning this was the admission test for the degree Master of Management Studies.

In the next 3 months, known as the peak of the Indian summer and the famed monsoon period of Mumbai, I mastered the geography of Mumbai, the vast expanse of a city running a few hundred kilometres on either side, but seamlessly connected by its 3 different train lines, Central, Western and Harbour. I would come to know 13 years later that this was similar to the several subway lines that so magnificiently connect the five boroughs of New York City.
The summer was over, the monsoon was over and so was my dream of becoming a graduate from one of the top ten management institutes in India, class of 1996.

But 1994 was another year, and after a short stint at a dear uncle's small scale (but large-hearted) electronic instrument factory and a sales job for a fly-by-night operator who professed himself to be the face of AT&T in India, I decided it was time to take the CAT again. This time for admission into the IIMs' MBA program starting June 1995.

One step better, this time it was an invitation for a group discussion and personal interview from Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, an institute that groomed management graduates for the creative yet results-only-matter field of advertising. I call it one step better because it was certainly in line with the sweet but bizzare accident that happened between the CAT in Dec 1994 and the interview invitation in Feb 1995.

A series of unexpected meetings with friends who were connected to the advertising industry brought me to believe that I had the wherewithal to be in the midst of the creative lot, lapping up all the glamour and the glory. I set out to first enquire, educate myself and once I was armed with sufficient information, I tried to analyse it to see if I would be a right fit in this industry.
Meanwhile, my gut was screaming. "What are you waiting for?", it seemed to say. This was the perfect fit it had ever seen in my life. I had always had a creative bent of mind. My exploits started with a play I wrote and acted in for a farewell show at junior school and went on to several stage performances thereafter through high school and engineering college (remember me visiting Loyolla College all those times in the 4 years?). Why? I had even a written an ad jingle the previous summer for a music director friend of mine. So what was I waiting for indeed?
Seven pages, lasted my supposedly creative resume and it took me less than 30 days and exactly three advertising agencies to get my first Trainee Copywriter job. "I wouldn't say your resume is creative, but it certainly shows your enthusiasm", said the Managing Director of Takewing Communication Pvt. Ltd., a 25 man agency in a posh Chennai locality whose work was also considered among industry specialists as posh.

I felt like banging my fist on the glass top of the huge table in the conference room, asking him to keep his tiny agency to himself and storming out of his office, but I sat there smiling at him like a yuppie. He had just converted my resume into toilet paper, stamped my ego into the dust, and yet it made business sense. I had the job, the foot in the door, that I needed.

I mastered the meaning of deja vu through several occasions over the next four years when I took an ad to a client that I was certain the best I had ever produced. "Atila the Hun" would then ravage it and fill it with huge product photos and blurbs screaming "FREE! Toothbrush with Y2k Software".

I ended up like most other reptued copywriters in the world, with a portfolio full of unpublished work, but learnt the most important truth about the world of sales and marketing. That this four letter word starting with F was the most abused (not abusive) word in the advertising language and nine times out of ten, brought in an obscene amount of sales for the brand using it (no matter if the brand in question is called fcuk!).

The years that passed amidst all this were another four and they also included in them, the King of all my attempts at the CAT. This was in Dec 1997 for the IIMs' MBA program to commence in Jun 1998 and this time I had an invitation for a group discussion and interview from the Indian Institue of Management, Bangalore. I can never forget those two days in my life. The night before that I spent at the IIMB hostel and the historic day of the GD and PI itself.
Clearly this was my best performance in the CAT becasue I had got invited by the second best institute in the country. So I had decided to give it my everything and spent a whole month post the invitation poring over several newspapers, journals and marketing magazines updating myself with the latest happenings the world around. I even wrote down several questions that I could be asked in the personal interview and possible answers that made most sense given my then profession and most importantly, given my title of Senior Copywriter.

But I guess I more than answered my question myself there, because most of the 35 minute personal interview was spent by the esteemed professors of management trying to convince me that I really did not need an MBA at that time in my career. "You are in a creative field and you seem to be enjoying that too, so why would you want to throw all that away to do an MBA, when that may not even be what you want to do in life", they said (they had to get a couple of sips of water in between that long sentence though).

I left the interview with that all too familiar feeling of uncertainty. Maybe...

A month later IIM Bangalore told me I was waitlisted and would know in another month if I was in or out. Legend has it that the wait list was never activated but as there is no data to evidence that, it is only right that it stays a legend.

"They are really right. You are a right-brained person", and "you don't need an MBA to be a successful copywriter', were only some of the consoling messages I received from well-wishers. "The IIMs do not deserve you", was by and far the best one I ever heard. While I spent the next four or five months adding more such phrases to my copywriter's repertoire of clever lines, there came an opportunity for my mother to utter a line that seemed to really change things for the better.

My biggest client at Imageads and Communications (where I was Senior Copywriter in Chennai) decided to hire me as their Corporate Communications executive in Sep 1998. DSQ Software Limited was then the seventh largest IT company in India (according to the then recently published Dataquest annual survey of Top 20 Indian IT companies). And at more than twice the salary that Imageads was paying me, it seemed just the right place and right job for an Electronics and Communications Engineer who had a passion for writing.

"Now I am not unhappy that you did not get into the IIMs", my mother said. She couldn't have been more right at that time because my lifestyle did change quite a bit in the next few months per se. Jeans and t-shirts were replaced by formals and ties at work everyday, my first email address was created and my cute little red moped (with a 50cc engine) was upgraded to a sleek black 100cc motorcycle (It remained my faithful servant for ten years and my favourite possession).

Why? I even met my wife to be within a month of joining DSQ. We were happily married two years later but what happened on our first anniversary was what made our wedding date historic, though in a strange sort of manner. We were married on the 11th of September, 2000.
Those two years were also the years that transformed an Engineer who could write into a marketing professional who had set up and was heading a unique offshore sales support operation, working 24 x 5, supporting geographies from Australia to the USA. Clever lines and the artwork as the medium of reaching out to the cusotmer made way to a series of activities that included market research, telephone lead generation, key target identfication, presentation and proposal support.

The ability to dream up the ideas by oneself transformed into the ability to build, organize, train and manage teams and to get them to deliver the promised results. Creative deadlines became sales targets, the copywriter's clipboard was gone and MS XL spreadsheets took charge. Sheer creative brilliance was transformed into strategic planning and disciplined execution. The one thing that continued to flow though was the adrenaline.

Operations management experience eventually paved the way to a befitting title (though Operations Manager sounds so much like saying A for Apple). It also brought with it a change of industry from IT outsourcing to business process outsourcing, a change of company from DSQ to iSeva Systems Pvt Ltd and a change of location from Chennai to Bangalore. Jun 2002 to oct 2007 saw many more changes, like my first steps beyond Indian soil, an exposure to the intricate world of Mortgage Banking, a return to Chennai and finally, a transfer to the USA with Sutherland Global Services.

One thing that had not changed however was the desire to get the MBA and to get it from the IIMs. Sometime during the run to Oct 2007, there was a 4th and a 5th attempt at CAT. They were obviously not well prepared approaches, as the results showed, but clearly, the desire was still burning...

...to be continued.