Cure by Ayurveda!!!

thefreedictionary.com/ deifines Ayruveda as "The ancient Hindu science of health and medicine". So isn't it kind of intuitive that one gets a cure when one resorts to Ayurveda?

Again, what on earth does Ayurveda have to do with my Executive MBA at Columbia? There is a 100% probability that you will find out the answer, given that you read this entire piece. Though going by the number of comments on the 4 pieces I have already written on this blog, the probability of anyone reading it seems to be ZERO! (Because, probability can never be negative something and hey, by the way, just like Ayurveda, ZERO was also one of India's ancient inventions. Jai Ho!)

Let me come back to how Ayurveda is related to my MBA. I have indeed been unwell in the last couple of days. Nothing physical, mostly in the mind but it has been a sickness that has developed over the last 4 weeks. I was fine when I left school after class on Saturday 31 Jan 2009 and even managed my 5% complete clog on Feb 9, 2009, even while I was preparing for a Statistics mid-term exam.

Oops! Did I say Statistics mid-term? Because that is where it all began. I have always been good at Math and when I started the MBA program, Stats seemed to be one of the subjects I started out well on. I even aced the quiz at the end of the residence week. So I was really excited about this mid-term and started preparing for it with gusto. I went over all the material for the exam, worked out practice problems and even the practice mid-term examinations. My learning team was supposed to meet the night before the exam and cram for the same. And I was feeling mighty confident that I had prepared well and even volunteered to help some of my teammates to prepare for the exam. When Friday the 13th dawned, I walked tall to school. Never in my life had I walked in for an examination this confident. At school and at undergrad, I always ended up studying less than what was supposed to be covered and would be studying up to the last minute before I entered the examination hall. Not this time, because Stats was my cup of tea. Or so I thought.

When I saw the exam for the first time at 845 AM, I was shocked that it was nothing like the practice mid-terms. While the practice mid-terms had had 12 to 15 problems at the max, this one had 28 problems and a 56 point grade scale. I was overwhelmed a little but my confidence led me to move forward. I was fine even when I took a bio-break 1 hour after the start of the exam, for I had finished 11 questions and I would have imagined that was a decent pace. Maybe I must not have even taken that break, becuase it was downhill from there. The questions started getting tougher and before I realized it was time and I had attempted questions worth only 45 or 46 of the 56 max points.

I walked out of the hall thoroughly disappointed. The fact that 119 other students felt that this exam had been really tough was no consolation. While a lot of people were upset at the system for a tough exam, I was sore with myself. Though I was good at Math in general, the world of probability had always been an elusive realm to me. It has been the thorn in my foot in several competitive examinations including the GMAT. So when I started this MBA, I told myself that I wanted to ace this course. I wanted to prove to myself that I had the ability to do this right. Yet, here I was, right after a mid-term exam that counted for 30% of the grade, totally having missed that opportunity. Once again, I had proved myself wrong.

The other 2 classes that day did not even matter because of my anger and frustration. That night, when I was alone at my hotel on Broadway and 96th, I mustered enough courage to tell myself that I needed to put the Statistics test behind me and move on. I was even feeling better as I arrived at school the next day. The classes seemed to fly by and when the Stats professor that afternoon showed us the distribution of marks for the previous year's class on a similar midtern, it gave me some hope. I knew I had answered only about 45 of the 56 points, but if I was as confident as I thought I was, I would end up in the 40s and I would have still been on the bright side. I left school that evening, with a heavy heart, promising to myself that I would work harder do better in the upcoming Strategy final and the Accounting mid-term which were due in the next couple of weekends.

I knew the next 2 weeks were going to be challenging with 1 exam to complete in the upcoming weekend and another to prepare for, especially given that I was slated to be the whole 2 weeks at a client's site participating in a major re-engineering exercise. Sure enough, my work took away most of what I had in terms of energy and the first week was a washout on course work. The case study for the Strategy final had been uploaded to the web-based student system on Thu morning, but the first time I even got to it was Saturday afternoon. A birthday party on Saturday afternoon made sure that my delivery of the final exam would go right into Sunday and a dinner engagement with a friend's family that day forced me to go down to the wire on submitting the exam. It was 3 minutes to midnight when I submitted it.

At the dawn of the second week, I was quiet happy with my ability to have so skilfully managed all my personal and family commitments and still complete my Strategy final exam on time. The first blow came when our learning team met Monday night for our weekly routine and I heard some of the others' answers to the problem. I realised that while I had certainly done a good job of analyzing the case, my final recommendation on the case was totally absurd and the root cause of that was that I had not studied the financials of the company carefully. Not only was that a blow to my "Strategic Planning" exultation but it also was a sign of danger looming large, given that I had the Financial Accounting exam coming up that very Friday.

Work only got tougher in the 2nd week of the re-engineering project and even though my well-educated wife helped by teaching me the fundamentals of accounting, as of the night of Wednesday that week, I was on a sticky-wicket for sure. I went into Thursday with a heavy mind. Luck was on my side and our visit at the client side was wrapped up that evening and I still seemed to have some energy. A determined effort to be prepared for the accounting examination saw me get past the basics into some unchartered territory that night and after 3 hours of sleep and reading through the bus journey from Mt Laurel to NY city, it was clearly de javu. I rewound my life 15 to 19 years and this is the same thing I had done on 58 different examination days over 4 years of college life - preparing for an examination until the minute I enter the hall, and still not covering all the material.

The results were evident. I walked out 3 hours later, feeling that all-too-familiar thing I had felt on those 58 occasions over 4 years - "I could have done better". I did feel good about the fact that I had worked through all the journal entries and the T-Accounts patiently on the 1st problem and got it right (which had never happened during practice), but that was hardly any consolation because I would certainly not be any better from a grade perspective on this exam either.

The real blow came after classes yesterday (Friday, 27 Feb 09). The stats grades were out. And I had a pathetic 50%. I was destroyed. I tried to put up a sportive outlook in front of my classmates at an evening event but clearly, I was shattered.

Even as I have ambled through today (it is 1159 PM on Saturday, Feb 28, 2009 and by the time I finish and post this, it may be the next month!), I have been in deep thought about what have been the reasons for my debacle in month 2. As I thought hard, it became clear to me that while I had my own excuses on how work had been etc., I just had not put in the hours.

Ever since I began this application process, everyone has told me that there would be no time for anything else once one started the program. It had to be work and school and sometimes, even family took a backseat. Here I was, watching my favorite TV shows, attending birthday parties and dinners and then retiring early on the excuse that I was worn out. And I expected to ace my examinations. I had actually challenged the opinion that one would not even have time for family, let alone other indulgences and slowly, but surely, I was beginning to realize that it was absolutely true. Negative points to me for not learning from others' wisdom.

I am staying back in NY tonight so our learning team can meet up tomorrow and work on a presentation due next week. As I walked back from the subway station on 96th street to my hotel this evening, one thing was clear to me. In the Executive MBA classroom, everyone is in there because he or she is smart. The capability is even. The difference is between who puts in the hours and who doesn't.

Here I was in NY city on a Saturday night and numerous were the options that this wonderful city threw open to me. But after considering them for only a fraction of a second, I told myself, "I am going to put in the hours tonight". But it was not to be before I had had some food for thought. In all my sorrow, I had not taken good care of my stomach and it was screaming for attention. I quickly dropped off my bag in my hotel room and was back at the front desk asking the attendant where I could find an Indian restaurant in the neighborhood. "There is one right behind us, but it is vegetarian", he said. "It is called Ayenda or something". That was perfect for the South Indian brahmin boy and off I was in the direction of Ayenda.

Left on 94th and left again on Amsterdam and I was facing it. The front-desk attendant was right about "Ay" but none more than that, for the name of the small but elegant restaurant I was facing was "Ayurveda". It was not crowded so I could choose where I wanted to be seated. The choice I did not have was from the menu because there was no menu and all this restaurant offered was a traditional Indian dinner on a "Thali". A generous serving of white rice, with 2 entrees, a soup, a salad, yogurt, pickles, papad and several chutneys, followed by a delectable rice kheer was the perfect answer to a distressed man's soul. 20 mins later I burped.

It is almost 4 hours since I had that meal and I have also drowned 2 cups of coffee in an attempt to stay awake. Not much has happened in terms of putting in the hours, but I feel better and a lot more certain of what I must do from here. And I am not talking about turning off the lights and going to sleep.

Ayurveda (on Amsterdam between 94th and 95th) certainly provided me the temporary fix. Whether I will stick to my plan about putting in the hours or not is still to be seen. But then, that may well be the difference between me and this EMBA...

It's already Mid-term!

It is 320 PM on Monday, Feb 9, 2009 and I have no other meetings for the rest of the day. So I wonder if I should quickly dive into my Statistics textbook and start preparing for the mid-term examination that is due Friday the 13th (what a horror?).Alternately, I wonder whether I should prepare for all the client review meetings I have tomorrow. Oops! There goes my email alert. Be right back!

Am back. Clearly, the early pangs in the EMBA are decision-making and time management (what a cliche, huh?). EMBA life began on 09 Jan 09 (exactly one month before today and sorry for the way I get excited about such obvious math calc). Orientation lasted 2 days at Columbia Universtity's Morningside Heights campus in uptown Manhattan, New York city. Wow, I must say, the campus looks GORGEOUS when it snows.

The official start of EMBA classes was during First Residence Week. 123 high-power executives marooned in a snow-covered resort and conference center, in a middle-of-nowhere place called Palisades, NY. 9 hours of classes a day accompanied by endless (or should I say limitless) food, staying up all night on assignments and group work, a chair massage just when you felt like you were starting to wear out, a game of monoploy that was not played for fun and a statistics quiz to wrap. That's residence week for you at Columbia Business School's EMBA program. I look forward to Second Residence Week in May 09.

Time management was not much of a challenge at residence week, given that not much of it was left to be managed. Decision-making was even easier. 123 organizations (including some duplicates like GE and IBM that send a high number of candidates to school every year) had been informed that these high-power officers were going on vacation or to school (depending on how supportive their organization was). Cell phones and laptops were to be truned OFF during class hours. I must say at this time that my company has been very supportive and people have rallied around me to help me go through school.

It was the 2 weeks after that were real killers. Continuous travel on work, 2 projects going live in 2 different countries on the same day, while I was in a totally different location, trying to kick-off proceedings with a new client we had signed-off on. That I got to class on Jan 30 for the first official weekend at school (which happens to be at Warren Hall on Amsterdam Avenue at 116th) was a huge bonus, let alone doing well in a 5 minute group presentation on "Strategy" for a leading semiconductor manufacturing company.

The last 10 days have been better (9 to be precise!). But just so I make it clear, early struggles for me with the EMBA program have been time management and setting priorities.

There are many perspectives. "You got to pick your battles", some classmates said. I agree (wise guy that I am!). But I relised how wrong I could have been when the results came out for the Statistics quiz and the Strategy group assignment and I saw how each of the 123 people were fighting for Honors!

"It's the Network", said some others (classmates and well wishers). I agree (with even more conviction this time). But beware my friend, you are part of the network because you got some meat to stay in it, not just good looks and smooth talk (like I have either of those in the first place!!!).

Professors have a completely different view. "Forget the math", they say (and there goes the only skill I relied on my enitre life!). "It's the concept behind the math, it's how you understand what to use where and what you can do with the information." I agree (vehemently this time). OK, I got the concept prof, you bet I did, so will you pardon my grade and allow me to move on to the next semester? You know what answer I got, don't you? Why else do you think I marked off 5 PM to 8 PM on my calendar to study for the Stats mid-term and hung a do-not-disturb sign on my msn and gtalk messengers?

What I really think has stuck is the Associate Dean's words. "Don't wish away these months", he said, "make full use of the 20 months and enjoy them".

Oops! 5% of my EMBA is over. Only 95% remains (obvious math again!). I don't want to miss a minute. So let me get back to studying. At least, it is already past 5 PM and I don't need to worry about work until 8 AM tomorrow morning.