Fall for what you believe in. What you stand for.
Stand there. Even when your feet are trembling.
Wanting to run. Escape from that moment.
Don’t.
Stay. Experience it.

Fall fighting.
So hard, it hurts.
Teaches you to get up again.
But fall with your beliefs secure in your hands.

Bear the anguish.
Your head held high.

So you never fall in your own eyes.
For no antiseptic can cure that.

• Firstly, and most obviously, the salary jump. Nowhere else will you get a salary jump disproportionate to its true value. I mean if two years of chilling, a few projects with ‘real companies’, some supposedly enriching summer internship, and a lot of late nights can hike your current salary by 4 times, its well worth it. To borrow a thought, If you are going to get fucked at work anyway, might as well get paid bloody well for it!

• It will get you an entry in Investment Banking, or Capital Advisory.  So what if you understand nothing about it. No one who joined it really did, or had much interest for it.  It just happened to be the place where the money was.

• The extra salary will come in handy for a hell of a lot of things. Especially the number of loans you’ll pick up immediately after college, or have already picked up.

• Not only that, it will help you fund the increase in alcohol consumption cost to cope with the non-sense you’ll still have to bear at work.

• It will give you two more years to chill, be yourself, do your things, get drunk, get fuckin smashed, not worry about performance appraisals or client briefings.

• Of your batchmates who did it!
  • The barely average ones, who you thought you would be able to outpace on any reasonable day with your eyes closed, managed to do an MBA while you DID have your eyes closed. And now give gyaan on how a Masters is a must!
  • The intelligent ones, who did it, and are now in a position of envy, simply because they took a plunge that you still haven’t taken.
    

• All the frustrating, incompetent managers you have had, who knew zilch, as well as that new bloke who joined in last month, knew squat, yet earned in 7 digits had one thing in common – They were MBAs.

• You’re an IIT’ian (IIM ABC aapke liye hi banaa tha). Or an engineer whose had enough of engineering (Koi na koi A-list B-School le lega boss), or a CA who believes that just accountancy is not enough, you need managerial skills (Haha)

• It will shut your family up. Most of them really don’t care. They are just looking for a conversation starter – What are you doing nowadays… What are your future plans… Are you not going to study further? Yet once known you have no MBA plans, it’ll be brought up everytime, and you shall be counseled on the importance of Post Graduation. MBA, and how everybody is doing it.

• Or probably you’re being pressurized for marriage and want to offset it by a couple of years.

• Both of which make you want to get away from home, and you really can’t have a better excuse than wanting to do further studies. Better still, you can do a foreign Masters and get ‘international exposure’.

• It is probably the last chance you’ll have to interact on a regular basis with people you share common interests with, and not common competitive goals.

• It is also most likely to be the last place you’ll have a pool of single women/men. And a lot of time to ‘get to know them better’.

• And in case, you don’t get lucky on campus, you can make use of Instant recognition: From ‘that lukha’, you suddenly become the dude who’s in IIM B, and that’s how you’ll be referred to behind your back, called, leg pulled about, and pointed out by random strangers from across a crowded room. And hey, it’s bloody cool, and don’t deny – you love it!

• Consequently, it will add depth to your opinions. What was earlier utter non-sense will suddenly be considered valuable insight, and unwanted suggestions will become considerable inputs.

• How to make PPT presentations in 10 minutes is not something anyone will teach you at work.

• Nor will you learn how to present them as a product of great thought and weeks of effort anywhere else.

• It shall equip you with skill sets that make deadlines irrelevant, since they’d have passed probably long before you even get to work on that damned project. It will add exceptional value to your ability to do nothing, and yet look busy at it.

• 3 months of CAT/GMAT studies really is a positively better option in front of unending months of office related embarrassment.

• Lastly, you have been positively inspired by Five Point Someone, or Anything for you Ma’m or seen 3 Idiots, and its too late to get into Engineering, but you want to work hard to be ‘kaabil, and not kaamyaab’.

[Issued in public interest. This article is written by a Non MBA who currently shows no signs of crossing the bridge, for he is unable to find a reason convincing enough to do so.]

The first one was ‘Chale Chalo‘: The making of Lagaan. Probably the most telling documentary I’ve seen. The toil of the soil. The entire gamut of emotions a human can experience - the will to rough it out, lose, win, the pain, the ecstasy, despair, helplessness, and delight. The lunacy of film-making. The idealism, and the heartbreak. The dreams and the nightmares. It was an experience that somewhere makes you realise that there can be no substitute for pure, unadulterated ground hardwork. I urge you to see this documentary. It’ll definitely leave an imprint. Something for you to chew on.

The second was shared by Bhavin: Harsha Bhogle at IIM (A) . Bits and pieces of this video are available on facebook, but this is the entire monologue. He touches some very pertinent points about practical approaches to your profession, and how one can observe and learn. The reference points are relatable, the humour-characteristic. There is much to learn from it.

If you have the time, I urge you to watch both these videos. They’ll give you food for thought.

Control over my language I’m losing.

This is to constantly remind myself,

I need to stop abusing!

It definitely can’t be taught,

But when you really need an answer,

Listen carefully, silence speaks a lot.

Take time to plan and create,

Take time to be and do,

Its time that’s power to you.

Passing with time, only boring and duller.

Leave it to circumstance to spice it up,

Mix up the music, fill it with color.

Where coming second is falling from grace.

Can anyone confirm…

…slow and steady still wins the race?

A medium to put across the sweet and bitter.

But one’s daily thoughts, or what can be said one-to-one,

How can one be comfortable sharing with an unknown world on twitter?

or in it – and going strong,

Heart take, heart ache,

There’s always a Rahman song.