Revenge of The Communicator

Unlearn, reinforce and learn. The three objectives of the communication class. Students in our class also make sure that the learning part is not lost on the teachers as well.

Five students(including yours truly) reached at the last second as the lecture started, only to be greeted by the smiling teacher, who broke into applause along with the students, politely but effectively sending the message of reaching before time. Point taken.

Next class, I leave an assignment on tenterhooks to reach on time – sorry, two minutes before time. I even use the elevator. Irony strikes. The teacher herself is not there. Huffing, puffing and panting, the class – especially those who feel betrayed for hurrying unnecessarily – spreads the message two minutes into the lecture – welcome the teacher when she arrives. The teacher enters. Like clockwork, her entry is greeted with warm applause. Unlearn, reinforce, learn.

The teacher then proceeds to grade us on our work thus far. A point docked for anything missing. Another professor had said in one of our classes “Habits are developed in two ways – funda and danda(the stick)”. The danda to drive in the message, used to perfection. And I’d guess the teacher didn’t take the applause too kindly. Vengeance for vengeance.

Atma Gyan

Economics is the study of the problems of choice. And our courses make sure we have enough practice understanding that – we have to choose between sleeping at the hostel and completing assignments the Ctrl+C way, or burning the midnight oil and sleeping in lectures with the teacher standing right over our heads.

A graduate fresh from my engineering days, I am not used to sitting in lectures longer than 40 minutes. But here, the professors’ first impression ensures that none of the class will even dream of saying “Bas, please, Sir” anytime during the lecture. In fact, professors frequently exceed the one-and-a-half hour limit, sans any objection from the students.

Add to that the lovely monologues that some professors are prone to breaking into. One abrupt transition, from microeconomic theory, to the merits of a value system, woke up this daredevil sleeper. I had lost track of whatever was going on in class, somewhere during the professor’s speech on market value and economic profit, when I suddenly heard something about alcohol and vices. The professor was now asking “Why would you want to drink something that makes you less human?”. He even ventured into spirituality, happiness, and how to live a peaceful, complete life – one that involved shopping on Saturdays and relaxing in front of the TV on Sundays. I was instantly awake and nodding vigorously. How long had I been sleeping? And was this a dream?

One incident, though, was not a dream. Another daredevil first-bench sleeper had been dozing off every now and then for all but the last 10 minutes of the class. At the end of the class, the professor finally pauses his monologue and asks a question. Half-asleep, the student answers, and gets vehement praise. The professor praises the conflict in his mind, his thinking prowess, little aware that the conflict is nothing but a characteristic of the transition the lucky fellow’s brain was making from a soporific state to a semi-awake one. He even goes to the extent of saying that this guy will go very far in life. The rest of the class could do nothing but look on.

Life has begun thus at MDI – though it is still in its infancy. Where professors care for learning, and employ pedagogies from quizzes to monologues to interactions to cases to games. Where students value the importance of those few hours of sleep, and curse the comfortable AC rooms for inducing stupor, at the same time thanking them for protection from sultry Gurgaon. And where life actually lives.

Seeing Beyond The Self

Based on the article “The Power to See Ourselves” by Paul J. Brouwer

All of us have a tendency of seeing, hearing, and believing exactly what we want to. Take the example of a rose. We notice the flower’s petals and their delicate beauty, not the thorns on its stem. Take the example of any person who you admire. You see the good, and choose to ignore the bad. What we are able to see – the sieve, the filter we use against the world – essentially defines the way we see ourselves. Our self-concept, self-image – which defines how we interpret the world. And which is what we need to modify to be better.

Arguments to the above will include strong defences of the form “I am what I am”. But life throws up such challenges, such situations that this counter seems pathetically inadequate, ineffective, worthless. “I am what I am” is a fallacy. We change everyday.

Responsibility awaits us. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s managers. And not just at their jobs. Management of life is a task in itself. Tomorrow, the responsibility of several people will lie upon our shoulders. The question is : can we truly understand them and be responsible for them if we don’t understand ourselves?

What does understanding the self involve? In my opinion, it involves knowing and accepting where we are good, and where we are bad, so that we can change for the better. So that we can constantly challenge ourselves.

But how does one understand the self? Introspection and acceptance. Each one of us essentially knows what we are made up of – what our qualities are, and what are our shortcomings. It’s just that we generally choose to brush whatever we find wrong with ourselves under the carpet. We choose to defend whatever bad we have in terms of our needs, and individuality. A short-tempered person says he must be angry or people will not listen. A smoker knows smoking kills, but defends his need to smoke due to a stressful life. Or else we simply deny. “This is not a problem I have”. The Architect in The Matrix rightly said “Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.” I might add it is one of the commonest ones too.

At this point, I would like to warn against another very common human tendency – the tendency to believe in extremes. It is important to believe in your good and recognize your bad, for everyone lies in the grey spectrum. People can be incredibly self-loathing or narcissistic when analysing themselves. Constructive appraisal from reliable sources is what helps further clarify the understanding of the self.

So once we are done with self-analysis, how do we proceed? By simply motivating the self to change. There should be willingness to change for the better. Easier said than done, I know. But there’s no other way. I’ve found with my personal experiences and with those of others that we change only when we are exposed to the adverse consequences of what we do. It’s always better if we can recognize the potential consequences in advance and act before damage. Damage can sometimes be irreparable, and the scars of a failing can haunt a person for life.

Self-improvement is again a tricky thing, for people can get obsessed with every little fault of theirs. But excess of even a good thing – trying to change for the better in this case – is bad. So don’t nag yourself into becoming pessimistic, albeit ready for change – recognize and change where it is actually needed.

The ball is always in our court. Our life, our decisions. Change will happen – it is inevitable. It is up to us as to whether we want life run its course and change us, or step up and do the needful.

The Bottom of the Pyramid

A strong foundation is at the crux of every durable construction. Strong fundamentals, similarly, are essential to education and learning. Learning can truly be achieved by understanding what components is the topic being taught or studied made up of. Without the base, the bottom, of the pyramid, the apex cannot be reached.

The importance of fundamentals is reinforced time and again by professors. What exactly will one do with knowing the formulae that define microeconomic theory without knowing what an economy is? How will one be successful at understanding accounts of a company without knowing what assets mean in the financial context? What use is knowing 5 different models of human behavioural analysis when one doesn’t know how to define his own behaviour? How can we hold positions of responsibility and lead organizations without knowing what a manager exactly does?

The core, the definitions, the simplest meaning of every term is of utmost importance. To understand marketing, we must know what a market is, what affects the consumer’s choice, and how we can cater better to the consumer’s needs. To know what a manager does, we must define his roles, responsibilities, and activities. To understand economics, we must understand how our entire life is nothing but a set of problems of choice.

A simple way of putting it – whatever technical knowledge we gain can only be assimilated if we have understood each and every aspect to a degree that we can explain everything we know to an absolute layman without any jargon. The same concept, the same knowledge, when we explain it, should be understood as well by the paanwala as by the Vice-President of a multinational corporation. And that knowledge can truly be imbibed in the way we think, act, and function, by relating it to practical examples that are relevant to the implementation of the knowledge – which is where the analysis of case studies plays a significant role.

As students, our responsibility, our duty is to imbibe fully whatever is taught. As thought leaders, we must think as to what implications the knowledge has and introduce new ways of interpreting the knowledge. As change masters, we are responsible for challenging it, and introducing new knowledge and avenues of thought.