ISB MBA?? Before the end terms

I feel lost. I feel inadequate. I feel like life is rushing past and leaving me gasping in its wake. I am trying hard to catch up but I just can’t.

Remember BW aka Beggar Woman. Well here is a sequel, or first a refresher. Well she was a pretty little thing(always helps to put things in perspective, and this puts it in a way in which nothing else can), a little lost, well lets say very lost, but then I have a soft spot for BW so cant be too harsh...

Its been long since I read a book , there is just sooo much to catch up on, Istanbul , Snow(Pamuk), Umbert Eco, Pratchett , my manna, Shataram, all perched tantalizingly on the teak wood shelf while I connive for project teams, tussle for company projects and dream up uninspiring business plans .And I do have to study. Though that I gave up a lost cause the last term.

So BW had been suitably catharsized with the chance encounter with the witch and that had quelled her queenly ambitions for sometime, and she decided to pursue more constructive hobbies like learning how to read. Not that she trusted books anymore after having been painfully betrayed by one but it always helps to research your enemy (I should be calling this a competitive advantage but I really cant bring myself to)

BW had become an avid reader, and was currently reading the biographies of jack, snow white and all her old cronies. She kicked herself for not knowing all that before. She could so easily have avoided being duped(refer BW blog for the uninitiated)

BW came to the life changing conclusion. It’s all there if you just know where to look. I mean which book to look into.

Knowledge is an overpowering emotion. It instills in you a feeling of power, of confidence, sometimes misplaced, but overpowering nevertheless. And you feel ambitious. So BW decided she could still pursue her dreams. Only now that she was a beauty with brains (as she liked to call herself, a queen seemed too ornamental a career goal. Also she had been following the news, and it seemed that the place was abuzz with the coming of a new factory which had people moving around with video cameras and shooting her friends. Animations they called it. And they even paid you for it.

And this was just one of the many things the corporation did. They were into a zillion other activities, all of which sounded very exciting to our freshly minted scholar. She decided the future lay in that corporation, and the people who worked in them. They had a funny name for them. Many Busybodies Active (MBA).

And I walk past the corridors of the library looking for that elusive book. Its exam time here. Everywhere u see groups of people huddled together, channeling their collective energies to solve such metaphysical mysteries of life as DMOP( Decision Models Using Optimization), MarkStrat(Marketing Strategy), CompStrat(Competitive Strategy) andGLEC(Global Economics), the 4 courses we have this term.
Vocabulary seems to be limited to a permutation of these 4 terms with prepositions thrown in half heartedly.
Nothing instills comradeship more than imminent exams.

Its raining outside and that makes me calmer. It seems to wash away for the time being all insecurities. The sky outside is a deep, dark musty grey flecked with specks of startling white...the last valiant attempt of the sun before it succumbs. Deep dark musty grey but now flecked with more somber shades, still white but duller , calmer now, as if triumphant but tired and unsure of conquered glory .The clouds crawl through the landscape, slowly very slowly , lazily, hazily like grey moss, like a dirty stream listlessly bubbling through the grass..the grass is green painfully so, blatantly green, it resolutely attacks the stream as if wishing to smother it under its ever proliferating expanse, and now the stream is lost...but the grass is darker too, moist and murky, as if suppressing an ugly secret, and unsure of the imbibed glory.

BW sits by the stream, now lost in tangled undergrowth. She feels the chill of the wind but its a pleasant sensation. From the distance she sees the cold hard grills of the factory. They look forbidding.

But she wants be famous so she sets about her education. As she knows, its all there if you only know where to look. But its sundown and she sees the workers teeming out of the factory. She sees them looking in her direction, cool appraising glances and hears snatches of “brand repositioning, she would make a good seductress, we need to cater to that niche segment”, or “oh don’t u see, she is the perfect helpless waif, ideal for the singles!!!, they are a growing segment after all”, “it’s a perfect strategic fit, murder and revenge, who wants tht Shrek hogwash anymore!!!”, mushy and moronic, “ok lets conduct a conjoint for the same”..

And she is filled with misgivings.