Chandigrah --- Bhopal --- Chennai. the journey continues.

After a brief cup of coffee you want to read something. You shrug the newspaper off after peeping through a couple of stories and finding them about the same old stuff. Sex, violence, threats and politics. You look out of the window and see the trail of the city calling you bye-bye. You are back into the countryside. Speed is picking up and it feels that it's hot outside. Suddenly you get the feeling that you are in hills. Not the one with snow falls and deodar trees rather, it's the pale looking hills of Chattisgarh symbolising the hard life which the people living in this part go through every day. Endless spaces of trees without life and ground covered with sunburnt leaves. The color of soil is brown and i think they more resemble rocks. Few years back this use to be the part of Madhya Pradesh state and then a political storm was created over the mismanagement of funds alloted for tribal welfare. It took the shape of mass movement of Adivasis for the demand of a separate state. Well, after years of agitation and struggle they finally got their new state. Now, five years after the creation, the per capita almost remains the same, very few investment opportunities were created and the first chief minister and his son became famous for dirty political gimmicks.

The rocks standing in the background tells you the story of the life here which is always demanding and posing new challenges to you. You bow your head to the gritty and hard working Adivasi and your train takes you further. Small green plants appear in the background. You spot a tractor ploughing the field and maybe the workers are singing a song. I ask one of my fellow passenger and he tells me that these are orange trees and a lot of migrant workers come here to work as farm help. They bring with them the memories of their land and their songs for every ocassion: peace, pain and hopes. This is Maharashtra. Nagpur is arriving.

The train stays in Maharashtra for a brief period only and you see the factories built to take the advantage of the railway network and then slowly it drifts into Andhra. It's really a long long journey ahead. You first travel Andhra from west to east and then north to south along the coastline. YOu see lakes, fisheries, kids playing in the dusk, and then coconut trees fading in the background. I have never been to Hyderabad but since the last few years have followed a lot of news stories about how Hyderabad changed from a Biryani destination to the cyber savvy town Cyberabad. Well the very thought that comes to your mind about Andhra is that "it has changed". You imagine village people using laptops to check the market prices of agricultural commodities, you think about the students finding it easy to pick up their dream jobs, you think about the sheer number of institutes for professional education that has been built here in the recent years. Suddenly you stop thinking because what you see is completely different from your imagination. Here also you see a kid selling pea nuts with his mother and when you ask him something, he says " No Hindi, No English, Telgu." My fellow passenger who is an old man in his late fifties tells me that this is also the place where largest number of farmers commit sucide due to failed crops. Due to liberal policies of the govt. a large number of micro credit companies have flourished in the region and they sometime even take the land as gurantee for the credit. When the crop fails and the farmer is unable to repay the loan, the only option left to him is to sell his land to the crediting agency and then commit sucide. The train crosses over a bridge. The river is almost dry. I imagine about one such widow and then try to correlate it with that women selling peanuts with her 6-7 years old son. Does she have any other options?

It's nine in the night. I want to sleep but, memories of the day keep coming back and i am again staring out of window looking to see some light. The train is now running along the shore, gasping for some fresh air, he too have seen much. I doze off into a sleep.

Chandigrah --- Bhopal --- Chennai.

India is really a country full of diversities. From the snow clad mountains of Kashmir to the mystic confluence of sea and ocean in Kanyakumari, you see people speaking different language, havingdifferent food habbits, different way of living but yet tied with that common thread of unity. Geographically, the monsoon wind might be characterised by the one following the eastern treck and one taking the western course, but the spirit of India flows effortlessly from North to South and East to West without changing faces.

As the train reaches it's peek speed, you will see the patches of green moving backwards as if someone is waiting for them at home and they are in hurry. The road follows you for a while and then suddenly bend to give way to the watery canals. The puppets standing in the wheat fields gaze at you in surprise with the feeling that if he is standing still then why the the world is moving. This is march and the wheat crop is waiting to be harvested. You see a couple of shadows working hastily in their fields weeding out the unwanted part of the crop. Whatever the season may be, Punjab is always green.

As the train crosses the numerous bridges you again see the road catching up with you. This is Haryana, the land with the highest per capita income for farmers. The land which has been the battlefield since the time immemorial. Mahabharata was fought at Kurukshetra (it's said that in some parts of Kurukshetra the color of the soil is deep red), Prithviraj Chauhan was held captive by Gori at Tarain (Now Tarawadi, a small town near Karnal), Panipat saw three bloody battles. It witnessed the rise of Akbar as the emperor of India and also the fall of Marathas in the hand of Ahmed Sah Abdali. This is the land which was plundered, looted and had suffered the tortures inflicted by the brutal invaders but the spirit has remained unbeaten.

The train slowly settles into a nice speed and your body now becomes addicted to the rhythmic movement of the train as if, it's slowly closing your eyes and making you go into a sound sleep. You suddenly wake up with a jerk. The train has stopped, you try to see out of window and all you can see is the smoke coming out of thatched huts and dots of lights coming out of tiny bulbs hanging around bamboo sticks. This is the outskirts of Delhi. As the city grow bigger the size of the houses becomes smaller and when you reach Delhi you are greetedwith stinky smell (people and animals have no choice then to deficate in open), pigs and goats competing for space with naked children and people with bare minimum on their bodies, and women folk and girls picking rags. If this doesn't give you kicks in your stomach then perhaps you don't care enough for your fellow Indians. You most probably do not belong to the common crowd and you are among the lucky few who are spared the pain of making their ends meet. Anyways without being much philosphical i think i should keep moving ahead with my journey, like my train.

The speed of train goes to the crawling minimum and it feels that the train is moving forcefully. As the pilot don't want you to miss a split second of this very very moving scene of seeing the man mastering the art of survival in bare minimum. You can't really call this life, this must be called survival. Feeling pity for the children and then for the other people you now focus on your main goal, 'Changing the train'. Delhi is arriving and you also have now to worry about the safety of your luggage. Okay so here We are in Delhi and have around half an hour to change our train. After arguing with the porter for the fare we decided to ferry our luggage (which is not heavy though but when you have facilities you tend to become addicted to it) across the platforms.

It's night and the best thing you can do is to doze off. I went into slumber thinking about that poor child who was singing and jumping (well he was trying to dance actually) with his brother playing an improvised musical instrument (something like guitar made of neem wood with strings made of electric wiring and of miniature size), to wake up with thoughts about my interview for MBA course. But again this weird thought came to my mind that would that child ever be able to go to some school and then to some college and then will he ever be able to make some choices for him? Will he ever be able to support a family? I don't know the answers for these question and I try to concentrate for the questions which are most likely to be asked to me during my MBA Interview. What are your goals in life ? Your hobbies? Your strengths and weaknesses? Your dreams? Now i am deep into thoughts. Isn't my dream is similar to the dream of that beggar child? Like getting a night's sleep without worrying for tomorrow but then this another thought comes to my mind. Will he dare to dream ever?

The train is now slowing down. The road again is running with the same pace. Speeding up, slowing down, about to pull to a stop. The slums have again reappeared on the horizon. It must be a big city. I ask the pantry worker. He replies in accented English. It's Bhopal.

Superstitious Me.

I had this subconscious feeling that saturdays and the number three are lucky for me and well this has to do something with my superstitious character. Anyways the news of my final selection for PGDBM course of IFMR came as a sweet surprise as i wasn't expecting the results before two weeks. It shows that why South India has developed at a rate faster than North India. These guys really understand the value of time and therefore qualifies as the better professionals. As a matter of fact, If IIMs can delay the results by a weeks time then we can very well forget about the rest of the pack. Institutes like IIFT announced the written scores 3 months after holding the test. Symbiosis didn't have a photo identity of the thousands of applicants who took their aptitude test this year and FMS which takes only the written scores into consideration, took more than 3 weeks to filter out the top 700 out of the possible 20000.

Here we can see that how marketing and branding can do wonders to even the reputation of an educational institute. Where the insitutes like IIPM, AMITY and RAI are riding high on the waves of advertising campaigns these better South Indian B-Schools are just hanging around the horizon. Will write about IFMR campus at sometime later.

Coming back to the numerology, this was my third interview and after failing miserably at the first and second time this was indeed a case of being "third time lucky" and though the results were out on friday i got to hear it on saturday. IFMR, here I come.

One Failure is MISTAKE , two Failures are a BLUNDER and three is surely FATE.

Well, i discovered this adage just last night in a bid to bring some comfort to my hurted soul. Ever since i started my B-School hunt i have faced only one problem: Problem of complacency. When i started my preparations i had certain example with me (role models) Success stories of persons who are non other than someone i know and have observed very closely in the yesteryears. I think i am a bit priviledged to have seen all these success stories in the making and if you wish then you can draw a lot of inspiration from them. I have this story of Mihir Diwakar who was my classmate till high school and he dropped out because he was finding it hard to strike a balance between his cricket practise sessions and schooling. He played a lot of cricket in those years 1995-2000. He was also a member of the under 19 cricket team which won the world cup in SriLanka. He don the Indian cap with the likes of Kaif and Yuvraj in that series. Then he was selected for the Bihar team and played with the likes of Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Well i don't know where he is now but his was truly a case, where one hanged his hat just because of the derth of opportunities.

Now the second example is of the latest Indian sensation Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Mention his name and your memory gets overflooded with the powerfully hit sixes and fours of Pakistani pacemen. He was an year senior to me in higher secondary and when i was in twelve'th standard he got selected for the Bihar team. Well, his residence was about 200 yards from the school premises so one could easily watch him during one of those practice sessions. And Dhoni was quite a hit with the girls of our class so, usually his friends, who wanted to take advantage of this fact would come on a round with him to the school more often. I have some vivid memories of Dhoni 'the cricketer', Dhoni 'the senior', Dhoni 'the sportsmen' and Dhoni 'the hero' but i don't think that sharing them here would make any difference to the feeling i am having right now. The significant thing is that a young school boy coming from a middle class family dared to dream big and despite of all the odds flooding his way he finally earned his rightful place in this world.

Coming back to the main point, it was pretty natural for me to dream big and i really did dream big. I had some realistic goals in my mind when i set out for realising my MBA dream. 99 percentile in CAT is completely achievable and there is no any magic wand for that except to work hard and practice harder. There i slipped a bit courtesy the environment at my college which makes you feel at times and often that MBA is something out of this world and instead one should work towards getting a work permit to work in airports, dhabas or drive refrigerated trucks in some alien corner of this world. Well i still knew it by heart that i can crack the CAT. CAT was not at all a dissapointment in the end. I feel that it was a more like a learning experience which taught me a lot many things. The real disspointment was SYmbiosis National Aptitude Test. And the adage i wrote at the top of this page was to absorb the shock out of this SNAP TEST.

Firstly, i appeared for the test and thought it was a cakewalk. I completed the paper and rechecked the OMR sheet for the correct markings. I expected something about 105-110 marks and what i got was much lesser than what i expected. The same problem was faced with several other students but one could do very little when he is hanging with that loose thread of optimism that maybe tomorrow i'll be accepted by this institute.

Then came the shortlisting. I wonder that premiere institutes like SCMHRD try to hide behind the 'profile based calls' crap. What's the importance of an aptitude test when you still think that a person scoring higher marks is not fit for the course because of some mistakes of his past. Well i understand that there are a lot of variables involved in the selection procedure but I wish if these varibales would be brought to light ever. So, that a student can take an informed decision about joining or not joining an institute. Another example is the extended deadlines and spreading wrong rumours regarding cutoffs for increasing the number of applicants and thus minting more money out of the pocket of the students community.

And then the third stage. I was interviewed by SIIB and i found that the case studies were same as they gave three days ago to the students of Kolkata. The group task was same for everyone in India and i wonder that are these so called professors really aware of the speed of information in an electronic age? Perhaps No. The interview questions were also more or less same for everyone and so were the topics for essay writing. Well, what have happened is that the students appearing on the second day and onwards and student appearing at Bangalore and Pune centre were in a better position to outsmart the candidates of New Delhi and Kolkata. So, the question arised that how they decided about the merit list. Isn't the whole process is something like a written test where everybody gets the same question paper but a group gets it on the first day and the rest of the groups on the subsequent days? Well then it's the simple mathematics of chance. Anyways the final result is that those who have got the opportunities are feeling lucky and this blog will be considered the effort of a loser and that's partly true.

Well, not completely true as i know that i deserve my rightful place in this world and my moment of glory is still to come. My soul is hurt but my spirits are still untouched by the cheap stunts of few people who don't know what they are doing. I think i am true when i say that One failure is a mistake, two failures are a blunder and three is surely FATE. The feeling of rejection can be very painful but friends if you have failed once twice or even thrice then take my words don't loose your hope. May the FATES have stored something better for you.