Gulliver among the giants

 

We were the lords and ladies of all we surveyed. A campus emerging, Sphinx like, from the ruminating remnants of prehistoric stones, an open-air mess with cloistered smoke inside and a green nursery without, hundred percent compulsory attendance, a fragmented library providing excuses for bus journeys to the city, all this presaged a two year sojourn that ends with quadrangled card games and bucket-bashes. It was a time for venturesome dreams, gigantic castles in the air, generous undercurrents of apprehension and excitement, for exchanging names and qualifications and identification details with a hundred others, remembering some, forgetting some, and then trying to remember some more. A time for forays into skits and songs. Talks about the Inter-IIM. And first, tentative attempts at beating the system.

 

Thus begins our yearbook for the 1982-84 batch of MBA students at IIM, Bangalore. There were only three IIMs then. What the pass-outs lacked in numbers, they made up in arrogance. However, not all were arrogant. It’s fascinating to see what happened to the least arrogant or the meekest of them all. Did they inherit the earth?

 

Possibly the most vela guy was Das Narayan Das. Any kind of serious endeavour like studies, projects, etc. and he were as remote from each other as possible. Last time I saw him in India before he went to US was him doing some mysterious things in a swimming pool in Bombay. He was so energetic and vigorous that there was less water in the pool than outside when he finally came out. Out of curiosity I asked him what that was all about and he said, “Didn’t you know, I was swimming?” But before that, we were both in Bombay for our summer training. I was with McDowell and Co. and he was with TCS. One afternoon, the receptionist buzzed me to tell me that Narayan Das was waiting for me at the reception. However, when I went there, Narayan was nowhere to be seen. I was intrigued. Later when I rang him up to ask what happened, he said, “Actually, the receptionist was very good-looking so I thought I would come back and go tomorrow in a better (i.e., less crumpled) dress and after a shave. We used to play the word games where there were gradings like if you make 20-25 words, you get Excellent, 15-19 words, very good and so on. He would make a few words and then change the grading scales. He also invented something called anti-chess to counter a serious and seriously arrogant guy who used to lose a match and proclaim, “Uff, I calculated up to the 8^th move; I should’ve calculated up to the 9^th move …” What did he do in life? Can you believe it, he is an acclaimed Professor of Marketing and Dean at Harvard Business School? So popular is his course that students have to apply and bid for his course two years in advance to get a look-in.

 

A guy called Freddie (Frederic Fougea) happened to us in the second year. Inter-IIM competition was a fiercely fought affair those days. We won the inter-IIM thanks to this one guy. He would go and ace all the sports competitions like Tennis in the morning, then turn up for the Western music with a saxophone and win all these hands down. We had invented a game called Frisby Footer, playing with a Frisby with some football rules. It became so popular that there was an all-Bangalore championship amongst the colleges. We won the final 60-10 or so and out of that, Freddie score 50 odd “goals.” Well, after passing out, the guy directed 10 films and was associated with 30 odd films and television serials as producer and screenwriter. His films have won scores of awards including an Emmy and his serials have been telecast in hundreds of channels. 

We used to call him Hassled. Even now, in our group, he signs his posts as H. The name is Ramesh Srinivasan. The two things which truly excited him at the campus were winning at Carrom and perfecting his square drive. Well, he went on to play active competitive carrom for 11 years winning a lot of tournaments abroad. He also played active competitive amateur cricket in Los Angeles for nine years for which he would drive 275 miles each way. He has run two full marathons and has clocked 15,000 miles of running when last checked. Meanwhile, he headed Bally Technologies (turnover $ 1 billion) and is currently President and CEO, Agylisis, US. Last year he casually donated $1.3 million from his personal funds to his alma mater, IIT (BHU) for building a state-of-the-art student activity centre (sports).

In the yearbook, we gave taglines to most of the students. Her tagline was, “This miss is a hit.” Again a serious veli or so we thought. Life and soul of any gathering and truly easy to talk to. Those days, getting to the US was not easy and academics was one of the routes. (On her own admission) she applied for a Ph D just to get to the US to be together with her then-significant-other and later-husband. The same Tennis-anyone girl became a renowned academic. The citations of her books and papers run into tens of thousands. However, one thing has remained constant. She continues to be extremely popular, amongst students, amongst peers and, of course, amongst serious academics. I think, year after year, students at Tuck School of Business vote her the most popular teacher. She is Kusum Lata Ailawadi. 

These and many other giants trod the earth at IIMB back in 1982-1984. And then, there was little old me, almost certainly there through a monumental clerical mistake or something. A veritable tiny, puny Gulliver (a Lilliputian, actually) …