The Bangalore Years (1982-84) at IIMB
What happens to anyone who goes to an IIM is that his life changes forever. It is a unique environment, where you are forced to do many new things. The residential setup with a cosmopolitan crowd-urban, rural, northern, eastern, western, southern, young, old and so on …the diversity is amazing. The only other place I got to see this kind of diversity was in the U.S. university I went to later on. All the assumptions that you have about yourself have to be re-evaluated, in general, when you land up at such a place.
To balance the cosmopolitan students and faculty, we had a totally rural ambience of Bilekahalli where IIMB was located. We were the first inhabitants of this new campus, and faced the music in many ways. No street lights-actually, no streets in the beginning, a makeshift mess of a dining room in a shed, no computers (that was not the IIM’s fault, there weren’t any in India then), no sports facilities except open spaces, and so on. Looking back, we didn’t mind it one bit. This is worth thinking about, in the context of material greed that overcomes many of us who graduate from there, from about the time placement season starts. Is material wealth correlated with happiness? I don’t know.
The atmosphere in the classes ranged from electric and ecstatic to bored and tuned out- depending on who taught and how they taught. The processes and the autonomy of using different methods of teaching (trying to teach?) were truly world class, and in some cases, superior to those I found in the U.S. later. For example, the system of doing course projects in every marketing course was the best thing to happen to us armchair engineers!
The first term, we did a project on estimating demand for mopeds (the dinosaurial equivalents of today’s Scooty). Off we went to meet dealers of Luna (the market leader then) and TVS mopeds in Bangalore. We were three in the group, and did not have the faintest idea of how to do this project. But amazingly, at the end of the term, we knew a lot more than at the beginning. Learning somehow happens when the responsibility shifts to the learner. In the next term, we again had a project, and this time we decided to estimate the demand for HDPE (plastic) carry bags in various applications. This also turned out to be a great learning experience, going into dusty streets to find sellers, ask them how many they sold, where they were used and so on, and try and put together this weird set of estimates into one whole figure. We might have been wrong by miles like any bad astrologer, but still we learnt a lot!
There was also my first exposure to the subject we called OB-Organizational Behaviour. I realized how much there was to learn about human beings, including myself, after going through that course. It was of course, the professor (S.K. Roy) who made it so awesome, and that spurred me on to take a few more courses in the area- and each of them lived up to my expectations. This was not always the case in other areas. I hated the finance courses, and could barely keep awake in some of them. There was a very good Indian Economy course (by Prof. Indira Rajaraman), where, for the first time, I could appreciate macroeconomics and India’s economic data- which were not so great at that point, though!
Some of the marketing courses were good too, particularly advertising where a lot of ad agency guys guest-lectured with their snazzy presentations, and they inspired me to get into advertising as my campus job later on. Industrial marketing (Prof. Thiru) was well taught, with a lot of case studies. The exams were a mix of different types. One I remember particularly well was a take home exam in Org. Behaviour, where we were given a set of statements (10, maybe) and we had to agree with them or disagree with them, with justification. I had to really rack my brains and refer to a lot of books to answer that exam (the copy and paste facility did not exist then). Far more than for many closed book ones. Later in life at Clemson, I would encounter a microeconomics prof., who gave us Agree or Disagree type questions for an entire exam.
The most boring was a course on Energy Modeling, where 99 percent of the people slept through all the classes. The system of electives and registration was new to those of us who came from the university system, but it felt nice to have a choice. Also, the CGPA system seemed fairer than the marks system to me. The relative grading kept everyone on their toes, because even if you were good, others who were better could pull your grade down.
An interesting thing happened somewhere in term 2 at IIM. I started writing under a pseudonym ‘Observer’, about small events like sports (the few that we could manage to play) on the notice board at the hostel, and found these pieces had a wide readership (later, it became our official wall mag –we called it Mural). So I expanded into areas like film reviews and jokes (PJs), along with Dash, my co-editor of the IIM magazine, and we became a rage. Some movies we reviewed those days included Mawaali, the Jeetendra-Sreedevi potboiler. In one of the movies we saw (at the now non-existent Drive-in theatre to which we usually rode on a bicycle), Shakti Kapoor played a character whose name was ‘Khoya Khoya Attache’! The movie was called Inquilab, and starred the Big B. Takeoffs on faculty were quite routine in these articles, and a new dimension was added when we discovered a guy in our batch-Vijayaraghavan, or Vijjy- who could draw cartoons. We had one cartoon of students being “ground” in a grinder by Prof Apte in his Economics course, another of Prof Jagadish looking in a mirror asking “who is the fairest of them all?” and so on. Serious comments also happened on events at times, but the dominant theme was humour.
We also had the unique tradition of coining nicknames for everyone. These were usually (not always) anglicized versions of our original names- Gunds for me, Paddy for Padmanabhan, Jockey for Narayan Das ( now a Harvard prof.) and the graphic ‘Toote Chappal Gande Paon’ for V.K. Ravi (a market research honcho and golfer today). We also had nicknames for faculty. Rajan (who was called ROI or Rajan of India) was very creative, and coined many of these. Among the ones that stuck was Cadbury, for a prof. who resembled the butler in Richie Rich comics. One prof. was also named Lothar, after the Mandrake comics character.
An institution at IIM campus was Uncle (with of course an aunty in tow)- who had a chai and bonda shop on campus. That was the place where evenings were spent reminiscing on the day’s happenings, or what was wrong with the system, or the world, or your grades, etc. all the time through our two years. The sweet couple (Uncle and Aunty) who spoke only Kannada (I think), and many of us who didn’t, communicated perfectly. When I later read Gerald Durrell’s book “My Family and Other Animals”, I could relate to his Greek communication- Kannada was Greek to us, literally, in those days.
Another institution was Naffy-the dog. He was named after the famous concept of the Need for Affiliation (n-Aff). He was the campus pet, and could be found everywhere. Rumours had it that he attended classes more regularly than some students. There was also, briefly , a monkey on campus-thanks to Fred, an exchange student from France, who carried one along. It was seen on the shoulders of some guys regularly, and even acted in a play staged on campus! I think it delivered some jungle mail to the Phantom, played by Snail wearing a VIP underwear on top of a pair of jeans for the right effect.
The cultural activities were truly some of the highlights of our stay at IIMB. We staged a play called “Waiting for Lefty” and I got to act in a lead role for the first time. My co-lead was Rose, and the other major pair was Ali and Navneeta. Harish Chaudhury (now an IITD prof.) directed the play. Many new talents were discovered in the three or four other roles in the play. There were other acts that brought the house down, like some Tamil song and dance acts, and a theme song, “Mere Dil Ka Quarter Kar Lo Occupy” sung by Hemant and Kishore Kelekar, incorporating many of the famous personalities like JD Singh, our beloved marketing prof, and many others.
The sports scene picked up after an innovation that our batch can be credited with. One of us had a Frisbee lying with us, and it was not too common in India those days. Someone came up with the bright idea of playing Frisbee Footer, a combo of Rugby and Frisbee. It had passing, and goals and so on, with a goalkeeper to prevent the goals. It spread like crazy, and we even had tournaments of Frisbee Footer.
There were also people who played Bridge all their waking hours, and I occasionally joined in. The lights used to go out fairly frequently (we were in rural Bangalore), and that used to be the occasion for the singers to take over. Our block had Deepak (Todo) who was particularly good, and we could listen to world class music at our doorstep. Our seniors also had a rock band, which played fairly good Elvis and other numbers, but they stayed in the city, and we interacted infrequently.
Gopal Bhat and his favourite song “Ek Chatur Naar” from Padosan was the highlight of many culturals. He was very comfortable with the classical part sung by Manna Dey (for Mehmood in the movie) in the song. He later also sang a ghazal equally well, along with Deepika for a program on All India Radio that I compered.
The wall mag was christened Mural, and we (Dash and I) also produced two issues of a print magazine we called IIMBIBE (Dash was Bibhuti Bhushan Dash, my partner-in-crime, rather, my co-editor). This was again a wonderful experience, with some classic articles written by Snail, Rajan of India, and others. I contributed one on Godliness and 100 percent attendance, arguing that the IIM policy on 100 percent attendance was designed to create godliness among us, because only god would be able to meet such tough norms. The letters to the editor column was also a highlight. We faked them, for the first issue itself, in the names of various classmates and faculty. If “bestsellers” can get endorsements/plugs before they are published, we thought we could write letters to the editors of an unpublished mag. Dash and I are in the pic below.
The second issue of the magazine, we decided to be different. We made it a faculty special, and started chasing the professors who we thought could contribute. It was again a learning experience. We discovered talent in unexpected places. Prof. AK Rao, who taught a very “dry” subject (Operations Research) according to students, came out with one of the funniest pieces.
Dr. Gopal Valecha who taught us organizational behaviour, described very engagingly his experiences at Ohio University. Everybody thoroughly enjoyed this issue as well. We, the editors, had the joy of chasing the profs for their articles, instead of their chasing us for assignments. Vijayaraghavan’s cartoon (which showed a donkey chewing up our magazine and exclaiming- ‘it’s very tasty’) adorned the IIMBIBE cover. This guy is himself a prof. at XLRI now.
There were of course, many dark moments at IIMB as well. A couple of student colleagues could not make the academic cutoffs, and had to leave half way. Two more died in road accidents, making one wonder if our pathetic road conditions were responsible. One was a bizarre case, involving almost everyone in the campus in a search. Puneet, pillion riding on a bike, disappeared after an accident close to the campus. A search along the road proved futile. His body was fished out of a nearby lake a few days later, leading to many theories about the events surrounding his death. That left many of us in shock for a while. Salve was the other colleague who died after his bike crashed into a pole in the city.
The summer project at IIMB was a veritable feast for me, as I liked to travel. This three-month project had me touring the whole of Kerala, parts of West Bengal including Siliguri and Darjeeling, and the eastern parts of Assam near Tinsukia. I had to cover the plywood manufacturers, assessing demand for some cutting tools like saw blades made of tungsten carbide. The Bangalore based company which I worked for was very professional, and treated us trainees well.
I encountered a lot of very nice and helpful people during my visit to the North-east. They were a lot more laid back and friendly compared to the typical rushed corporate executives that I encountered elsewhere. The natural beauty of the parts of Assam that I saw was amazing, but I suppose there were underlying economic issues that erupt in violent agitation from time to time. In fact, one of the worst massacres at Nellie had taken place just before my visit.
The tuition fee at IIMB those days was Rs. 1500 for a year, payable in three instalments. Of course, parental salaries were also down to earth, matching the fee. Even our own nominal salaries after we finished (not corrected for time value and inflation) were a pittance compared to what fresh MBAs make today.
One of the nice things I think I did at IIMB was doing group photo shoots of all classmates. I had to borrow a camera from Siraj to do it, and used colour film for the first time. To keep the group size manageable, I invited people block-wise, and floor-wise. Those pictures are today priceless! One funny thing about the pictures was that they cost Rs. 5 per print in 1984. Even today, they cost about the same. But today, there are fewer labs that deliver within the hour!
The year book, IIMPRESSIONS, was the last thing I worked on at IIMB, with Dash for company. We decided to go for a zodiac sign based format. All guys and girls of a zodiac sign were clubbed together with an introduction to the section, and people who knew them well were commissioned secretly to do the writing of the individual pieces on each. Zany and irreverent, complete with nicknames and mugshots (some of them have to be seen to be believed), it was the biggest blockbuster, with students who did not get it begging for copies months later! It was printed at an obscure letter press (not even an offset press), but that did not diminish its appeal.
We collected data for the year book through a questionnaire called Pakad Baees (Catch 22 translated into Hindi). Another innovation that the year book contained was the use of ads (rather, tag lines from ads) to attach to specific people in our batch. Like the Charms slogan, ‘Charms is the spirit of freedom. Charms is the Way you are’- applied to Chasha. Or a paint company’s line- ‘In a world of changing values, some things stand apart’, for Himanshu Manglik, changed to ‘In a world of corporate mediocrity, some things stand apart’. Or, Raymond’s “A guide to the well-dressed male” applied to Ravikumar. Or, “Whenever you think of colour, think of Siraj”, borrowed from Jenson and Nicholson. Another cigarette ad went, “Smoothness was never so satisfying”, and it fit Lingaraju perfectly. He was the smooth operator of our batch, in many ways.
A book that impressed me during my IIM days was Ogilvy on Advertising. I bought a copy, and read it many times. I still feel it is one of the best books of all times on marketing in general, and advertising and promotion in particular. The man knew how to market himself and his ideas! Proof that I read it.
I appeared for placement interviews with 3 or 4 ad agencies, and was selected by Living Media (India Today group publishers) for their agency, New Horizons, in Delhi. I had a meeting with Aroon Purie, their editor-founder, during the interview process, and I was impressed. India Today in the eighties was as reputed as TIME in the U.S. I remember that a copy of India Today was enough to bribe your way into some media houses and sundry other places. Even people who did not understand English used to keep a copy of the magazine on their table, just to appear “intelligent”.
I worked as an account executive/client liaison executive in the ad agency. We did regular ads for India Today, some for a city magazine called Bombay (now defunct), and the original designs for Computer World magazine that they were launching. An NID graduate was doing the design and page layout, and the first editor was a “techie” from Hyderabad. We also did ads for Appu Ghar, India’s first amusement park that came up at Pragati Maidan. It was Indira Gandhi who had given this name to the park, overruling the more westernized Disneyland type names that the promoters had wanted. The park was a big hit, and we got to see the rides at close quarters before they opened.
I changed residences once in Delhi, going from a “barsaati” in Defence colony to an apartment in Vasant Vihar. What shocked me was the price of food and accommodation in Delhi. I spent half my princely salary on the room, and the rest (almost) on food. Of course, they were interesting days. I took some time adjusting to the severe cold in winters, and used a room heater for the first time in my life. My two classmates, Venky, and Gobish (Gautam Biswas), were my room-mates, and we shared a lot of work-related stories. Venky worked for Maruti which had just set up shop in India, and was trying to get vendors to supply some parts. In 1984, Indian vendors were neither used to supplying quality, nor quantity. So it was an uphill battle for him and others in a similar responsibility. This was the first time I realized how difficult it is to buy something, even for a company.
One horrific experience at Delhi was the riots after Indira Gandhi was killed. Just because her killer was a Sikh, mobs in Delhi went around killing any Sikh they could find. I was horrified that such a thing could happen in the so-called civilized world. Many years later, the same horror story repeated after the Godhra train incident in Gujarat, where Hindu mobs went around torching innocent Muslims. We remain animals in many ways, and the veneer of civilization and sophistication is quite thin, is my only conclusion. But good governance can minimize the damage is still my belief.
During my stint with New Horizons, I had a first hand experience of industrial photography, which was really boring. People photography or landscape photography I used to enjoy, but this was something else. I also had occasion to visit Thomson Press, one of the most technologically advanced (it was a part of India Today group) printing outfits in India. It had computerized machinery in days before the PC came to corporates.
Within a year, I felt I was stagnating at my job (the bane of all MBAs, ad guys, and now IT guys in India as well), and went back to Bangalore to look for a job. I landed one in a company founded by three IIMA batchmates. The company was called Marketing and Business Associates (MBA again!) and was into marketing research. This is how my tryst with M.R. began, and lasts to this day. I found the job intellectually stimulating compared with my earlier one, and it also helped that I got to tour Ooty on one of my first assignments. I managed to do a decent job there, without speaking a word of Tamil, extracting info from potato farmers and tea garden managers for my client’s product, a micronutrient for plants that was sprayed on to the leaves.
My next major assignment was for WIPRO consumer , trying to figure out which ingredient customers would prefer in their toilet soap-Tulsi, coconut oil, or something else. Another was for readymade chapatis (heat and eat) in Mumbai, and for a fabric softener. Fabric softener was an idea ahead of its time, because not many had a washing machine in 1985. I used my first fabric softener in the U.S. a year later!
Another interesting research project I worked on was for BHEL, who had a Flue Gas Desulphuriser (FGD), costing about a crore rupees, and wanted to assess demand. So I went to a lot of industries which emit sulphur gases, and delicately extracted their pollution data. This was slightly difficult at times, and led to trips to the hinterland in many cases. But networking usually helped, and the IIM buddies usually helped in many ways. Like at Vizag, I was able to stay with Nandu Jr., a classmate, and got VIP connections in a couple of companies through his dad! This guy is now a marketing prof. in the U.S. We also were neighbours in G Block at IIM.
The marketing research industry was advertising’s poor cousin (probably still is) in terms of spending by clients, but for a person working in it, probably worth its weight in gold. Where else can you interact with the consumer of different products and services on a regular basis, gaining insight into how their minds work? I was posted at Mumbai, and one of the memorable experiences I had was of working with HDFC as a client. Indian companies those days did not have a customer-friendly culture, but HDFC seemed like an exception to me. Watching how customers were treated by their staff was a revelation.
What happens to anyone who goes to an IIM is that his life changes forever. It is a unique environment, where you are forced to do many new things. The residential setup with a cosmopolitan crowd-urban, rural, northern, eastern, western, southern, young, old and so on …the diversity is amazing. The only other place I got to see this kind of diversity was in the U.S. university I went to later on. All the assumptions that you have about yourself have to be re-evaluated, in general, when you land up at such a place.
To balance the cosmopolitan students and faculty, we had a totally rural ambience of Bilekahalli where IIMB was located. We were the first inhabitants of this new campus, and faced the music in many ways. No street lights-actually, no streets in the beginning, a makeshift mess of a dining room in a shed, no computers (that was not the IIM’s fault, there weren’t any in India then), no sports facilities except open spaces, and so on. Looking back, we didn’t mind it one bit. This is worth thinking about, in the context of material greed that overcomes many of us who graduate from there, from about the time placement season starts. Is material wealth correlated with happiness? I don’t know.
The atmosphere in the classes ranged from electric and ecstatic to bored and tuned out- depending on who taught and how they taught. The processes and the autonomy of using different methods of teaching (trying to teach?) were truly world class, and in some cases, superior to those I found in the U.S. later. For example, the system of doing course projects in every marketing course was the best thing to happen to us armchair engineers!
The first term, we did a project on estimating demand for mopeds (the dinosaurial equivalents of today’s Scooty). Off we went to meet dealers of Luna (the market leader then) and TVS mopeds in Bangalore. We were three in the group, and did not have the faintest idea of how to do this project. But amazingly, at the end of the term, we knew a lot more than at the beginning. Learning somehow happens when the responsibility shifts to the learner. In the next term, we again had a project, and this time we decided to estimate the demand for HDPE (plastic) carry bags in various applications. This also turned out to be a great learning experience, going into dusty streets to find sellers, ask them how many they sold, where they were used and so on, and try and put together this weird set of estimates into one whole figure. We might have been wrong by miles like any bad astrologer, but still we learnt a lot!
There was also my first exposure to the subject we called OB-Organizational Behaviour. I realized how much there was to learn about human beings, including myself, after going through that course. It was of course, the professor (S.K. Roy) who made it so awesome, and that spurred me on to take a few more courses in the area- and each of them lived up to my expectations. This was not always the case in other areas. I hated the finance courses, and could barely keep awake in some of them. There was a very good Indian Economy course (by Prof. Indira Rajaraman), where, for the first time, I could appreciate macroeconomics and India’s economic data- which were not so great at that point, though!
Some of the marketing courses were good too, particularly advertising where a lot of ad agency guys guest-lectured with their snazzy presentations, and they inspired me to get into advertising as my campus job later on. Industrial marketing (Prof. Thiru) was well taught, with a lot of case studies. The exams were a mix of different types. One I remember particularly well was a take home exam in Org. Behaviour, where we were given a set of statements (10, maybe) and we had to agree with them or disagree with them, with justification. I had to really rack my brains and refer to a lot of books to answer that exam (the copy and paste facility did not exist then). Far more than for many closed book ones. Later in life at Clemson, I would encounter a microeconomics prof., who gave us Agree or Disagree type questions for an entire exam.
The most boring was a course on Energy Modeling, where 99 percent of the people slept through all the classes. The system of electives and registration was new to those of us who came from the university system, but it felt nice to have a choice. Also, the CGPA system seemed fairer than the marks system to me. The relative grading kept everyone on their toes, because even if you were good, others who were better could pull your grade down.
An interesting thing happened somewhere in term 2 at IIM. I started writing under a pseudonym ‘Observer’, about small events like sports (the few that we could manage to play) on the notice board at the hostel, and found these pieces had a wide readership (later, it became our official wall mag –we called it Mural). So I expanded into areas like film reviews and jokes (PJs), along with Dash, my co-editor of the IIM magazine, and we became a rage. Some movies we reviewed those days included Mawaali, the Jeetendra-Sreedevi potboiler. In one of the movies we saw (at the now non-existent Drive-in theatre to which we usually rode on a bicycle), Shakti Kapoor played a character whose name was ‘Khoya Khoya Attache’! The movie was called Inquilab, and starred the Big B. Takeoffs on faculty were quite routine in these articles, and a new dimension was added when we discovered a guy in our batch-Vijayaraghavan, or Vijjy- who could draw cartoons. We had one cartoon of students being “ground” in a grinder by Prof Apte in his Economics course, another of Prof Jagadish looking in a mirror asking “who is the fairest of them all?” and so on. Serious comments also happened on events at times, but the dominant theme was humour.
We also had the unique tradition of coining nicknames for everyone. These were usually (not always) anglicized versions of our original names- Gunds for me, Paddy for Padmanabhan, Jockey for Narayan Das ( now a Harvard prof.) and the graphic ‘Toote Chappal Gande Paon’ for V.K. Ravi (a market research honcho and golfer today). We also had nicknames for faculty. Rajan (who was called ROI or Rajan of India) was very creative, and coined many of these. Among the ones that stuck was Cadbury, for a prof. who resembled the butler in Richie Rich comics. One prof. was also named Lothar, after the Mandrake comics character.
An institution at IIM campus was Uncle (with of course an aunty in tow)- who had a chai and bonda shop on campus. That was the place where evenings were spent reminiscing on the day’s happenings, or what was wrong with the system, or the world, or your grades, etc. all the time through our two years. The sweet couple (Uncle and Aunty) who spoke only Kannada (I think), and many of us who didn’t, communicated perfectly. When I later read Gerald Durrell’s book “My Family and Other Animals”, I could relate to his Greek communication- Kannada was Greek to us, literally, in those days.
Another institution was Naffy-the dog. He was named after the famous concept of the Need for Affiliation (n-Aff). He was the campus pet, and could be found everywhere. Rumours had it that he attended classes more regularly than some students. There was also, briefly , a monkey on campus-thanks to Fred, an exchange student from France, who carried one along. It was seen on the shoulders of some guys regularly, and even acted in a play staged on campus! I think it delivered some jungle mail to the Phantom, played by Snail wearing a VIP underwear on top of a pair of jeans for the right effect.
The cultural activities were truly some of the highlights of our stay at IIMB. We staged a play called “Waiting for Lefty” and I got to act in a lead role for the first time. My co-lead was Rose, and the other major pair was Ali and Navneeta. Harish Chaudhury (now an IITD prof.) directed the play. Many new talents were discovered in the three or four other roles in the play. There were other acts that brought the house down, like some Tamil song and dance acts, and a theme song, “Mere Dil Ka Quarter Kar Lo Occupy” sung by Hemant and Kishore Kelekar, incorporating many of the famous personalities like JD Singh, our beloved marketing prof, and many others.
The sports scene picked up after an innovation that our batch can be credited with. One of us had a Frisbee lying with us, and it was not too common in India those days. Someone came up with the bright idea of playing Frisbee Footer, a combo of Rugby and Frisbee. It had passing, and goals and so on, with a goalkeeper to prevent the goals. It spread like crazy, and we even had tournaments of Frisbee Footer.
There were also people who played Bridge all their waking hours, and I occasionally joined in. The lights used to go out fairly frequently (we were in rural Bangalore), and that used to be the occasion for the singers to take over. Our block had Deepak (Todo) who was particularly good, and we could listen to world class music at our doorstep. Our seniors also had a rock band, which played fairly good Elvis and other numbers, but they stayed in the city, and we interacted infrequently.
Gopal Bhat and his favourite song “Ek Chatur Naar” from Padosan was the highlight of many culturals. He was very comfortable with the classical part sung by Manna Dey (for Mehmood in the movie) in the song. He later also sang a ghazal equally well, along with Deepika for a program on All India Radio that I compered.
The wall mag was christened Mural, and we (Dash and I) also produced two issues of a print magazine we called IIMBIBE (Dash was Bibhuti Bhushan Dash, my partner-in-crime, rather, my co-editor). This was again a wonderful experience, with some classic articles written by Snail, Rajan of India, and others. I contributed one on Godliness and 100 percent attendance, arguing that the IIM policy on 100 percent attendance was designed to create godliness among us, because only god would be able to meet such tough norms. The letters to the editor column was also a highlight. We faked them, for the first issue itself, in the names of various classmates and faculty. If “bestsellers” can get endorsements/plugs before they are published, we thought we could write letters to the editors of an unpublished mag. Dash and I are in the pic below.
The second issue of the magazine, we decided to be different. We made it a faculty special, and started chasing the professors who we thought could contribute. It was again a learning experience. We discovered talent in unexpected places. Prof. AK Rao, who taught a very “dry” subject (Operations Research) according to students, came out with one of the funniest pieces.
Dr. Gopal Valecha who taught us organizational behaviour, described very engagingly his experiences at Ohio University. Everybody thoroughly enjoyed this issue as well. We, the editors, had the joy of chasing the profs for their articles, instead of their chasing us for assignments. Vijayaraghavan’s cartoon (which showed a donkey chewing up our magazine and exclaiming- ‘it’s very tasty’) adorned the IIMBIBE cover. This guy is himself a prof. at XLRI now.
There were of course, many dark moments at IIMB as well. A couple of student colleagues could not make the academic cutoffs, and had to leave half way. Two more died in road accidents, making one wonder if our pathetic road conditions were responsible. One was a bizarre case, involving almost everyone in the campus in a search. Puneet, pillion riding on a bike, disappeared after an accident close to the campus. A search along the road proved futile. His body was fished out of a nearby lake a few days later, leading to many theories about the events surrounding his death. That left many of us in shock for a while. Salve was the other colleague who died after his bike crashed into a pole in the city.
The summer project at IIMB was a veritable feast for me, as I liked to travel. This three-month project had me touring the whole of Kerala, parts of West Bengal including Siliguri and Darjeeling, and the eastern parts of Assam near Tinsukia. I had to cover the plywood manufacturers, assessing demand for some cutting tools like saw blades made of tungsten carbide. The Bangalore based company which I worked for was very professional, and treated us trainees well.
I encountered a lot of very nice and helpful people during my visit to the North-east. They were a lot more laid back and friendly compared to the typical rushed corporate executives that I encountered elsewhere. The natural beauty of the parts of Assam that I saw was amazing, but I suppose there were underlying economic issues that erupt in violent agitation from time to time. In fact, one of the worst massacres at Nellie had taken place just before my visit.
The tuition fee at IIMB those days was Rs. 1500 for a year, payable in three instalments. Of course, parental salaries were also down to earth, matching the fee. Even our own nominal salaries after we finished (not corrected for time value and inflation) were a pittance compared to what fresh MBAs make today.
One of the nice things I think I did at IIMB was doing group photo shoots of all classmates. I had to borrow a camera from Siraj to do it, and used colour film for the first time. To keep the group size manageable, I invited people block-wise, and floor-wise. Those pictures are today priceless! One funny thing about the pictures was that they cost Rs. 5 per print in 1984. Even today, they cost about the same. But today, there are fewer labs that deliver within the hour!
The year book, IIMPRESSIONS, was the last thing I worked on at IIMB, with Dash for company. We decided to go for a zodiac sign based format. All guys and girls of a zodiac sign were clubbed together with an introduction to the section, and people who knew them well were commissioned secretly to do the writing of the individual pieces on each. Zany and irreverent, complete with nicknames and mugshots (some of them have to be seen to be believed), it was the biggest blockbuster, with students who did not get it begging for copies months later! It was printed at an obscure letter press (not even an offset press), but that did not diminish its appeal.
We collected data for the year book through a questionnaire called Pakad Baees (Catch 22 translated into Hindi). Another innovation that the year book contained was the use of ads (rather, tag lines from ads) to attach to specific people in our batch. Like the Charms slogan, ‘Charms is the spirit of freedom. Charms is the Way you are’- applied to Chasha. Or a paint company’s line- ‘In a world of changing values, some things stand apart’, for Himanshu Manglik, changed to ‘In a world of corporate mediocrity, some things stand apart’. Or, Raymond’s “A guide to the well-dressed male” applied to Ravikumar. Or, “Whenever you think of colour, think of Siraj”, borrowed from Jenson and Nicholson. Another cigarette ad went, “Smoothness was never so satisfying”, and it fit Lingaraju perfectly. He was the smooth operator of our batch, in many ways.
A book that impressed me during my IIM days was Ogilvy on Advertising. I bought a copy, and read it many times. I still feel it is one of the best books of all times on marketing in general, and advertising and promotion in particular. The man knew how to market himself and his ideas! Proof that I read it.
I appeared for placement interviews with 3 or 4 ad agencies, and was selected by Living Media (India Today group publishers) for their agency, New Horizons, in Delhi. I had a meeting with Aroon Purie, their editor-founder, during the interview process, and I was impressed. India Today in the eighties was as reputed as TIME in the U.S. I remember that a copy of India Today was enough to bribe your way into some media houses and sundry other places. Even people who did not understand English used to keep a copy of the magazine on their table, just to appear “intelligent”.
I worked as an account executive/client liaison executive in the ad agency. We did regular ads for India Today, some for a city magazine called Bombay (now defunct), and the original designs for Computer World magazine that they were launching. An NID graduate was doing the design and page layout, and the first editor was a “techie” from Hyderabad. We also did ads for Appu Ghar, India’s first amusement park that came up at Pragati Maidan. It was Indira Gandhi who had given this name to the park, overruling the more westernized Disneyland type names that the promoters had wanted. The park was a big hit, and we got to see the rides at close quarters before they opened.
I changed residences once in Delhi, going from a “barsaati” in Defence colony to an apartment in Vasant Vihar. What shocked me was the price of food and accommodation in Delhi. I spent half my princely salary on the room, and the rest (almost) on food. Of course, they were interesting days. I took some time adjusting to the severe cold in winters, and used a room heater for the first time in my life. My two classmates, Venky, and Gobish (Gautam Biswas), were my room-mates, and we shared a lot of work-related stories. Venky worked for Maruti which had just set up shop in India, and was trying to get vendors to supply some parts. In 1984, Indian vendors were neither used to supplying quality, nor quantity. So it was an uphill battle for him and others in a similar responsibility. This was the first time I realized how difficult it is to buy something, even for a company.
One horrific experience at Delhi was the riots after Indira Gandhi was killed. Just because her killer was a Sikh, mobs in Delhi went around killing any Sikh they could find. I was horrified that such a thing could happen in the so-called civilized world. Many years later, the same horror story repeated after the Godhra train incident in Gujarat, where Hindu mobs went around torching innocent Muslims. We remain animals in many ways, and the veneer of civilization and sophistication is quite thin, is my only conclusion. But good governance can minimize the damage is still my belief.
During my stint with New Horizons, I had a first hand experience of industrial photography, which was really boring. People photography or landscape photography I used to enjoy, but this was something else. I also had occasion to visit Thomson Press, one of the most technologically advanced (it was a part of India Today group) printing outfits in India. It had computerized machinery in days before the PC came to corporates.
Within a year, I felt I was stagnating at my job (the bane of all MBAs, ad guys, and now IT guys in India as well), and went back to Bangalore to look for a job. I landed one in a company founded by three IIMA batchmates. The company was called Marketing and Business Associates (MBA again!) and was into marketing research. This is how my tryst with M.R. began, and lasts to this day. I found the job intellectually stimulating compared with my earlier one, and it also helped that I got to tour Ooty on one of my first assignments. I managed to do a decent job there, without speaking a word of Tamil, extracting info from potato farmers and tea garden managers for my client’s product, a micronutrient for plants that was sprayed on to the leaves.
My next major assignment was for WIPRO consumer , trying to figure out which ingredient customers would prefer in their toilet soap-Tulsi, coconut oil, or something else. Another was for readymade chapatis (heat and eat) in Mumbai, and for a fabric softener. Fabric softener was an idea ahead of its time, because not many had a washing machine in 1985. I used my first fabric softener in the U.S. a year later!
Another interesting research project I worked on was for BHEL, who had a Flue Gas Desulphuriser (FGD), costing about a crore rupees, and wanted to assess demand. So I went to a lot of industries which emit sulphur gases, and delicately extracted their pollution data. This was slightly difficult at times, and led to trips to the hinterland in many cases. But networking usually helped, and the IIM buddies usually helped in many ways. Like at Vizag, I was able to stay with Nandu Jr., a classmate, and got VIP connections in a couple of companies through his dad! This guy is now a marketing prof. in the U.S. We also were neighbours in G Block at IIM.
The marketing research industry was advertising’s poor cousin (probably still is) in terms of spending by clients, but for a person working in it, probably worth its weight in gold. Where else can you interact with the consumer of different products and services on a regular basis, gaining insight into how their minds work? I was posted at Mumbai, and one of the memorable experiences I had was of working with HDFC as a client. Indian companies those days did not have a customer-friendly culture, but HDFC seemed like an exception to me. Watching how customers were treated by their staff was a revelation.
6 comments:
Hi - this is an odd comment but I have been searching for some clear reference to this song, Mere Dil ka Quarter kar Lo Occupy- like who sang it, what its origins are etc. I'm wondering if you could point me to the friends of your who used to sing it! Or ask them, if they know much about it! Thanks very much!
hello sir
it was a fun reading this post and a lot of learning as well.
That was like a journal from your life's chapters. Interesting and a great read.
thank you, Parul. It is in fact a chapter from my autobiography.
Seems to me like the lack of technology only made your IIM experience more fun. And we had PGP office emails to keep us on our toes!
Anusha, I think you are quite right! Mails from PGP office can be a major pain!
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