Who Am I?

As an informal assignment the seniors from the B-School that I'd probably be joining shortly, asked us to create a fish-bone diagram or an Ishikawa diagram to answer the question 'Who Am I?'. Though I never submitted an assignment during my graduation, I decided to turn over a new leaf this time around.

An Ishikawa or a fish-bone diagram for 'Who Am I?'

I love it when a plan comes together

It has been a roller coaster ride since I got my CAT result on 9 January. In this period, I have been to about a dozen of B-school and job interviews where I usually feel nervous, to the dozen of B-school Group Discussion where I feel quite at ease. Interviewed about 50 odd students myself in the recruitment for my Drams club. Organized the Annual fest of my college. And experienced betrayals, success, loneliness, bankruptcy and whatnot.

After three months of doing stuff that I did because 'a man gotta do what a man gotta do' I was finally jobless again on April 15th. I had been busy, but something that was more important than all of this had been put on the back-burner. My final year project. Something that I'd talk about when I'm old and lose all my teeth. The glorious feeling of creating a software system. It took me 6 months to zero down to a topic. I wanted it to be something new, a project which had never been made before. My quest for a novel idea, was unfruitful. So decided to go on an adventure ride on a topic I had no idea about. I have decided to create the replica of Skydrive or the Googledrive. Though it has already been invented, I decided to create a cloud file storage system of my own, which I thought was sufficiently difficult.

The First Battle: down but not defeated

My life has been an easy one. I never had to try hard to get anything. You can say that I have been cruising through these years. Most of this comfort is due to the fact that nobody expected much from me. I've been better than average all through my life, but never the best.

After some odd 20 years of same life, one is bound to get bored. I also fell prey to the same fate. A dormant trait, ambition, activated itself. Now I was wondering how to pull myself out of the stream, in which I had been flowing along for all these years, and which definitely was leading me to a life of mediocre. So I started planning, with my graduation underway, there were two options. A better job or a better education. From my profile I could only land myself a software job, which isn't very hard to get in the current IT boom. Everyone has one. So it was better education that I needed. This path forked out into technical or managerial education. Here it was an obvious choice, management education. High return on investment and a degree that makes you fit for working in almost every field.

So it began, the war for MBA.

An unintended revolution

When Anna Hazare sat down for his anshan at Jantar Mantar, on 5 April 2011, he had an agenda on his mind. He wanted to uproot corruption from India. A nearly impossible task, corruption has mingled so beautifully into our social fabric that, that we all have a blind eye for it. When an officer gets a bundle of crisp new currency notes, it is termed as a gift for the family and children. It is never for him. When one has to cough up more money than what is legitimately payable for any government service, one never feels extorted or bribed, it is more likely to be considered as 'Suvidha Shulk' - (Convenience Fee) a small amount of money which one can afford and others cannot. It must really feel good to stamp their financial superiority on others as people cruise up the long line, get their work done while others sweat there for hours. Same goes with our administrators, politicians, representatives and other elected people of authority. When they cut their commission from the public budget, they feel it is morally justified. It is a small compensation for the years of public service, even the people running NGOs draw their livelihood from the donations don't they?

In such social atmosphere how could a person with no organizational support? How could he fight a crusade against corruption? Will people turn against themselves? Was the 'society' mature enough to introspect and clean itself from sins that the members of the society loved to commit?

Anyone with a sane mind would know that this was not even a possibility. Even Hazare must have known, because instead of aiming at corruption in society in general with a cannon, he targeted corruption in politicians and ministers with an sniper rifle.