Going MAD(MBA Applicant Disease)-Part 1

Common symptoms
Patient cuts off most social contacts.
Walks around with dazed look.
Misses meals at random and wakes up hungry at night.
Dreams on alternate nights about getting selected and getting rejected.
Dream of walking around downtown Chicago, wearing a green Tuckie Tshirt, meeting the girl in the Wharton brochure, the Boston cold and the Stanford heat.
Wakes up with cozy feelings and realizes it was all a dream...deferred.
Often starts praying in the middle of the day.

Detailed breakdown of effects

Week of submission.
Submit online application.
Check next day if application status had turned to "complete" status.
Check again in the evening. And midnight.
Consider sending an enquiry mail to AdCom about status.
Read Dave's blog about persistent applicant horror stories and decide not to.
Repeat checking business until finally breaking loose and sending a "If you dont mind, could you check my application which I submitted (along with $250) a month back and havent even received an acknowledgement yet" (Last drastic step not advisory unless one has the Bush surname.)

1st month post submission
Wake up.
Turn on lappie.
Check mail to see if any i'view invites have come in.
Act surprised that they havent.
Check HBS site to see if status has changed.
Check Stanford site to see if status has changed.
Check Wharton site to see if status has changed.
Check Ross site to see if status has changed.
Check Tuck site to see if status has changed.
Applaud the Chicago and Columbia software which sends updates for every teeny weeny status change.
Walk around with a demented smile after getting 1st invite.
Smile at high targets, smile at the over made up secretary, smile through the pollution, smile through a stupido superboss comment.
Get greedy and go through check-site routine again.

2nd month post submission
Start worrying about 2nd invite.
Invoke God's mercy, grace and goodwill in the 10 seconds that Gmail takes to open.
Option 1 - See spam in mail box that promises enlargements, vitality and every piece of crap except an interview - torn between throttling random spammers and smashing lappie.
Option 2a - See empty mail box and feel totally hollow inside.
Option 2b - See empty mail box and ponder about the mysteries of the universe-calm down with remixed classic quotes "This too shall bloody pass"..."Rome was not built in a frigging day".
Start doing the Mine Vs.Yours-compare no of invites with other applicants.
Start obsessive worrying about not getting any 2nd invite.
Get 2nd invite-do the demented smile routine again.

(The Interview - Contd in Part 2..;-)

Hello Chicago GSB, say Hi to Ganja Turtle...

CHICAGO
Chicago, in comparison to Wharton seems almost, old fashioned...but in a very attractive classic way.Chicago was one of the first universities to start a leadership course and it is, their website claims ...ahem..."still one of the finest". Chicago GSB is known for its strong theoretical foundations and some phenomenal Nobel prize winning faculty. And at a different level, Chicago seems much more level headed and down-to-earth than some of its Ivy league peers. One occasionally hears stories about its "quant-jock" reputation as also about some resident ultra-nerds who use calculus to arrange the furniture...and comes away feeling scared! But interacting with Chicago alumni has somehow put me totally at ease. In the last 2 years of aspiring to go to a business school, I would say the only other school that operates at this personal a level or perhaps at a better level is Tuck - the Tuck staff really impressed me with their very personal touch...if you were to read sghama's blog, you would hear about how he chose Tuck over Chicago... and even Stanford seemed reasonably humble-except for some whacky streaks of "humour",the Stanford reception was quite cool.

But like I found out, apart from the glitzy presentations, the matte laminated classy brochures and the slick websites, the alumni of a B-school remain the best way of finding out how a school is...more or less.

The Chicago interview
Called the alum to fix up a an interview and he was like "dont wear a tie etc"...I was like "Am sorry, sir?"...hes like "Dont wear all that crap - we wanna know how good you are and not how could you look"...am like Wow......"Hey,thank you"...one morning of stupidly roaming around the roads of Bangalore in a dark suit averted!

Managed to find his home located at one of the fabulous palm lined "Hollywoodesque" villa compounds that seem like a piece of America...beautiful place just getting done. The door was opened up by Mrs.Alum who invited me in and offered a glass of water.I sunk into the sofa,came up for air and sunk in again-keenly watched by a pair of cute 10 year old eyes...noticed a lovely copy of a Monet on the wall, a miniature of Cupid & Psyche (After the Pieta, its one of my favs) on the side table. So fa,so good like the ad says. But Ms.Keen-eyes sits opposite me and fixes me with a serious glare...so I try my friendly act "Hi"...and get a stern "HI" for a reply...Over the next 2 minutes, I manage to squeeze out bits of info from the lil lady who glares at me for,I guess,coming on a Sunday morning..."My name is Pooja". Junior who alternates between screaming and smiling and jumping and gurgling was "Vidyuth-brother".

Thankfully the alum comes in by now and rescues me from Ms.Lil Glare...greeted me and took me inside. Explained why and how we would proceed...and the next 1 hour
was easily one of the best interactions I have ever had with an alum - I had read up on his background...what us Tamils would call his "history & geography"...but for
someone who was running his own company and had applied for a fundu patent, he was amazingly down to earth and totally put me at ease...he quizzed me on my goals, my background...whether my childhood was different because of having a Master Mariner father and a professor for a mother...what I planned to at Chicago...why I wrote poetry...and all these questions (I realized later) were almost sidepoints in a what transpired to be a very interesting conversation. He explained how Chicago was good...and why...and why these things mattered. He also explained in a very honest way about what he thought was fundamentally different about Chicago as compared to other schools-with an amazing "3 MBAs in a room" example!(which I have quoted to alteast 10 people by now!)

I was reminded of some of my interactions with prospective students at BIM-Trichy. Finally I was also more than a bit curious about a product that the alums company was coming up with, so asked him to clarify a point which had potential to become an interesting debate....but we were running out of time, so we shook hands and I told him that it was a wonderful experience and possibly my best. I probably sounded like "I think I did really well!" so he said"Thats good for you!"

Its very difficult for an alum to sound this way about an experience or a place unless one is really passionate about it...and in this case, it really showed. It made a whole lot of difference to me - this interview! I am quite convinced that I would fit into Chicago...now if only Ms.Rosemaria Martinelli and her team would agree, we could be done with all the formalities!

Now onwards, my friends,onwards...to 20th December, when the lights of the world will descend on the select few...the chosen ones! Until then like Ulysses,one shall try "to strive, to seek to find and not to yield..."

Hello Wharton! Ganja Here...open up, open up!

Whew...finally managed to complete my interviews for Wharton & Chicago. Became especially tight since, the Wharton i'view was fixed at very short notice.

About the schools
While both Wharton & Chicago are reknowned for the large no of grads who join finance/consulting, there seems to be a very distinct difference about the mindsets that drive students/personalities to Wharton or to Chicago -as a recent alumnus said, they operate on entirely different planes... this is where the famou F word of B-school admissions comes in - "FIT".

WHARTON
Wharton seems to be a classic Ivy league school; takes in a large number of very proactive ultra-confident individuals who want to make a lot of money/ transform themselves and the world. Wharton allows them to freewheel, gives them cutting edge analytical skills from fantastic professors and then unleash them on the world.
A former colleague now at McKinsey remarked that while Harvard guys are born believing that their fathers own the world, Wharton guys step out thinking that they own the world post Wharton. Uber-confident (to the point of being arrogant sometimes), capitalists, Ivy league pedigree and an ability to come on top of any situation - this eems to be the quintessential Wharton grad - I know am going out on a limb here because like every other B-school, there is no "typical" student...but if one were to check the Wharton resume book, speak to alumni, attend receptions and check recruiter speak, this is what one would carry away from the "Wharton" experience.

You wanted to be a master of the universe in your Armani suit and Fendi shades? Wanted to jetset across to the Riviera and fly down to Pattaya for a colleagues engagement and be back in the Big Apple to close THE deal of the month...you belong to Wharton! Although one hears that much of this competitive "shark" reputation is undeserved and is a vestige of the schools investment banking/ financial roots, one cannot clearly make out a stance otherwise. A lot of us esp....sales/mktg/ibankers like this "fast/hard/results" reputation...and if you do, then Wharton is for you. One gets the feeling that to belong to Wharton, you need to be very quick on your toes and mind, have a clear idea of your priorities while at school, have what you can call the entrepreneurial ability to gel-well with a wide range of individuals and kind of do your own unique thing...among 1000 talented others! An amazing school in its own right...maybe ideally suited for the fast forward, global business environment of the 22nd century.Maybe.

THE WHARTON INTERVIEW
I got the standard questions during the Wharton interview...
Run me through your resume...
Where else have you applied?
What are your plans after wharton?
Why Wharton?
Biggest disappointments?
Valued achievements?
Why take you instead of the other 10K odd applicants?

Ganja Turtle did quite well
...as well as one can do in a full suit in a non-a/cd office at 2pm on a Bengalooru afternoon...did a classic Ganja fumble..."So, I basically think I am unique because of a. my passion-in all that I do, my passion shines through...for eg..etc etc.
b. because of my multifaceted personality - I am a performer at work, a quizzer, a poet, a volleyball/tabletennis/soccer player, an avid reader, a martial artist etc etc.
c. and finally because of the amazing experiences that I have been through - Indian telecom in the last 5 years, a merger with an MNC etc etc...

Not being satisfied with merely stating 3 points, GT attempts a masterly conclusion here...
"So to sum it up...
"ONE"(thumb goes up-amaerican shtyle) My experiences...
"TWO"(a well practiced index finger pops out) my multifacetedness (all behold, a new word was born!)
"THREE"....the middle finger pops out right on time...but my mind jams....uh oh...total traffic jam. I try to do the "thinkers frown" while my mind desperateley races about what the #@&$%# my first point was...but naaahhhh...while my finger twitches around, my mind says naaahhh,not today,boy!

Thankfully, the interviewer had the graciousness to turn away and start writing in his golden monogrammed Wharton notebook.

Except for this big stumble (aow!) and one small one (ouch) about Whartons core curriculum, I think I managed to come across quite well - expressed my career goals,
the reason behind pursuing my MBA and why Wharton. Somehow all I do now is to think and chuckle about this goof-up...a colleague tells me its my way of rationalizing a
bad experience...thats me, your everyday Freud, chuckling away while the gates of U.Penn slowly close...(slow, flowing sad music and lights dim,please!)

More about Chicago in my next post...

A Young Warrior

The Tamils were the perhaps the only spoilsports to the myth of India being a peaceloving country without imperialistic intentions.The Cholas raised their Tiger flag in Ceylon,the islands of Indonesia and all in-between. Although this cannot be termed as a full scale invasion,some Indians did once set out of their land with eyes on the soil of distant foreign lands.

The brutal internecine warfare of the South Indian races - Cheras,Cholas,Pandyas, Pallavas have given rise to countless literary works that celebrate courage, invincibility and dauntlessness.But as someone who's always liked to turn over a rock to see whats on the other side,I found this also....

A Young Warrior
- Ponmutiyar (translated by A. K. Ramanujan)

O heart
sorrowing
for this lad
once scared of a stick
lifted in mock anger
when he refused
a drink of milk,
now
not content with killing
war elephants
with spotted trunks,
this son
of the strong man who fell yesterday
seems unaware of the arrow
in his wound,
his head of hair is plumed
like a horse's,
he has fallen
on his shield,
his beard still soft.


And just a curious fact peeping out from the leaves of history: When is a mistake not a mistake? In language at least, the answer to this question is “When everyone adopts it,” and on rare occasions, “When it's in the dictionary.”

The word internecine presents a case in point. It usually has the meaning “relating to internal struggle,” but in its first recorded use in English, in 1663, it meant “fought to the death.” How it got from one sense to another is an interesting story in the history of English. The Latin source of the word, spelled both internecnus and internecvus, meant “fought to the death, murderous.” It is a derivative of the verb necre, “to kill.” The prefix inter- was here used not in the usual sense “between, mutual” but rather as an intensifier meaning “all the way, to the death.”

This piece of knowledge was unknown to Samuel Johnson, however, when he was working on his great dictionary in the 18th century. He included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error. On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.” This story thus illustrates how dictionaries are often viewed as providing norms and how the ultimate arbiter in language, even for the dictionary itself, is popular usage.

By this and this only...

...blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract,
By this, and this only, we have existed,
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms.

- Thomas Stearns Eliot (The Wasteland)

Once upon a time ago, I had a well nourished tummy...

A long pending tag about an old favourite…mom’s cooking!

Although mom had and still has a full time job, she somehow multi-tasks and remains the world’s best cook…with her birthday coming up next week, this tag seems a fitting salut to the magic of her love and to the 1000s of meals that we were force fed then and miss now.


Mom’s long beans poriyal
Theres some wonderful magic that mom does with plain long beans and tomatoes. A spicy and simple dish, she used to store this in a big bowl when she went out of town for her weekend classes. Weekend meals for me and my bro used to be beans dosa, beans sandwich, rice & beans…and we loved it! (for the first few months atleast)!

Idiyappam+ Maasi or cheeni sambal
First of all the idiyappam…they need to be fine strings –for this you need gadgets with tiny holes and the energy to keep the idiyappam press going on and on and on… When we weren’t messing it up trying to do that, mom did this exceedingly well.
Combo #1 - Maasi sambal
A coconut+lime+powdered dry fish thingy, I could pack in more than 15 idiyappams accompanied with this amazing dish. The only difficult part is scraping the coconut and getting good quality dried fish (without sand)…but its worth it!
Combo #2 - Cheeni sambal
Burnt sugar+lots of cut onions+dry fish powder+lots of simmering= 1 yummy yum yum dish- 1 months stock of which that Dad carried in a steel container when he went off to ship. This can be made very thick and mixed with milk to be diluted if and when more peoples turn up for grub…or if one gets hungrier!
The best part about both these dishes is Mum could somehow always make the usually nasty smell of dried fish disappear in 10 minutes. Some women are amazing!

Sambar of any sort
Sambhars make for wonderful accompaniment for idlis, rice and dosas. And mum knows atleast 3 different sambhars…on top of which, she can make them change taste between morning to evening to night – for idlis, it’s a more watery and spicy sambhar. For rice, she adds whole small onions (me likes crunching them!) and varies combinations with different vegetables like radishes, drumsticks and ladiesfingers. At night for dosas, she adds potatoes which somehow absorb the sambhar’s flavour in less than half an hour.

Tomato/ Onion/ Garlic chutneys
Amazing how mom can whip up any of the above chutneys in all of 5 minutes and still make them so amazingly tasty. I miss them all!

Pepper liver gravy
An old favourite of Dad’s, this is usually made on X’mas or New Year night so that we have some nice n spicy gravy and idlis when we return hungry after midnight mass. But its best the next day morning, seasoned and slightly fermented.

Fish/ crab gravy
Fish gravy is as indispensable during weekends because you can have it with anything –idlis/chapattis/parathas/rice/idlis/dosas- and dad being a fish freak, there was always lots of this at home. Crab gravy was special because it requires a 3 hour, 2 handed lunch to do justice to the juicy meat-there is that magical moment when you manage to cleave your way past the shells and a small white cluster plops into your palm!

Meatball gravy
Theres supposedly a patented family recipe behind this masala – this involves collecting a whole lot of random things, measuring them, and forcing kids to take them to the mill for grinding. But such kids are later mollified by being given “pre-serving samples” of the gravy and patties well before lunch.


Dad’s fish and prawn fry
The kitchen was usually mom’s kingdom…except when Dad was in a fish fry/prawn fry mood. This is not as simple as it seems. Aforementioned little boys are called in from various sleeping/TV-watching/play areas and are forced to help one strong captain with 14 inch biceps. For fish, the process is relatively simple – the fish cleaning water has to be poured from plant to plant so that sometime in the distant future “we can pluck shiny red tomatoes for salad”.
Cleaning prawns is a bit more dirty and complicated, one has to break the shell-then with a small knife, you need to clean it of one dirty strip…and then rinse. Dirty forced labour, but no one ever rescued us…after lunch, we were quite happy to forget such trauma.

After this the captain took over…masala is lovingly created and pushed into slits in the fish’s body…the flame is kept ONLY at simmer (fiddlers with the flame are threatened with various punishments ranging from being hung upside down to permanent exile without monetary support) and some “extra special” pieces are fried in coconut oil. The best fish cleaning volunteer was usually awarded with fried fish eggs in their tiny pouches…because by eating them, “you can get the strength of a hundred fishes”. There usually was a noticeable puffing up of a little chest for about 5 minutes after eating fish eggs.

And now I am hungry!