35th Week- 5th February to 11th February, 2012
5th February - IRMA has declared their GD-PI list one month ago. XIMB-RM cut off for rural management course had been declared now. This year CAT, XAT & IRMA scores are valid for the entrance from this year. I welcome this diversification of application with different scores.
Lot of debate and analysis will go again in the rural management community.It is a course that has unique fusion of rural development and business management. Rural Management is a different course whose people are convinced of the superiority of their mission and are obsessed with the inferiority of their merit on CAT/XAT scale. As per mine opinion, a rural manager must be more professional and learned as comparison to the normal MBA college manager as one has less capital and more complex problems to deal with. More about rural manager as per point of view of an IRMA at pagal guy.
I respect IRMA for their immense work in the field of development. Yet, governemnt and IRMA adminsitration have failed to set up more number of colleges on such pattern. With 32 years of establishment, there is no substantial increase in the number of seats offered from 80's to 2010. A very low increment of seats while the population has 65 billion to 112 billion people shows lag of government in the higher education. This is a drastic policy lapse from both IRMA and Central Government. They should take lessons from IITs and IIMs who are opening colleges without the illusive fears of quality dilution by few elites. Here, I will lay emphasis on the private colleges like XIMB that are putting efforts for developing such niche program with a different framework. Yet, reservation of seats for a youth from BPL card holder family by IRMA is a nice move. I heavily appreciate this progressive step. Way to go !
6th February - Quiz in IRV ; I was selected in the new XSYS Team that is the Systems Association of XIMB. That is a good progress happening slowly in mine professional life.
There is much beyond classroom to learn. The attitude of Spoon-feeding knowledge has killed the spirit of questioning and search for the solutions. Its hard to get the spirit of questioning in the last stages of your academic career.
7th February - ADM end term exam was there and hence it led to the official end of the 2nd trimester today. I missed two classes of REPP and RIM for the exam. It was a low point of my post-graduation academic session. There was huge and open discussion on the caste system with referring to an EPW article : An Obituary on Caste as a System by M N Srinivas. The changing social dynamics of India throughout centuries was well documented in this. Yet, the article misses to say much about caste system in Islam and Christianity of the converted community.
Mr. Sandeep Rajan and Mr. Harihar Dubey of PGDM(RM) 2010-12 batch have won the Earthian Awards 2011-12 declared by WIPRO.
8th February - I heard the name of Harsh Mandar who is a bureaucrat turned activist in UDO lecture. This was the last class of IRV. Prof summarized the class with anecdotes of his life and a nice video giving message to live simply.
Life is like Coffee
9th February - "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over ― Aleister Crowley". Robert Chambers points out different type of biases that a rural manager should be minimizing. Its often true that we convert our developmental intervention as rural development tourism. In 1983, six biases of such visits : spatial, project, person, seasonal diplomatic and professional - against seeing, meeting and learning from the poor people were identified and described. In 2008, the seventh bias of security was added and all these biases continue to reinforce popular wrong perceptions.
There is Ganesh Devy and Mahashweta Devi who are working for tribal languages unknown to most of us. While they are unheard by most of us, we tend to read more Dickens than Mahashweta Devi to understand our own backyard. I was lucky to get a TED talk by G N Devy. Professor Ganesh Devy talks about how languages evolve. And how local Indian languages are dying, taking with them a treasure of historical knowledge and wisdom.
RIM: I learned about Distribution strategies and tactics of rural market. Companies are reviewing the rural marketing concept and trying to outreach rural market with NGO's and SHG other than the channel partners. There was discussion on SHG. The average life of SHG is 39 months as per a study (No reference document available).
There was a video shown on Project Shakti of HUL. HUL collaborate with self-help groups and non-governmental organizations to identify underprivileged women and train them to be saleswomen.
Film on Project Shakti
Congratulations to Suma Pratyusha and Sreevidya Gowda of RM-1 batch for finishing at Silver Level in the Acara Challenge 2012 organized by the University of Minnesota. Kudos to them !
10th February - It was the last day of National CSR Conference. Only lecture of REPP was possible with Joseph C Kumarappa. Economy of Permanence is a famous book written by him. Unfortunately the book is out of print but was downloaded and supplied to the whole batch by GB. [Download PDF Version]
11th February - There is case discussion in BIS over CCD. The approach to teach BIS completely through case studies is quite strange with most of the public coming from agriculture and commerce background. As they have consider BIS a technical subject with unheard jargon.
Guest Lecture by Biju Dominic
Biju Dominic is an alumnus of XIMB. He is currently CEO of FinalMile Consulting. . He mostly focused his talks om behaviour architecture- changing human behaviour with the help of Cognitive Neurology and Behavioural Economics. He talked a lot about solving macro level problems with micro- management.
- The genuine question raised by him was - Does Brain take a shortcut ?
- Indian politician is a person to learn man- management.He gave various example from Kerala to US Presidential elections to prove his claims.
- Sucking out of money phenomenon. This is happening to the big farmers at Noida and Gurgaon who had became suddenly rich with the higher prices of the real estate. The habit of austerity has given place to mindless consumerism. And they consume most of their money within few years, and never make a substantial investment . It has lot of do with irrational nature of the human beings that neo-liberal economics fail to explain.
- The genuine question raised by him was - Does Brain take a shortcut ?
- Indian politician is a person to learn man- management.He gave various example from Kerala to US Presidential elections to prove his claims.
- Sucking out of money phenomenon. This is happening to the big farmers at Noida and Gurgaon who had became suddenly rich with the higher prices of the real estate. The habit of austerity has given place to mindless consumerism. And they consume most of their money within few years, and never make a substantial investment . It has lot of do with irrational nature of the human beings that neo-liberal economics fail to explain.
