33rd Week@XIMB

33rd Week@XIMB- 22nd January to 28th January, 2012

22nd January :  I wasted two of the three holidays in sleeping, web surfing and playing computer games. I have the old habit of procrastination in the cases of assignments.

23rd January : Nothing much substantial except learning about Non-Governmental Development Organization (NGDO).

24th January : I learned about Madhu Viswanathan in RIM lecture who has founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project a non-profit organization that offers marketplace literacy programs in subsistence marketplaces.



25th January : UDO lecture begins with Dalai Lama Quote : Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. There was emphasis on compassion in the organization. There were three TED video shown : Joan Halifax, Karen Armstrong and Daniel Goleman where I was having neutral, negative and positive feedback towards there views. I am reproducing here talk of Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence who asks why we aren't more compassionate more of the time.

Daniel Goleman: Why arent we all Good Samaritans?



26th January : Train to Patna.  SRC organized the event "Para-Athlos 2012, a sports meet for differently abled children at the XIMB grounds ". Read on SRC blog for more detail ...

27th January : I missed 4 lecture today. This has never happened before.

28th January : Saraswati Puja organized in the campus ; I was in Patna thinking about governance and work culture prevailing in the state. The economic reconstruction is not “development as usual,” and became more sensitive to the specific needs and idiosyncrasies of the state affected by conflict and corruption over the years. Prosperity depends on the synergy between private sector, people and state as a whole cluster, not only on the individual entrepreneur. We have to remember that people have always prized opportunity over equality.

No democracy can be built on the foundations of the kind of mistrust and anger that prevails among various castes and classes. There is need for balance between merit and positive discrimination policies. Competition is not the only factor for the creation of smarter people or more educated people. People fulfill their potential if they can get access. Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. So many years of Lalu Yadav has virtually destroyed any chances of growth in Bihar. This is the time of rebuilding and growth.

32nd Week@XIMB

32nd Week- 15th January to 22nd January, 2012

15th January : Sunday is mostly celebrated as perfect reading day by me. Pagalguy had some really interesting articles on their portal. I will put here two articles -

1- India’s latent entrepreneurship potential lies untapped because of life skills that aren’t taught and social expectations that aren’t set right. By addressing these problems in India’s bright youngsters through their curriculums, b-schools could lay the seed for innovative businesses that scale to become billion dollar companies, says Vijay Anand, Head of IIT Madras’s Incubation Center and Founder of popular startup event ‘Proto.in’. Read more here..

2- The popular method of measuring the average salary against the fees to calculate the Return on Investment of an MBA program has no fundamental basis by any concept of Finance, says IMI Delhi’s Admission Chairperson Prof Himadri Das. He suggests a more sound method to calculate the RoI and demonstrates how it is linked to the quality of the b-school’s professors.
Read more here...

16th January : It was just another busy day. Today, I felt that humans have been sandwiched between godless communism and God-damn-it capitalism. Thrash religion, Love People and Learn Economics sounds like good mantra for mine personal development!

17th January : REPP lecture was mostly based on news discussion. There was use of words like Structural Adjustment and Structural Transformation. They are buzz words mostly used by World Bank regarding Indian economy. I get to know about colleges of developmental studies at International (IDS SUSSEX, ISS in The Hague, UEA Norwich) and at National location.

I learned a little about product and service design at OM. MIS lecture was a slow starter. All software engineers feel nostalgic for their working days and IT firms. RIM lecture was focused on both production and consumption aspects of the marketing. There is a TED video of Madhu Viswanathan founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project a non-profit organization that offers marketplace literacy programs in subsistence marketplaces.

TEDxUIUC - Madhu Viswanathan - Bottom-Up Solutions for Subsistence Marketplaces


18th January : MP lecture was largely based on the village plan. It was last lecture of ADM. Professor talked about philosophy of life that includes hard work, knowledge and ethics. He emphasized on the competitive advantage within us due to ours exposure to both academic and Industry experts.

Ms. Parul Agarwal, from the 2008-10 batch and is currently working as a Senior Research Associate at IFMR-CMR. She came to our campus but I was feeling lazy to attend her lecture.

19th January : I finally submitted the final version of our RLLE report to the college. It was 115 pages long having 40 pages of diagram only. There is over focus on the Elinor Ostrom while talking about Tragedy of commons. I learned in brief about STEEPLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal )analysis that is used as a framework of macro-environmental factors used in strategic management. There was similar study of dimensions of the community in CMIB lecture.

strategic Guest Lecture : Mr Kannan Lakshminarayan will speak on "Weaving a Vision: Technology applications in rural areas". Mr Kannan an engineer and entrepreneur has designed the rural ATM and a decentralised microspinning machine for processing cotton.

Malkha, a neologism that conjoins the words Malmal and Khadi, is the brand name of natural-dyed handloom cloth produced by the Decentralised Cotton Yarn Trust in Andhra Pradesh [Source : India Together]. Malkha' is a new age cotton fabric, that fuses traditional methods of production with innovative micro spinning machine's. Microspin is a start-up company born out of the vision to radically transform what is arguably the oldest industry of India – Textiles. This enables a field to fabric manufacturing chain, which is environmentally conscious and socially responsible, empowering diverse communities of cotton pickers, weavers and spinners through their ethical trade policies and equitable profit. More details on his innovations are available at MicroSpin and Youtube Video of Malkha is available.

With the mission of helping banks reach out profitably to unbanked & under-banked regions, and years of R & D ably supported by IIT Madras, Vortex has designed ATMs which are highly reliable, rugged, easy to use and eco-friendly. They consume up to 90% lesser power and hence can be economically operated using solar power. Vortex ATMs are currently serving even the remotest parts of rural India – using technology as an enabler to improve quality of life. More details on his innovations are available at Vortex India.

20th January : XIMB was hosting pan-India annual B-School sports fest, Athlos, on the 20th-22nd January. It was a rest day for me. On a serious note, I gave a thought about pursuing higher studies(PHD) with few years of field experience. This decision depends a lot on the personal life and academic standards hiding in the future. I always think a serious student of developmental studies must be equipped with skills in the real world with basic knowledge of political science, statistics, anthropological ,historical and economics, to encourage them for multi dimesnsional analysis framework. Even Chris Blattman agreed with me in his blog post.

21st January : I have no interest in these gaming affairs. Still,  I was busy playing Age of Mythology whole day. Time enjoyed is not time wasted.

31st Week@XIMB

31st Week-  8th January to 14th January 2012

8th January: A busy day in the assignments.

There was a public lecture by Prof Norman Uphoff, Director, Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) and Professor of Government and International Agriculture on “Public Policy Opportunities for Food Security (and Poverty Reduction) in a Climate-Stressed World: Building Upon Our Learning from Agroecology and SRI (system of rice intensification ).” There was a headband of "JAI SRI" (Joint Action Initiative on System of Rice Intensification). The students of the 3 Continent Global Management Program also attended

The System of Rice Intensification, assembled in Madagascar over a 20-year period and gaining application internationally since 2000. As per my knowledge, PRADAN started introducing SRI in rainfed areas of the Eastern Gangetic Plains in 2003. He stressed the point of diminishing return obtained in the genetic input and external input after few seasons of cultivation.

9th January: There was only one lecture on IRV (Introduction to Risk and Valuation). I was amazed to know that the Ph.D. guide of our Prof. is Dr. Kirit S. Parikh. He stressed the fact that nothing is interesting if you're not interested and preparing the question paper of any subject can give you command over it. I was introduced to the concept of the time value of money.

- Microeconomics is only a tool of decision-making in the text of consumers, firms, and markets.

- Each of the people sitting in the class has a different opportunity cost, hence the unique ability to differ in decision making.

10th January: Only one lecture on REPP (Rural Enterprise and Public Policies). He gave high regard to P Sainath. He raised the point that despite so many successes, India's rural-urban divide is terrifying. As Amartya Sen warns in his address to the 93rd Indian Science Congress in Hyderabad, India's future "cannot be one that is half California and half sub-Saharan Africa". South Africa and Brazil have economic inequalities within their social structure but now India is also joining their ranks. All thanks to the wrong economic and political policies of the Indian government.

The concept of Gap Year College was told by him. An interesting concept read by me in the blog of Rashmi Bansal. Ending today with a quote for an engineer  -

"And somewhere there are engineers

Helping others fly faster than sound.

But, where are the engineers

Helping those who must live on the ground?"

-- Young Oxfam Poster

11th January: A lot of classes were canceled.

When you feel that the film industry is always a place of people with no art, culture, or political interest. The stereotype is wrong. Surprised to see the talk of Mansoor Khan who was talking about sustainability and growth. For those who aspire for a career change, purpose in life and trying to make sense of this insane world, he sets a glaring example.

TEDxYouth@Chennai - Mansoor Khan - The Third Curve.

Mansoor Khan is known to the country as the director of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander. Despite being a success in Bollywood, he moved with his family to Coonoor where lives on a 22-acre organic cheesemaking farm. Alumni of IIT-Madras, he went on to study at Cornell University and then, MIT, USA.

12th January: There was the first lecture on CMIB (Community Mobilisation & Institution Building). There is a proposed discussion of Swades, Manthan, and Chak De India in the course outline. I am excited about the movies especially Manthan. Manthan was a 1976 Hindi film made by Shyam Benegal, based on a story written jointly by Verghese Kurien and director Shyam Benegal.

Professor of OM (Operations Management)  started with few quotes that were so precise and accurate.

“I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” ― Albert Einstein.

“If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.”      ― Bill Gates.

"Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt.

I heard the first time about the triple bottom line (abbreviated as TBL or 3BL). As per the economist (magazine), behind it lies the same fundamental principle: what you measure is what you get, because what you measure is what you are likely to pay attention to. Only when companies measure their social and environmental impact will we have socially and environmentally responsible organizations.

Never know about any business model till this class. Learned about one today. For example, one of the initiatives in the business excellence movement is a framework known as the TBEM (Tata Business Excellence Model). TBEM assesses core aspects of business operations: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, workforce focus, process management, and business results. Read more on the Tata group website.

13th January: MR (Marketing Research) class started with two lectures back to back. A lot of stuff about social networks and content analysis is still there to learn.

OM (Operations Management) class is becoming full of new information and jargon. One article on strategy was given to us for reading. What Is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter. Source: Harvard Business Review, 21 pages. Publication date: Nov 01, 1996. The author argues that operational effectiveness, although necessary to superior performance, is not sufficient, because its techniques are easy to imitate. In contrast, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match.

14th January: CMIB lecture was focused on the definition and characteristics of the community. I was thinking about our Cinephile society that emerged as Cine Darbaar now. My head was revolving around the talk, dreams, and vision of realistic and indie cinema. I was able to appreciate the necessity of social capital and the need for regular interaction for vibrancy in the community.

Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks. - Mark Twain. Any guess for mentioning this quote. I was reading about forecasting in OM (Operations Management) class. We were assigned to find the concept of the Markov chain. Happy Weekend.

I talked today with one of the teachers about the quality of students at XIMB. The discussion was casual yet confidential in nature.

Sparsh: Development in a Trimester of rural management - 2...

Sparsh: Development in a Trimester of rural management - 2...: Continuing from the 1st part of the Development series in RM , I will move towards the 2nd part of the learning in the field of Rural Manag...

30th Week@XIMB

30th Week- 1st January to 7th January

1st January : This day was not any more significant than other days. A day worth utilized in reading book.

There is a different world that exist outside the college gate. Hence, jumping directly from the graduate college to B School for higher education is not a good idea. One should try a year off or career building in any industry, NGO etc. It always makes you wiser. I feel sorry for the few classmates who didn't show the inclination of growing as a mature person even now.

Passing over six months in MBA, I think pre work experience before a MBA is more useful rather than a fresher doing an MBA. There is a difference in the mindset of the Workex and freshers. It is a difference of maturity and vision. People with Work-Ex may be overqualified or unfit for certain type of the job, but they can manage things better due to their previous interaction with the outdoor environment.

Recently Department of Industrial and Management Engineering (IME) at IITK plans for a ‘no entry’ board for freshers. It is planning to close the doors for candidates who don’t have prior work experience. “The reason why such a decision is being deliberated over is because freshers lack practical knowledge and can’t visualise the responsibilities that come with a managerial position,” said Prof BV Phani, faculty of finance and entrepreneurship, IME. “Our objective is to provide students with the best possible management exposure/education so that they learn and understand the process. Students view the management programmes of IITs as secondary, as compared to the IIMs, and stop-gap arrangements. This has resulted in a disconnect between the students and faculty.”

2nd January : Whole day was spent in CTCRI for the preparation of the report.

A sarcastic cover letter written to Hiring Manager for a International Humanitarian Organization. I see remarkable and subtle similarity in our course program with the applicant.

There is a tussle to turn this course like postgraduate course of social work without paying attention to the students loan. Education is not only about academic learning and vision about students of the college, but also about ROI (Return of Investment) on the high course fees paid by each student here.

I bookmarked an interesting paper by Bernadette M. Wanjala and Roldan Muradian published in 2011. Can Big Push Interventions Take Small-scale Farmers out of Poverty? Insights from the Sauri Millennium Village in Kenya. CIDIN Working Paper 2011-1. Nijmegen: CIDIN.

Abstract: Using household survey data from Sauri Millennium village and propensity score matching methodology, this paper sought to analyze the impact of the Millennium Village Project (MVP) interventions on agricultural productivity and income. The results show a significant increase in agricultural productivity and an insignificant income effect, which can be attributed to small land sizes and over-reliance on agriculture. The results indicate the need to diversify economic activities and a revision of the assumptions on the relationship between productivity and income, on which the MVP, and many other rural development policies, rely on.

3rd January - The registration for the third trimester started today. There are lot of academic reports pending to be completed due to RLLE.

My respect for our Class Representatives (CRs) Gaurish and Saket had increased today. They are coping with administration (higher management) without adequate support from the students on the issues of missing SRM (Social Research Method) classes and introducing of OBL (Outbound Learning program) to RM. They are the real hero that our Rural Management program deserve, but most of our batch-mates don't even respect the duo right now.

We remember the leaders who always encourage and gave opportunity to make our own choices. I hope better sense prevail in the administration. The course choices, not the mandatory part of the curriculum define the decision making power of a student in the Business School. The policies of college must reflect the priorities of the students and industry rather than reinforcing the position of the faculty caught in wrap of timelessness. We all know that the absolutist conformity had always discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent.

4th January - I was busy in CTCRI for preparing the RLLE report. I was surprised to know that people from other countries are waiting for out report.

‎5th January - I was busy whole day since there was visit of one company to the campus. Since, its a confidential matter, nothing much can be written in the public.

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, formerPresident being felicitated by XIMB Director P.T. Joseph at Xavier Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar. He is at XIMB to interact with students on Thursday evening.— Photo: Ashoke Chakrabarty

He raised an important question and an oath for the students - "What will i be remembered for..??" and "Small aim is crime." I disagreed with the quest of legacy raised in the question and the ambition aspect of the oath. I was surprised to see myself disagreeing with such an eminent personality and even mine own role model. There is no crime in aiming small. May be I acted as a conservative & guardian of "Small is Beautiful" manifesto.

His talk focused on the importance of creative leadership for economic development, the relevance of sustainable development in the current global economic scenario, the implementation of PURA (Provision of Urban amenities in Rural areas) and his visualization of India in the year 2020. He is an inspiration source to us who wants to create a sustainable development model by mobilising the youth of the country.  He mentioned a website of the movement started by him - WHAT CAN I GIVE?  His full speech at XIMB campus can be read on his personal website.

I decided to be free again on the personal front. Happy New Year to me.

6th January - I had meeting with Fr. P T Joseph regarding EQ & Leadership course with group of other students. He had taken feedback with the student of the last six month. Few of us had courage to speak our minds while rest were silent spectators. The anger against administration or system may prosper in the hostels (and now social media) but it is a practical prospect outlining career path of achieving economic stability that decides the fate of any revolution inside college premiers. This led to the path of subservience and avoiding any clash with the administration regarding their own problems.

7th January -A day of rest and reconciliation. While I was having good time, continuous news of recession had created a pessimistic environment. Top B-Schools like IIMs, ISB expect fewer recruiters, fewer jobs and lower salaries this time . This news alarms the bad condition of the rest colleges and Indian economy. A college reputation in market depends on the capability to place its student with good package. The mettle of a college and its student came in limelight of these tough situation only.

I am not a job creator. Even while seeking a job, I believe in the long term prospects. Most people mistake the placement packages for success that are mere numbers . Through hard work and determination, one can balance these figures in the career. So, one should not let figures determine success. The whole scenario of cultivating job creators rather than job seekers is changing the landscape of India business. But it is long time to change mindset of an average student burdened with the loan for the risk of an entrepreneurship. Here is one step taken by TISS in the correct direction - School abolishes placements to push graduates to become entrepreneurs.