The Tale of Three Losses

Part 1: How I lost my dignity.....

Date: 10th April, 2009; Time: 10:00 A.M.;

Venue: Room no. 12, Ground Floor, B-building, Institute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology & Applied Nutrition (better known as Dadar Catering College), Veer Savarkar Marg, Dadar (W), Mumbai - 400028.

Occasion: PI (Personal Interview) for admission to IIM-C

Background: Yours Truly (hereafter referred to as YT) had never seriously planned on embarking on the journey to acquiring the most-hyped educational degree, straight after (presumably) acquiring the second-most hyped one. Nevertheless, when a free, non-poisonous lunch presents itself on your table without any initiative on your part, you start believing that you had desired to obtain that lunch all along. You even start imagining that devouring the plateful of delicacies would be the best thing to happen in your life. Now discontinuing the no-longer-palatable-food-analogy, in layman's words, at the mentioned time and place, YT's sole objective was to get into IIM-C (IIM-A had never really spawned a similar 'ambition' in YT and IIM-B had always had a rigidly entrenched idea about what constitutes 'ambition', while being ignorant about ability and smartness).

The GD (Group Discussion) as usual tried to bring out the animal inside all of the 'aspirants' present, by enclosing 12 of us in a semi-circular imaginary cage and asked to keep shouting at the top of our voices whatever we want to, for around 10 minutes. And as always, a topic (on the lines of 'Success of NGOs implies failure of Government') was given for the sake of formality; everyone of us knew that we were free to vigorously exercise our vocal chords to our hearts' content about what we had for breakfast in the morning, why we left our job at Microsoft/Google/Yahoo/Nomura (and for lesser mortals like YT, Infosys/TCS/Tech Mahindra/Wipro), why did we not eat the previous night, and how-can-anyone-forget? 65%-of-India's population-is-younger-than-30, and somehow connect all these to the 'given topic'. After the expected test of the 'survival of the outspoken', the turn came for each to prove that one is the least worthless of all present there, namely, the Personal Interview.

So, now the real story of the assault on YT's dignity begins (does YT oblige???)

To be continued..........