Long since I've written anything at all ! Not that nothing exciting was happening ! Just that did not really get too much time to mull over the happenings. I am back in campus after a rather exciting course - ERI - Explorations in Roles and Identities. We were thrown together close to the Rann of Kutch for 6 days to discuss life, experiences, traumas and future !
In between we also took a safari in the Little Rann of Kutch seeing wild asses and Nilgais. It was an ossum experience and something unwordly in the MBAish definitions of courses and grades. We camped in tents close to a lake and would visit the lake in the nights at less than 10 deg temperatures to view the reflection of the full moon and think about the emotionally draining sessions. It was part traumatic part revelation listening to guys/gals who were comrades of ours in what would easily be the most whirlwind time of our life. People whom we know was along with us in the mentally and physically stressful first year at A. Lots of people clearly had enough emotional issues related to IIM A itself that though we all wanted to keep the red brick building and the happenings inside, out of our thinking, it would just not budge !! It was great listening to the "emotional" side of lotsa people whom we thought were damn tuff ! At the end of the day, personally, it was great to build some personal relationships with my friends with whom it was always a formal work/need based relations inside the college.
We shared our experiences in relations with Parents, Siblings,Friends & Girlfriend. Larger issues like coping with death, leaving a legacy, what is life and who am I to more mundane issues like career, I-Banking/Consulting careers, Work-life Balance,Meaning of Money and meaning of work. All in all it was a great and an entirely must break for the students before they pass out from here. Two years here otherwise would leave people mechanical robots without much of emotions and a clear lack of identification with other humans. I am grateful that this course existed.
Meanwhile tomorrow our final term starts. It is a short term since we have final placements in March. Just got my books for next term and again we have some amazing books to read. My "text" books for courses (LVMR) include :
Yuganta - By Karve
Saint Joan - Bernard Shaw
Machiavelli's The Prince
Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House
King Henry V and Othello by Shakespeare
The little Price by Exupery
Tughlaq by Girish Karnad
Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Cervantes classic of all times - Don Quixote
The Art of War by Tzu
Whether these shall help build leaders of tomorrow (which is one of the objectives of the course!) it shall be fun reading and analysing these classics in class.
4 comments:
You might want to add "Arthashastra" by Chanakya to that list.Kautilya is simply the Baap of Strategy.To quote Prof Boesche:
"To return to Machiavelli's after reading the military writings of Kautilya is jolting. It becomes readily apparent that Machiavelli is not even trying to tell us something new about warfare, because he believed the ancient Greeks and Romans knew it all - aside from such things as artillery...
"They (Kautilya and Sun Tzu) were also prepared to win in ways Machiavelli would regard as dishonourable and disgraceful-assassination, disinformation, causing quarrels between ministers by bribes or by means of jealousy over a beautiful woman planted as a secret agent, and so on. Machiavelli - who offers no systematic discussion of even guerrilla warfare - would have been easily outmatched by generals reading either Sun Tzu or Kautilya."
Cheers
Oh my God! that's some cool course set yo have for reading..what fun! After these shit load of engg stuff that's goin to be some relief...which course is this btw?
Dushyant - we do have a small reading wrt kautilya but not the entire arthashastra - i shall catch up with it later in life :)
Ellie - the course is Leadership, vision meaning and reality...yea compared to some of the more drier courses in engg, MBA does offer certain amoubnt of flexibility..but not too much :DD
continuing with LVMR ?
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