As I slouch in my chair at these weird, unearthly hours of a wintry January morning, I turn nostalgic trying to delve into my glorious two trimesters at the sacrum sacrosanct, BIM, Trichy. I ask to myself, "Is it worth my while to squander these precious hours on retrospection?" But then I placate myself and get on to reliving my last seven months.

When I entered the BIM campus, a sense of pride and delight overtook my jitteriness. I did see some cherubic faces here, but was soon given a hard-bitten reality check. My class was as lifeless as a wooden log. But then I live in a nano-technology world, where people would rather squander time with quantum computers than with pretty faces. As someone here has rightly said, "We view romance in the rear-view mirror." As soon as we were allotted flats, we were given a case study in Decision Modeling (DM). We had to submit it in two days using our Operation Research (OR) knowledge. We slogged that night to arrive at a solution. Only later, we found out that DM was one of the most dreaded subjects and OR, as we knew, was nowhere near DM. For a person who has been away from the academic rigor for almost four years, like me, the fundas were very high sounding and my chutzpah was defeated to the core.

Then came accounting. I didn't understand when the class got over, but I saw that enviable smugness on the countenance of those commerce graduates. Having work experience in sales, Marketing sounded better. My aplomb was vaulted a bit. Everyone in our class seemed genius in a way. If one was a computer whiz kid, another was a communications stud. If one was a quantitative punter, other was an accounting pundit. I remembered what Swami Vivekandanda said once, "Every soul is potentially divine." And I felt better. For the first time in my life I was attending a marathon five hours lecture. I felt like I was down in the dumps and without my cognizance I had taken a siesta. My routine was totally thrown out of gears. I'm used to it now.

Then we had IEVM (Indian ethos and values in management, a two-credit course in the 2nd trimester), which was nothing less than a pure nirvana. A transcendental journey from Bhagavad-Gita to today's business ethics (I'm still in a fix whether to call it an oxymoron??) was very much engrossing. These are just a part of a complex patina that our life is made up of.

Then came our foreign language classes. French never sounded so mellifluous to me. Our French accent can now put even those dulcet darlings from Paris operas to sleep !!!

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* Contributed by -
Mahantesh Kolli,
Class of 2003-05,
Bharathidasan Institute of Management,
Trichy.