The SP Jain GD/GI experience-1

Feb the 17th: Cometh the day, cometh the hr..
Chic Formal clothes + shiny black shoes and me are poles apart! Before this, formal clothes were my companions only on two occasions: College sypmosiums or job-interviews. Finally I settled for a striped black shirt & the new "tailor-"made black pant.

I always seem to have a tryst with Murphy's law each time (The chances that you come across an occupied rickshaw is directly proportional to the criticality of the GD-PI you are gonna attend). Today wasn't the case though. As the auto-wala maneouvered his baby through the busy andheri traffic and I reached well before the stipulated time of 9:00 am.

It was quite an emotional moment to be part of the campus which I (supposedly) spent 2 years of junior college in. Old memories flooded my head - the broken beaker in the fume-filled chemistry lab, dissection of a hapless frog crying for help, 35% attendance, my parents being called to campus, my father giving me a discourse on attending lectures properly, the sports centre, the frankies at Guptaji. It was all up there in front of me like a ppt presentation projected on screen.
Infact, this single day was going to be more value-adding for me than the 2 years put together. The Bhavans' college building wore a new look, a far-cry from the dirty, crumbling castle it was when we last saw it. An anecdote which did the rounds then was that even if the building crumbled to rubble there would be no casualties. No one attended lectures anyway!! I brushed aside all these memories with a wry smile. It was business time , time to get serious.

SP Jain is quite a miniature version of most B-schools. As you enter the main building, there is no "Top 10 B-school" aura attached to it. Serene atmosphere, Simple in construction & style with a few rooms, lecture-halls, a few open spaces here and there and a small piece of vegetation outside which I assumed was the garden. That made up the B-school.

As I strolled to the room which read "Registration for interview round 1", I saw scores of snxious parents outside. Waiting, for most of us seems to be a waste of time but parents, especially mothers dont mind doing that all their lives. They wait for you to make your way out of the womb crying. They wait for you outside the kindergarten classroom as you sit with a teary-eyed face inside. They wait for you outside during the wretched board-exams. They wait with bated breath, to know which college you got into. They wait for you to know how well your interview went off and how good a job you got.

There was a sprinkling of students, 20-odd of them. Half of the males wore ties, some in blazers resembled leaders representing their countries in UN assembly meetings. Most looked like they come straight from their office-meetings and were immersed in their own thoughts.A few females sat far away in the last benches resigned to the fact they would recieve less attention than the interview files no matter what they tried.

I sat in between 2 guys. The dude on the right was dressed in chic-formals; a pink shirt wit hs shiny tie. He wore a nervous-look on his face, almost scaring me to wits. A part of me wanted to go to all the seemingly nervous dudes and calm them. I instantly reminded myself that they were all my opponents in this game. The guy on my left had a very confused expression. He was shuffling & re-shuffling the contents of his folder. He seeemed unsatisfied with the loads of documents,papers,certificates he was armed with or probably he had missed out on a few photo-copies.
The air was filled with a thick sense of competition by now that I could feel it envelope me. We were told that we were gonna be part of the A-panel consisting of 6 of us. We were the first group for the PI. There were 3 other groups after us. As the clock struck 9 we sat in chairs outside the interview room and then we were called in..

To be continued..