We did it!

Its good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Some 80 odd middle aged (mostly, ladies please ignore), confused people entered into classroom on 19^th June -2009, and thus began the new Journey called “PGSEM-2009”. I mentioned confused because nobody new where was the classroom C-11, (though readers can take liberty in interpretation).

Finally today, I submitted my last assignment (dutifully on last minute before deadline expires, so keeping up the tradition), and thus today marked the formal finish to the journey undertaken 2.5 years back.

Today I am not going to repeat what I mentioned in my last blog, though repeating is not a crime in IPC and incidentally many are making a living in just repeating things.

I will mention today some things which are seared into the generic make up of this journey.

PGSEM stoked the flame of “Life is but one chance” invariably in all of us. The unsaid “I wish..”, buried deep within all of us before joining PGSEM, became so vivid that all of us could muster ourselves, pick our pieces, go through the grill and finally enter into the class room. This journey epitomizes the transition from “I wish” to “I did it”. And I am game to savor this feeling for sometime now.

Another aspect of this journey is the “Experience” part of it. No, I am not talking of “getting high”, but a kind of liberating, elevating feeling each time a course, talk or discussion touched where it feels. It teaches people to be comfortable with scale of things, be comfortable with light speed shuttle between 30 thousand feet to 10 feet and finally be practical but sensitive about the fact that business is not balance sheet, employees are not raw materials. The whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Today all of us can wade through a multi billion dollar balance sheet (the #of line remains same J), talk to a top shot hedge fund manager and also learn something from road side tea stall person. You want to know how?

There are two secrets to this.

First is PGSEM de-stigmatize the word “Mistake”, which has haunted our whole education system so badly that people want LIC insurance before taking an exam. But in PGSEM, you make as many as you want, and you discover that making mistakes is ok since everyone is making them.

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.

Second is, it punctures the heavy word (I mean literally its like metric tons per letter)- “Expectations", or in other word the notion like “ log kya kahenge type” ( what will others/people say?). The truth is, nobody is watching you honey, so do whatever you want, and two, everyone is busy making the same mistakes, so it is cool.

So think of it, If only I could de-risk myself of these two words “Mistakes and Expectation”, I would still be the same but would have lot more moments with me of something which we call Life.

There is one more aspect which marks this journey “Exam Hyper-Inflation”. Think of it, its like once you go through 150 exams ( roughly) of all shades which includes, your ability to reflect upon a piece of empty paper for hours, to your ability to go hysterical before class to prove that Steve Jobs is way below your level of panache. So then you realize that the net value delivered by 100s of exams is roughly equal to the value we got of one dreaded board exam of 10 or 12^th. I kind of liked this inflation.

I mean, in my 10^th days, the mere thought of board exams would make me do 7 rounds of Hanumal Chalisa. And now, I am ok to give an exam at 3 am during my bio break. Actually some of us have actually written exams while there better halves were making calls to maternity ward in hospital, how do you beat that. Do you know why and how could we achieve this? It is not that we are not serious, but that we have realized “what is a real exam vs nominal exam”. Now this dear friends, I call a real experience.

No talk of PGSEM is ever complete without mention of “Time Management”. We did it so well, that some of us got married during exam breaks (basically overnight breaks). I am serious. We were doing skyping for assignment when normal people sleep and also used to work when normal people work. You can do this if this is once in blue moon, but how do you do this if this moon come 10 times in a quarter.

Lastly they say, Journey is not measured in miles or years but number of friends. And without doubt, most of us have got at least a couple 3:00 am friends (3:00 am in local timezone J). This is the asset which all of us would cherish for rest of our lives.

We came in confused, we are walking out even more confused but as someone has said, wise is one who is wise enough to realize that he knows nothing, most of us are wiser. We may have aged more than 2.5 years, but we have grown many times than that.

I am concluding now as someone said, “Conclusion is simply the place when someone got tired of thinking”.

I wish all my friends in this journey good luck and good wishes. Grow babies, make babies, become a baby, do whatever you wish as now you have the secret of how to go from “I wish” to “I did it”.

If ever you need to choose between dream big vs dream small, always dream big because marginal cost of dreaming big is zero.