From IIM Ahmedabad To Happiness

Author(s): Vijay K Jain
Publisher: Vikalp Printers

Page 16

FROM IIM-AHMEDABAD TO HAPPINESS
“cloud nine students started some serious soul-searching trying to satisfy oneself that he or she did not belong to the group that was not supposed to be there
Getting into IIM-A does mean that, in respect of certain skills that the Combined Admission Test (CAT) is testing you for, you have scored better than many others. These are the skills that the management institutes think are essential to your becoming a sound decision-maker, a good manager. Nothing more than that. You certainly have not been tested for your aptitude for other
numerous professions - medicine, architecture,
scientific
research, modelling, acting, painting, politics, entertainment, music and singing, teaching, sports, and so on.
Just as it is naive, bordering on stupidity, to assume that 'Femina Miss India’ is the most beautiful woman in the country, it is similarly unbecoming of a student of a premier management institute to carry with him the thought that he is the 'best brain' or the 'cream of the country. A 'Femina Miss India is certainly gorgeously beautiful, yet, in our own interest, we should drive our minds away from the comparative mode, else, we are going to not only unnecessarily undermine many millions of other women, but also preparing ourselves for a terrible compromise at the time of our marriage and thereafter.
Consider this apocryphal story:
A religious scholar once boarded a boat to cross a river. Just the boatman and the scholar were on the boat. After the boat had travelled some distance, the scholar asked the boatman, "Have you read this scripture?” “No, sir,” replied the boatman with utmost humility. Encouraged by the expected answer, the scholar fired another question, “Have you read that scripture?” “No, sir,” replied the boatman, again with humility. "How old are you?” asked the scholar. “I don't know exactly but I suspect about 50 years, sir,”