Its a long time Sandeep and Vaibhav, the co-founders of iimcatwalk.com have been asking me to write for iimcatwalk. "Abhe tu site kolkhe baita hey, kuch to likhna.." The reason I didn't write earlier was to grow this as a place where there is wider contribution apart from the founders. But now it's time to break my silence and open my heart. I (I refers to Sreekanth and russell is my nickname after my favourite philosopher Bertrand Russell) will try to write regularly from now on. Let my first article be about my thoughts on MBA itself and whether I should have done it.

First some background about myself, I am a CompSci Engg who then worked for 4 years in the software industry. After this I did an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and am now working in Mumbai for a leading ecommerce company in the world.

I was always a techie at heart, read tech, breathed tech (ate food). So back in 2000 having entered the software industry, I felt, I was in the right industry. I enjoyed the first 2-3 years, one of them being in the heavenly Europe, in the city of Brussels. What was good was that I learned a lot - how to get things done in a company, how to deal with people etc, what was bad was - there was very little tech about my software career

Also beyond a point I was doing the same set of things and there was no challenge in my life as a software engineer. I felt bored, depressed and contemplated having more chais a day (not suicide, that needs energy). After one of these chais, one day I thought "Yaar life me kuch maza nahi aa raha. Life me kuch aisa karna mangta hey, khi marne ke baad apna putla bhi lage park me! Apna-ij naam har road pe!" you get the hang...

Basically in the life of every youngster comes this day, when he says enough is enough. I want to lead a different life. I want to do something else. I call this the mid-20s crisis! (Life being fast nowadays the mid-life crisis hits us early). I contemplated jumping from TCS and working for some other company and then said "Naah" like Munnabha and Circuit after the "dry-day idea". How about an MS in US? Well after 3 months in Brussels, I was missing the polluted air of India, the crowded roads, where vehicles kissed you everyday and the people who spit into a crowd of 100s and still hit no one! I wanted to be only in India. Jeena yahaan, marna yahaan (considering the roads, that part was sure)

What could I do in India, other than work in a software company or BPO? Meaning people do PhD in anhtropology and then work for TCS or Infosys only, right? I thought let's not work at all for sometime. So after having rejected a stint abroad, or jumping companies, the only two logical options left were Himalayas and CAT. Since the Himalayas were too high, I aimed a bit lower, an MBA from an IIM! Yes, I actually believed I would clear CAT and make it to an IIM!

I spent around 3-4 hours everyday from July 2003 to the exam-day in November 2003. I worked really hard. After the exam, when I heard that the paper had leaked, I threw my digital watch, whose stop-watch had stopped at 1:59:59. I had used the same stop-watch for writing atleast 30 mock tests at home and with IMS, but never touched it again. I reset the stop-watch again at 10:59:59AM on Feb 15th 2004 for the CAT re-take. I was cool. I was looking at how tense others around me were and smiling. But I had decided that anyways one the exam starts, I would give it a go. I used a combination of intuition and judgement. For example for the first time in 30 mock tests, I answered all the RC questions except one and got it 100% right. Part of it was practice, part of it was because I was cool and actually didn't desperately want to clear it and part was luck (or God as some put it). Anyways I cleared it allright and cleared it well. The rest of the story i.e. the IIMA part, I will write some other day.

Let me get back my techie interests in life and how I found IIMA from that perspective. I actually went there thinking that I will find others who are similarly interested in the internet like me and probably startup on some cool idea. But most people at IIMA were more career-oriented than entre spirited. One reason could be that most of them were fresh graduates, who obviously wanted a stint at working and earning before trying out anything like this. Ofcourse there was the LEM course and the great Prof. Handa and 4-5 very interesting startups out of my batch - people who started-up without taking up a job at all! But none of those was in areas of my interest.

IIMA did one very important thing to my understanding of the business world and my maturity. It added a strong consumer focus to my thinking and I was introduced to Marketing as a profession and a little bit of financial understanding of things around me. IIMA ofcourse made me more confident about life itself! But given my financial condition, I couldn't have started up immeidately after the MBA. So I chose the only industry that was ever close to my heart - that of the internet and took a job with the only company that came to campus from this industry.

Working after an MBA is a good-learning experience in the sense that suddenly you get a larger perspective about the decisions you need to make and grow business. As of today, I enjoy my work and am happy. BUT the techie and entrepreneur in me will never die down and neither is it completely satisfied in a post-MBA job...

So should a techie have done an MBA? Well techies of the world like Steve Wozniak who designed the first PC, or Larry & Sergey who worked on the Google algorithms are not people whose first concern is the consumer. They want to create! It is the same creative urge there was in a Van Gough or a Beethoven. They create for the sake of creating, not consumption. But if you want to make a business out of it and run a company, you always need to think of the other angle - the consumer angle. What is the value the technology adds to me, the consumer? The MBA gives the techie this perspective. So now, even when I use my techie side to create, the question of "Who is the consumer and how does he see it is never forgotten!". In case a techie still doesn't want to get into anything like an MBA and still wants to start-up, my advice would be to have a partner, who can think of the consumer angle. This is vital.

Anyways, it was good fun writing this. Hope you enjoyed reading it too!
Put in your feelings/thoughts/suggestions as comments. Cheers.