The official program ended at about 5:00PM but by that time we have realized that we needed to lot more on our presentation for Day 2. We went back to the room and decided to quickly assemble back by 5:30. This time I took the lead and the team felt that I can present it better as I sounded more convincing. I agreed to it with a certain level of hesitation in my mind.
I know that there are lot of people around, who are brilliant but lack confidence at the right moment. I was exactly in that state at that moment. I have been interacting with many foreigners in my career but somehow I was never sure how an Indian would be perceived by them. But then my passion took over and my day one experience encouraged me a lot. After all they were all people like me sitting there and trying to make sense out of what the speaker was saying. Suddenly my fear about my language, accent and Indianness were gone. I was ready for the presentation. We worked till 8:00pm and went for the official dinner. We returned back quickly and continued working on the presentation. If there was anything that we were happy about, it was our commitment. In life, you succeed and fail but what makes an experience invaluable is the kind of effort that you put in. Even when you are successful, if you haven't given your best, I doubt if anyone would be fully happy. May be you would celebrate from outside but you would enjoy it fully from inside. But when you give your best, when you know that you are fully exhausted and that you have been stretched beyond your previous best, that's when I think one would get that satisfaction, that happiness, equivalent to conquering the summit. I felt the same when we finished our presentation
Day 2 started exactly in the reverse of day 1. The team that presented last on day 1 went first on day 2. And we got our chance as the penultimate team. We missed the presentation of IIM-Indore as we were pulled into a photoshoot. By 4:30 we dragged our luggage into the Siena and started back to the airport. We were really on the top of the world as we felt that our presentation was the best on Day 2. I think al our team members contributed a lot including Ankush who had to drop out due to some special reasons.
Our flight was at 10:10PM and the results were to be out by 9:30pm. One of our team member and two from the other team were there at Darden and were to start the next day. At 9:50 the other team guys managed to reach their team members and we heard that ISB came second. Initially we thought that our team made it but then realized quickly that it was not our team but the other team that made it to the second. For few minutes we were in kind of a shock and only a little later we could congratulate the other team. The disappointment was huge but for the first time in my life I could take a failure and not react wildly to it. Somehow the experience and the personal learning was so strong that I couldn't react negatively. This was the true emotion at that point. I slept off well that night and the next I continuously watched 4 movies to get back to normalcy. On one side there was a great disappointment but on the other side I was happy that I gave my best and didn't want to bother justifying the failure. There could be hundred and one reasons - it doesn't matter. In fact I was shocked to see that Rashid Ahmed's team didn't make it to the top three and the other team from Kenan Flagler made it to the top. That team was led by a guy who participated last year too when that team stood second. May be he understood the formula better than anyone else. Nevertheless, Co 08 made history - for all the future batches the bar has been raised. All the previous achievements were shadowed and the Innova team from ISB made it to the top three.
We did some quick shopping in the US on our way from Charlottesville to Dulles and then at the duty free mall at Doha.
We landed at Hyderabad on 19th morning and thus ended my trip to the Darden. Coincidentally, when I was doing my PGDITM, I participated in a competition and traveled outside Andhra Pradesh (can you believe it) for the first time. For the regional round I went to Coimbatore and later I traveled to Delhi for the finals. In my next job I was continuously traveling all around India. This time at ISB, I got an opportunity to go out of India and I am looking forward to a job that will allow me to travel around the world and interact with people from different nationalities.
Some pics that I wanted to share:
"Team Innova presenting their winning Idea"
"That's me at the Darden Library"
That's Anand, me and Rao
Is winning everything, I don't know. If we had made it to the top three, may be I would've been boasting about all the things that we did and how it contributed to our success but now I can only talk about the experience that I allowed myself to go through. Let me keep going, there is little time and lot more to catch up. BTW it is ILS at ISB tomorrow and I would be sitting through the summit for the full day.
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