Solstice 2007

Campus is full with alums. You can see groups of people from different batches catching up together. I could see people trying to go back to their lanes of memory and relive the moments they have spent earlier.

It also appears to me that Solstice will mark the beginning of parties at ISB as one alum put it. Till now we have been climbing the academic hill but now we are going to ride on the placement road, which will present sharp turns, unexpected twists but for all there is light at the end of tunnel and I'm sure this batch will break all the records set till now.

But I could finally realize one thing - Alums who join the consulting firms are the ones who keep visiting the campus and capture the mind space of the batch. This is a very powerful strategy and almost everyone considers consulting as an option. How many get selected is a different thing but there will be lots of attempts, at least. The amount of focus that these firms maintain on acquiring right talent is amazing.

While I am writing this post from inside ISB, there would so many outside ISB trying to gauge the placements season at ISB - some bullish and some bearish. But the most interested I think would be those who got through in round one. My advise is - don't worry, if you're good enough to get in, you'll be good enough to get out, you have to continue the hard work though. Numbers don't mean anything, so don't take them seriously.

It was in December 2002 when I first visited the ISB campus for conducting an outbound program for the alums as a part of Middle Earth team and it is 5 years since and many things have changed since then. I met one alum from Co 02 who participated in the outbound activities.

The concert by Indian Ocean was fabulous. They managed to do the whole thing their way without budging to any of the requests. The kind of songs they chose are also very unique and were in sync with the band identity/character they were projecting. It was really good.

Another thing that came to discussion was about the artificial behavior of few people and how they seem to be managing to act emotions too and get away with all the rewards. My response is that time is the biggest tester, teacher and equalizer. These people value certain thing so much that they are able to overcome the internal voice and act in the way that appeals to people. But people are not emotionally blind, they realize what is genuine or not, somewhere deep in their soul, whether they admit it or not is a different question.

Its sports time and I need to get going. C u shortly with more and more exciting stories.