The End is the New Beginning

The journey has been a roller coaster ride. 2 years of management education has made us wiser, I believe, if not by the volumes of education tried to shove up the brain, but by the life learnings.

It was not easy, coping with the pressure, burning midnight oil and what not. But we did it.

The assignment deadlines, persistent nagging by friends to send them your assignments, hunting down Scribd and Slideshare to get a teeny-weeny bit of your submission material, checking all the plagiarism checker sites known to mankind and finding that most of your hard work is the exact duplication of the public domain and screwing the remaining part of the night redoing the work using the right-click-synonym magic on MS Word were attempts to err the freshly baked engineer's life in the first term of MBA.

The classes were happening over and over, day and night. From the wee hours till past midnight. Then starts assignments of various sorts. The first term had marketing cases over cases with emerging markets flying over the head. Financial accounting was never ever willing to tally the balance sheet of life. 

Well, rephrasing became child's play when we were one term old. Then came the tensions of choosing electives and empirical studies. Not to add to the woes, finance became the back crunching exercise as we graduated from Accounting to Financial Management. The guys who were keen on pursuing CFA went to bow down to the world of operations management. 

The classes were tedious beyond the core as the count of the number of subjects crossed the hand and reached the toes. The teachers were persistent on our dedication in their subject and were overloading us with work as if that was the only subject to study. As the sections were shuffled each term, we actually had chances to mingle with more and more people. 

Before we knew what happened, 2 terms were over. Then came internship interviews and the 3rd term. We were a bunch of scapegoats in the brand mayhem caught up to strive for life in the raging sea. We were running behind internships while the classification that we had was to ensure us a paid internship that would leave behind savings post the expenses and booze charges. We dint. And an internship was an internship and we needed to have it. Time flew and we flew to different parts of the country and some went beyond the boundaries. It was a hectic task of getting up in the morning and going to office and submitting reports and actually working. 

Once we were back, life went on to reverse gear. The number of classes per day had fallen drastically and we actually had free time. And then we began to learn to be lazy. It was just less than a year ago, we had just unlearned the thing.

The second year actually was a year that split friends. You hardly had a chance to sit in class with your friends in class. When you attended service marketing, he would be sitting and gazing at the FRM teacher. The intrigued attention that was paid in class for some subjects were pretty much compensated for the lax in the others.  

The terms passed by, and we are here. Almost ready to be shown to the gate and to leave.

We hated the place. We hated the teachers, we hated the buildings, we hated the classrooms that made us claustrophobic, but we never hated the people whom we called friends. 

But now as we turn back into the way that leads us down the memory lane, we would know that, it was just the turn of events that made us hate them. It is just a matter of time that we would understand that how they meant to us. 

On a retrospective note as we leave, we are leaving a life that shall never return. We are leaving a life that we actually lived. We loved, we fought, we waged wars, we had indifferences and we patched it all up in a jiffy.

We loved the drooping eyelids and the happiness that brimmed in the mind as we ate a hearty meal (pun intended!) and went to the hostel for the great afternoon siesta. The crashing on the bed and letting go of all emotions are going to be a distant memory reserved for a Sunday.

We all loved copying our assignments. We loved to ask teachers for extensions. We loved the butterfly flutter in the tummy as we were midway through our assignment when the clock showed 1130pm (submission at midnight). We loved the panicking as we would go room to room, get hold of a few assignments, copy paste it and submit for the sake of it. Post college, you won’t be even able to do that even if you own the company.

I intentionally forgot about the most interesting part of the life here- proxies. The moment you queued up in the 'other' entrance to class, asked the people who sat in class to form a barricade while you could punch in, so that the teacher would not catch a glimpse of you and run away to avoid the teacher's eye- shall be a memory often thought with a grin and a tear at the edge of the eye. 

The midnight munchings and the walk with the chilly wind blowing to send chills up the spines would be missed. The coffees at past one at Bistro and the bland sandwiches from CCD after shouting our larynx out to wake the guy shall be missed. All has been a part and parcel of our life.

We loved to huddle up in someone's room and make plans. 

The bike rides to Mayajaal, the shared autos to Mahabalipuram, the beaches, the sun, the lovely chaats and ghee roasts of A2B, the restaurants of the temple town, the life- you shall be remembered. 

The crushes, the love, the break ups, the pals and gals- you too shall be missed.

As we gear up for life, we will get to know that the past was heaven. 

<Sniff, Sniff, I am getting emotional >

Everyone shall be missed! This life shall be missed!

Attye Peace!

Adios!

Love!

:)