But as my ill luck would have it, unknowingly I may have walked into a lion’s den, when I signed up for ‘Managing and Creating Creativity’, an elective taught by Krishnesh Mehta, a visiting faculty from our neighboring, National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad.
http://www.nid.edu/people_faculties_m.htm
From whatever he has told us till now, this could turn out to be the course that might make everything else that I have undergone till now in IIMA, look like child’s play. For starters let me remind you, that till now, no professor in my life has threatened me yet with bodily harm. Yeah, the occasional, “I will push your thick head against the wall, if you do arbit CP without reading the case”, might have happened. But I have always had the knack to see through such empty threats for what they really are – a rhetoric used to discourage divergent opinions - and get on with my life.
But here this Prof was looking to do an open mind surgery on us. And he was kind enough to forewarn us that it is going to hurt as hell. So before we began, he started out by making us write up and sign our name on a disclaimer which started out in a mild fashion as follows:
“I Biju Nair take full responsibility of whatever happens to me physically, mentally, emotionally etc. during this course, because of my own doing or doings of anyone participating in this course or any other stranger or any animal, insect, reptiles, or any other creature natural or artificial that will be used for the conduct of this course.”
“I agree to perform anything or everything that I might be asked to, as part of this course, whether I like it or not and whether I agree to it or not”
“I am agreeing to all of the above out of the choice of my own free will and am doing this with full consciousness and awareness without being under the influence of any kind of drugs, force or influence.”
And then the rest of the disclaimer went even more hay wire and eventually put us summarily responsible for anything and everything that may or may not go wrong under or above the sun. But strange as it may sound, I was more than happy to sign up, having fresh memories of my recent brushes with the IIMA rigor and its ‘grade factor’.
Now even without any such disclaimers, the kind of stuff that the professors over here have been able to make me do over the last 6 months or so, can make my hair stand up, even when I am just thinking about it wearing my favorite Nike cap. And now this quasi-legal agreement to top it all off… Needless to say, I started to get worried.
So we quizzed him on what were all the different things that he had already planned out for us, to warrant such an air tight agreement. To be honest, he was not very forthcoming, (with the kind of blanket agreement that he had already gotten from us, he didn’t need to be) other than telling us something about taking 200 steps through thick jungles in the middle of the night and sharing drinks with ferocious wild animals and some such stuff like that. He also mentioned something about having a near death experience and all. But I think I may have had my first one right there just hearing about all this, so this may not be applicable to me any more.
Another interesting pre-course ritual was the baselining of the Field Resonant Images (FRI) of our brains, to be compared with the ‘after‘ pictures to be taken at the end of our 8 week, course. Our Prof has promised us some really colorful results, if we follow his instructions properly. Yeah, right…Disturbing sleeping wild animals in the middle of the night is definitely going to kick-start my creativity for sure.
Now that I think of it, there seems to be only two ways this course is going to end for me. Either I will prove to be creative enough to come up with a good excuse that will convince the Prof to allow me to drop this course. Or I will be snacked on by wild animals in the jungles of Gujarat…
Talk about the pressures of having no other option but to be creative. Move over pass or fail courses…this one is going to be a do or die, from the way I see it...
Updated on 25th June 2010:
I do feel victimized, by the way Times of India reporters have gone out of their way to extract bits and pieces from this post, all in the name of investigative journalism, to malign one of my very beloved professors. As can be figured out from my responses to the comments that I received for my original post, my experience with this professor, as well as his course and teaching methods has been extremely positive. I do firmly believe that all the teaching methods that were used for this course were relevant and beneficial to the objectives of this course as experienced through my personal realisation. I totally agree with my fellow PGPXer's post given below and I myself couldn't have presented the case in a better way.
http://iima-pgpx4-impressions.blogspot.com/2010/06/nid-professor-is-clean.html
Thanks bro for this excellent post..You have said everything that needs to be said and that too after pertinent analysis of context and content...Wish our brethren getting paid for their journalistic efforts could even be half as effective, instead of pursuing unethical means to sensationalize matters and in the process only helping to obscure truth and obturate justice.
