Back to Campus, Back to Friends!

Devi, Shivani and I @ CR11, our Class Room!

Over the course of my unnecessarily elaborate life, currently cruising along the wrong side of fifties, I have been fortunate enough to attend very, many Weekend Parties, many, many Alma Mater Reunions, and not a small number of New Year Celebrations as well!

But never have I gotten together with a bunch of friends and family, to do all three of the above, all at one go!😎

Yes, last weekend was when we, the PGPX2, got together and killed those three Big Birds, in one stone; a uniquely magical feat that we could pull off, only because this stone, which was even bigger than a Capstone, was thrown by some of our very best: Our dashingly debonair Cultural Rep Nitin Beohar and his even better half, Prakarti!

Quite obviously, I cannot think of writing about our event before I thank this Power Duo for their immense contributions towards making all this happen, but at the same time, I am also not going into praising them here for their impressive talent, immeasurable energies, immaculate execution and all, only because I’m afraid I’ll soon start running out of words, meandering into blah blah blah… which is never really a pretty sight.

So here I am, starting and stopping with a simple: Thank you Nitin and Prakrati for everything!!!🙏

Now the best thing about our reunion in pretty elementary, straightforward terms is that whatever we had done during our One year in campus, Fifteen years ago; we managed to REDO all of them, all over again, in just two days straight and that too with an even bigger gusto!

Yes, we Sang, we Danced, we Played Cricket, Football, Badminton, Tennis, we Swam in the pool, we met in Syndicate rooms to finish off ‘bottlenecks’, and then we went looking for late night Tea Leaves, mostly because we were uninterested in sleeping outside of our classroom hours, only to top it all off, by cracking open a business case the very next day and using it to argue with our professor, just for old times’ sake!

Might be a surprise to many of you, but if I was asked to pick just one ‘event’ as the best of the entire lot, I would have to keep it Saral. Yes, Saral Sir took such an engaging and ‘enlightening’ session on the ‘Magic Pin’ case that I had a real epiphany about what IIMA means to me and how I will never ever grow tired of wanting to come back here time and time again.

Now don’t get me wrong, reading those 26 pages of the case, full of random numbers, fancy words, confusing charts and distracting pictures, was a lot of Pain indeed, which I will easily call the ‘Magic Pain’, and several times I found myself looking out the window, just to jump off and end it all, but the thrill of doing ‘CP’ without understanding the case, having read only bits and pieces here and there, was too good to pass up and that kept me going against all odds. As they say, quitters never win and winners never quit, but those who never quit and never win ends up scoring some big time CP credits!😉

As you all know, in our past life we had plenty of motivational speakers addressing us in class and this time around that role was played to the hilt by none other than our very own Penguin published author Amit Agarwal!

So down-to-earth and humble was he in how he shared his ‘Small is Big’ Story and so articulate was he in passing on his learnings to us that we soon started losing the ability to see any small, small things around. Everything started to appear really Big; a perspective that was worth its weight in gold, when we ran up against some unexpected supply demand mismatch with our Syndicate Room fuel supply, wherein we had to endure some really unfortunate but strictly enforced dosage control limits.

Yes, after a point, Smalls were the only ones we had, to pass it around, and the situation got so bad that we were about to write up our tear-jerking experiences into a new Case Study under the title / subtitle: ‘Tragic Pin: Small is not Bad. But Large is better’!

Luckily, that’s when Amit’s ‘Small is Large’ perspective came to our rescue and with that kind of an attitude, our altitude was only going to go ‘higher and higher’ as we kept on living it Large! Thank you, Amit Bhai!😍

Last but not the least is when I try to capture our in-house Steve Jobs, Lalit’s spectacular session!😇

Now, I couldn’t make heads or tails of all the Decimal points he made, but one thing I can tell you is that he can easily introduce himself like James Bond, saying “I am Jobs, Lalit jobs”, with the way he was handing out job offers left, right and center to PGPX folks.

Now don’t call me a conspiracy theorist and all, but I have an eerie feeling that this guy is slowly planning to recruit our entire batch into his company, which is more of a conglomerate now.

He also seems to be quite unperturbed by the fact that the last time someone tried to do such mass recruiting tactics with PGPX2, it didn’t end well, and finally one of the richest brothers in the world, Mukesh Bhai had to come forward with hundreds of crores to bail that gentleman out!

But then again, anyone who has ever interacted with Lalit will know that he believes in doing the impossible things first, even if it takes a tad bit longer. And honestly, I wouldn’t bet against him, no way, with a presentation that was so well made and so perfectly delivered that even a happily retired guy like me wanted to go work for him!

Yes, what got my hopes high up was when he kept on saying that his company is in the business of creating ‘Low Code / No Code’ platforms. With ‘Coding’ being the only ‘Work’ that I know, I quickly understood what it really meant: ‘Low Work / No Work’, and that’s what got the employee in me all fired up and raring to go!😂

All in all, our extended family was gelling so well together, even to the point of Mrs. Mishti Amitabh mooting the idea of building a whole PGPX residential community itself to accommodate the grand plans that we were starting to make for each other!

Yes, this is being currently envisioned as a fantastic fantasy land, where the husbands will be kept busy solving worthless cases day and night, so that the women folks are free to spend their time chitchatting, shopping, partying and all the other mission critical stuff that they are so good at!

Kind of like how it was when we were in Campus!

Now, how can anyone ever say NO to that!

Beats me!💙

Those who have read till this far have some further torment up their alley in the form of this bonus clip of some of our dance numbers from among all the festivities!!!😁