M.B.A.!

First year at a management school.................already through one semester............going through the grill of the summer placement process....................thought it is high time now I attempted to define what an M.B.A. is!
(And ya, this is my first blog and all that stuff.........and ya, i have been writing since last many years and all that stuff...........and i hope to make this blog page a window to my mind and all that stuff..............and these are my views, you may differ and all that stuff!)

M.B.A. literally stands for Making Brutal Adjustments! This you begin to sense and begin to sense real quick, but wait for some more time and it gets driven into your head brutally. The degree of brutality may differ from person to person, but for me it hit me real hard, and hit me when I was not at all ready to take the blow.

You have to make compromises..........sacrifices.........adjustments...........constantly. You have to balance your professional aspirations and your personal aspirations on a knife's edge..........not even a knife's edge maybe, maybe a needle's tip! And you realize that more often than not, it is the personal domain which gets sidelined. Exceptions are there, but this is largely the case. Now this is all ok and acceptable for people who value their professional career very highly. Even those who weigh the two equally are able to handle it. But what of those who have, throughout their lives, placed an abnormally high importance on the personal front?

You will say that these people should then form the "exception" i talked about above. But trust me, its not so easy. With hundreds of bright brains around............fighting to the core to prove themselves...............you can get "disoriented"..................you can easily get sucked into the competition..........the desire to prove yourself can take over. And (may god forbid), one fine day you wake up to realize that you have compromised on what you valued the most for what you valued the least!

And then you really get disoriented! You have (hopefully) achieved things which each and every person around you values the most...............they would love to be in your shoes. And you..............you would give anything to be in theirs! If only the world of desires and achievements were a free market, but sadly, it is not so. So you end up around people who think you are the man, you are the star. Can you expect them to understand? Probably not, unfair to demand that.

But then there are friends.............the close ones............the best buddies............who probably know you better. That is when they become critical. They are your only support system. If you have invested fairly in them over the years, you might survive............you might smile once a while................but if you havent...............? Or what if they are too busy solving similar issues in their own lives, hoping that you came to their rescue!

And the dangerous thing which can happen then is..............that you lose focus on what other's value. You anyway have lost all you valued........and the pain which it causes makes you lose what other's value as well! So now you become a complete loser!! That is when it hurts even more, and I dont know how to tackle with it. Will let you know, if i am able to figure out how to do that. Adios!