The five-year growth story

October 16th 2010 marks the 5th anniversary of the day I started writing. Little did I know then that this was a habit I’d carry forward. Little did I know then that I’d someday be able to write pages and pages about a single topic, that someday I’d have so many friends who’d take pleasure in reading my works.

For sticking with me through my highs and lows, for critically reviewing and commenting on my writings, you deserve a story.

Some of you have taken to writing recently, so I’m going to tell you how it came to be that I started writing, and how that habit has shaped my life in these last five years.

Life’s not a movie like The Dark Knight, where, right from the first scene the action is captivating and engaging. My tryst with pen and paper began quite nondescriptly. While I was in class XII, my parents kept forcing me to study, so while sitting all by myself with text books I started to write on my writing pad.

Where I got that idea from, I don’t really know. If I were to guess, I probably got the idea since I was used to writing even then- fanfics, a diary for a while when I was a kid, and even copying out stuff I liked from the internet (net was a novelty then).

And that’s how it all started.

Those were pretty stressful times for me, so my writings became more frequent and lengthier. I think practically all students dreaded the thought of approaching board exams; the peer pressure, the parental pressure, and the constant threat from the teachers that if you failed to perform well in the class tests, cycle tests, unit tests, mid-term exams, term exams, early morning tests, late evening tests, assignment tests, Revision-I exam, Revision-II exam, Revision-III exam et al. your hall ticket will be withheld. I come from an upper-end school where the focus was more on overall development than on just marks, but it was still a harrowing experience. I shudder to think of the mental torture some children face now- burdened by all the above mentioned exams, plus tuition classes, coaching classes for IIT-JEE…

I’m not slighting the students who liked this type of education; I’m just saying it wasn’t meant for me. Some swimmers thrive in the challenge of swimming across the English Channel, but no one wants to be thrown into the middle of the sea and told that his life depends on his swimming to safety all by himself. The former is a challenge you willingly take upon yourself, the latter is sheer agony.

Lucky for me (and you too if you like me) I managed to swim to the shore rather than sink. I didn’t do badly in my exams either- passed out with a 69.5%.

Those were probably the worst times of my life though. But there’s a silver lining to every cloud. Because I was constantly put through the wringer, I had to write more and more in order to keep myself sane. That helped shape my writing ability. Some of my first articles took shape then.

Just because something good came out of it doesn’t justify it though. Being struck by lightning may give you an eureka moment, but to wish for being hit by a bolt of lightning in order to get your eureka moment is ludicrous. If ever you raise kids, please don’t put them through this torturous process- unless they like it of course, in which case it’s a challenge and not a torture.

So yeah, back to my story. You’ll have to excuse my rambling on and on about nothing; that’s why this blog is titled Ramblings of a Lonely Soul.

The day my board exams ended, I was literally jumping with joy. I jumped into my room, switched on the PC and lost myself in a virtual world known as Ragnarok Online. For nearly the next one month, I led a different existence. The material self was just a conduit for my inner self to explore a world beyond the material realm. Some would call it ‘just a game’, but it was more than that for me. For the first time in a long time, I truly felt free. And believe me, once you taste that kind of freedom, there’s no going back.

What makes Ragnarok Online (RO) so special? Of all its attractions, the main one is freedom. You can be whoever you want to be. You are free from all the prejudices attached to your person. It is an egalitarian society with equal opportunity for all (and there are no discriminatory laws to coerce people in the guise of equal opportunity). It holds the promise of riches, no matter what your background or position in society is. If you have what it takes to make it big, you can make it big. There is nothing between you and your aspirations except yourself. It’s the classic learning grounds for entrepreneurs: you start with literally nothing, and build an empire through sheer effort and smart work. Unlike failure in life, here, if you lose, you actually lose nothing materially. So you can afford to take risks and learn. If you take it seriously, you can do serious business in the game, and at the same time build your own networks, develop yourself growing with friends, learn teamwork, learn time management, learn how to build a community… the opportunities are endless. And best of all, you can apply this learning in your life.

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, Part II: Legacy, the most important thing parents teach children is the link between effort and reward. This link is very important because without it, life appears random. In RO, this link is never out of your sight. The people who make it big are the people who put in the most effort. What better way to learn the lessons of life than by experiencing them yourself?

In a classroom, a teacher can recount her experiences or tell you a story to teach you values, but when you have the opportunity to be your own teacher, to learn by yourself and to seek out knowledge from the people you regard, to get a wholesome values education in your own way, and in a way you love to learn, how can the two be compared? The latter beats the former hands down.

I can confidently say that everything I learned in life, I learnt through playing Ragnarok Online. If we know about clay, we know about all the products made of clay such as earthen pots. We don’t need to separately study the properties of the earthen pot as long as we know the properties of clay. Rather than even learn the properties of clay, suppose we were to experiment with clay, would we not learn better about its properties, than by looking up clay under ‘C’ in the encyclopedia Britannica? When this sort of freedom to learn and experiment is available in the virtual world, who wants to waste their time learning by rote things which are quite useless in our daily lives.

The best education I ever got in my life, until the time I started preparing for CAT, was through my close connect with RO. The true value of this education is priceless. In money terms, it cost me nothing except broadband bills.

To tell you the truth, when I first started playing, I didn’t know what a profound impact it’d have on my life. There are people I know who hate the game because they think it has ruined their lives. They’re like an amphibious fish with wings, restricting themselves to the water they have grown to think as their society. One glimpse of the world beyond their comfort zone brings forth an inner struggle between the thirst for freedom and the mind-numbing conformity they have accustomed themselves to. Unfortunately, in their cases, conformity wins over freedom.
Just because someone tells you that games are bad for you, doesn’t make that the gospel truth.

When the printing press was invented, everyone promptly decried it, saying it will cause the end of civilization. Every scientific breakthrough has been thoroughly criticized even before it was used. Internet? Research loses value. Search engines? Google makes us stupid. Social networking? Makes you a soulless zombie in cyberspace. Wikipedia? Oh, it’ll never work.

We can find countless examples of great technologies decried even before they were put in use. Games are one such technology. And let’s face it: if students are attracted to games, it means they don’t find their schooling to be of great use. Games show you an alternate way of learning which is fun too. If schooling was fun, why would anyone play games instead of attending school?

The typical argument against games goes like this: If you play games you’ll never come up in life. You have to study hard and get into a good college, and in college you have to study hard to get into a good job or else you will end up as a loser in life. So study instead of playing games. If you substitute games for any other hobby of yours, the argument remains the same.

Breaking this argument: How exactly does studying hard in school and college correlate with a ‘good job’? What exactly is a good job? Something to flaunt? Something which pays well? Something which makes you happy? And what’s studying hard? Learning the 23rd root of the sum of the Fibonacci series up to the 23rd term? Learning to recite by rote the names of all the Presidents of India and the precise date and time in which certain ‘events of great importance’ happened? Learning how to calculate the escape velocity of a particle? How does learning all of this help me write that C++ program which gives me my daily bread?

Would I not be better off if I learnt to cooperate with others, built my communication skills, my ability to work as a team as well as alone, in the way I love- by playing an MMORPG? I can acquire technical skills from my place of choice: internet, books, tutorials, coaching institutes, finishing schools. So, where does studying all the muck they serve up for us in school and college help? They typically don’t, yet we spend so much of our lives there, without raising this question.

I love my school- they gave me as much freedom as they could within this education system. I hate my college- they tried to take away from me the few freedoms which the education system allowed me. Learning through games was my answer to my lack of education in the educational institutes I went to. It’s an answer available only to a privileged few: guard this privilege jealously, don’t trash it just because it made you a non-conformist. Your true education is learning that you have to keep learning, no matter how much you learn, and that you have to decide for yourself on what you need to learn for your life. No one teaches you that, you’ll have to learn that by yourself too.

As a practical exercise, list out all that you learned in school and college which you deem to be useful for you, and list out all that you learned on your own time away from these so-called places of learning which have been useful for you. Compare the time spent to learn the things in both lists, and also look at whether you could have learnt the useful things they taught you in school and college on your own, in much less time.

I’ve probably spent 5000 hours playing RO, in which time I learnt more than I did attending classes in school and college my entire life! And I’ve probably now spent about 2500 hours on CAT preparation and learning economics by myself, which gave me a much higher level of learning than everything else combined.

Thankfully for me, I didn’t let conformity win. Being practical, I knew I couldn’t break free from the system then, so I willed myself to go to college, to be confined within 4 walls for 4 years (at least it wasn’t a life sentence) in order to obtain my freedom for life. That seemed to be an excellent bargain to me. If you live in a society which values your ability to sit still on hindquarters for 8 hours a day, 250 days a year, for 18 years, then you’ll have to sit still on your hindquarters for 8 hours a day, 250 days a year, for 18 years, if not more. When in Rome, do as Romans do.

If I had been prescient back then, I would have definitely tried my best to make it into an IIT, so that I could really learn while still preserving my freedom. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about college and education at that time. And I definitely did not know that I’d end up in Hades after school.

But having tasted freedom, I was not to be cowed down by my 4-year sentence. I’d bide my time, escaping conformity whenever possible, chasing my freedom. I had no such plan then, but that’s what I did in the months between the end of school and the beginning of college.

I was a free bird. I explored, learnt, enjoyed and I was able to be myself. For those few months, I really lived.

All good things must come to an end. And so, on August 23rd 2006, I willingly gave up my freedom, to be reclaimed with interest 4 years later. What followed would change me forever.

The initial days were agony. Imagine sitting in a classroom from 8 am to 5 pm listening to the most boring tripe ever taught. And imagine having to copy this tripe from a book onto a notebook, at home, to be submitted as a ‘homework assignment’. There were a few people who eased the pain; to them I should be grateful.

My co-sufferers helped a lot too. I learned to call them friends. We stood up to all the silly conventions we could stand up to. We broke from our chains wherever and whenever we could. Some were afraid to reclaim their freedom initially, but we early fighters gave them the courage to break their own chains and join us in our quest for freedom. If only the world understood that people just want to be left to themselves, to be free to do what they want, it would be a much better place.

And if only we understood that it is we who have to stand up for our freedom, to give it up out of fear of retribution is not a choice, we’d have truly learnt our history. For what is history if not an endless struggle by the peoples of the world to be free from oppression? All clashes of civilizations can be traced to the individual love for freedom. Indeed, it is this love of freedom which makes us human.

It is a paradox that in order to be free you have to remain incarcerated. We Indians have got so used to bondage, having worn chains since the start of Imperialist rule that we suffer in silence. And like the baby elephant conditioned to think that it is bound to the tree by a chain tied around its leg, we too believe that we are bound, though we have the strength to rip apart those chains and even uproot the tree and fling it far away!

Bound though I was, I used my time well. I broke rules without getting caught (at least, not caught often). I nurtured my creativity, defended my freedom to play games, socialized with defiance. The last part seems puzzling? In the penitentiary I was in, socializing was a no-no. We were supposed to emulate Gandhi’s three monkeys with regard to the opposite sex: see no girls, hear no girls, and speak to no girls.

Is it any wonder then that my drive for freedom grew more and more as I was given less and less of it? A thing easily obtained has no value. When I had to fight tooth-and-nail to get my way, I started to love my freedom more.

And so, I freed myself while still bound. I started to love life, in a way you can only love that which has been denied to you. I enjoyed the time I got to write, I reveled in RO, I developed beautiful friendships, all of which made me grow personally, made a promising bud blossom into a spectacular flower.

I lived two parallel lives: free and bound. Then came the time for me to grow myself professionally. I decided to crack the CAT.

It was during the month of December in 2008 that I decided to take up that challenge. It happened in an interesting way. It was in the semester holidays after my 3rd year 1st semester exams. A bunch of my classmates were planning to do a mini-project at a place called Biozone. I went along to take a look. I didn’t like the place- it was too small, plus they took theory classes which I definitely did not want, and the factor which decided my disinclination to join was the cost of Rs. 3000/-. Fancy spending that kind of money there.

In the current University system of engineering education, which is completely (almost) theoretical, impractical and outdated, these project centers and finishing schools are supposed to fill an important gap between the procurement and application of knowledge. They are the life blood of students who wish to acquire practical, industry-oriented skills. When these places become just another centre for routine and mundane coursework, they lose all their charm. Then they just exist in order for the students to buy a project to show as their own, a high demand these days since most ‘engineers’ couldn’t care less about their project, so long as it helps them clear their course.

Interestingly, some lecturers prefer their students doing a project at a project centre than at a company. I say this as an opinion backed only by my experience- the few people in my batch who did a project at a company scored very low marks in their project, compared to the ones who did it at a project centre. It’s a sweeping statement, but I sure got that impression after comparing project scores.

I’m not making a point about all engineers. The ones who really want to learn, do so on their own. Such people gravitate towards the great temples of learning in India and abroad, which exist alongside these institutes for ‘manufactured education’, a few classics amidst a sea of Mills & Boons and pulp fiction. A true engineer yearns to belong to these great institutions.

I know this guy who’s a full out geek. He has learned all kinds of geeky stuff from how the system clock on your desktop works to how to discredit the theological teachings of certain religious institutions. He won’t let me call him a nerd, so I’ll settle for geek. And to prove my point, take his example. His resume includes all sorts of stuff not taught in any traditional institution. But the traditional institutes of manufactured education don’t develop his potential. He has to acquire his technical skills auto-didactically, the way I have to learn. He’s taught himself everything under the sun, ranging from philosophy to theology to string theory to programming.

Why is he so good? He doesn’t have any extra advantage in terms of educational opportunities; he just used the internet well. Like the chef says in the movie Rattatouille, “Anyone can cook.” Anyone can learn so long as they have access to the internet. It’s a great leveler. When you encounter such people, you feel what Thomas Friedman says: The World is Flat.

Coaching centers and finishing schools fill the needs of a great multitude of young Indians who have graduated from sub-par institutes. I only hope the day does not come when these centers in themselves become sub-par institutions, killing the only learning portal for a majority of graduates.

As I left Biozone, I decided then and there that I would enroll for the CAT 2009 course at T.I.M.E. Few days later, I was in. Classes were during weekends. I took this decision all by myself, and I must say that it was one of the best decisions in my life. And I was willing to pay Rs. 20,450/- for it.

From this point onwards my love for freedom and learning grew more and more. If there is one good thing to be said about my college life, it is that I had a truly great time during the college tour and symposium. Those were enriching experiences. All my other great moments came on my own time, or in my CAT classes.

Then, disaster struck. A tragedy befell me in mid-2009. I didn’t know it was a tragedy then, I learnt that in retrospect. I had got too close to a girl I ought not to have got too close to. For the sake of her privacy, I mention no names. Tragedies are not to be regretted, however, for they serve a purpose. I learnt a lot from this tragic experience.

To save you the trouble of reading a long and boring tale about a random person, I’ll KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!):

She was someone whom I’d categorized under a group called Friends. She turned out to be what I’d not categorize as Opportunist. In short, she took advantage of my generosity and sympathetic nature to extract all the resources she possibly could from me, and left me once the supply line of credit dried up, to seek newer, greener pastures. Oh, I could tell you tales, but I’d rather not spoil this blog with such sorry tales.

From this lesson I learnt to be selfish, which is stupid. Just because one flower is dirty doesn’t mean all flowers are. We still enjoy the other pretty flowers.

In the last semester of college, my repugnance to that place increased so much that I felt I was coming out of hell every time I left the place. It was as if they wanted one last chance to torture me, the sadists that they are, so they tried all the tricks up their sleeves to make me crack. But I wouldn’t, and came out unscathed, much to their chagrin. I was a free spirit once again.

There is an anecdote (I can’t establish its veracity) about the Buddha, that when he went for alms to a house, the lady of the house hurled all sorts of epithets at him for begging and he calmly and serenely listened to her and asked for alms once again after she had exhausted herself ranting. And the lady asks him how he could ask her for alms again after all that she had spoken about him. He calmly points to her cow and asks her, if she had given him that cow and he had declined her offer, where that cow would be. When she impatiently replied that it would obviously still belong to her, the Buddha said the same applies to everything that she said.

It is much the same with all those college staff who berated me. I didn’t accept their Michael Mann-esque treatises on my moral character, so to whom do they belong?

On May 14th 2010, I became a free man once again. The next day, our class held a farewell party, which still holds pleasant memories for me. We were all graduates, about to blaze our own trails in life. We could command respect from society, because we were engineers, the people who make the world, and though we may make bridges which collapse when cars ride through, we are hierarchically several steps above those lowly arts and science graduates, whom society treats with contempt.

The day after that, I wrote a scholarship exam at T.I.M.E., and based on that score, I got a Rs. 3000/- scholarship on my CAT 2010 course fee. The day after that, the boys of our class met at my home in the morning and played cricket. That was the last time we played cricket together. That signaled the end of college life for me.

I don’t see any reason for engineers to be regarded highly, or for other graduate courses to be belittled. Such judgments of value are so unbecoming of a person. It is not the degree you hold per se which is important; it is the value it has added to you, and the skills you’ve learnt while studying that are important. Some people just don’t get that. Given the right amount of practical experience and non-formal education, you can bypass this entire system of education.

Another popular education myth is that engineering plus MBA equals financial nirvana. That’s a completely flawed perception. The dean of a popular B-School in the city was candid enough to say as much in a talk he gave to promote his institute and his new book. Some people are quite vocal at attacking this myth, yet it persists.

Typically, an engineering student gets stuck as a ‘code monkey’ in an IT firm, or as a ‘customer support executive’ in a BPO. The only way they see to rise in the organization is to acquire an MBA. After a while, students spot this trend and don’t wait for their career to stagnate before jumping onto the MBA bandwagon. That’s why you see so many engineers jumping into a B-School right after graduation. There really is no unwritten rule which says engineers do well after an MBA. Managers do well; they just happen to be engineers too. There’s no added advantage to being an engineer. In fact, there is a downside to it: there are simply too many young, male engineers in India. Once jobs dry up, it’s not going to be a job market conducive for engineers. The return on investment is ultra-low, particularly when placements are not assured and you happen to have studied in a sub-par institution.

I may have come across as a hypocrite, since I’m also an engineer aspiring to do my MBA. But, as far as I’m concerned, the reasons are different. I need management education for the job profile I’m targeting. My core interest is finance and (macro) economics, though I’m open to other streams too. The learning from an MBA course is necessary for me to launch my career the way I want to. I’m studying what I wish to study, picking up a course which I chose myself, and which I feel will help me throughout my professional life.

When you really want something, the whole Universe conspires to help you achieve it. We can call this the Law of Attraction. I have had the yearning to pursue my true calling, the field of business and finance, for quite some while now. I didn’t know anything about that field, but opportunities opened up for me, and I started learning. To start with, all I had was passion to learn. The rest just fell into place naturally. So I strongly feel that it is the passion with which you chase your dream which matters. The learning will automatically happen. The opportunities will find you.

Consider another instance from my life as an example. As I was starting to explore economics, to find out how the world works, I came across traditional economics, and hung onto the words of certain sycophants not worth their Nobel prizes. Had I not had someone to guide me onto the right path, to steer me away from classical and Keynesian “All hail the King” economics, I’d have got fooled. Thankfully, I got exposed to the works of great economists, people who spoke truth to power, who thrashed out their economic principles in irrefutable logic, who recognized the evils of central planning and interventionism, people who have nailed the theory of the trade cycle, people who have always been champions of liberalism and the free market. I am speaking, of course, of the Austrian school of economics, the intellectual giant the world desperately needs to lift itself out of financial calamity. Were it not for this exposure, I shudder to think that I’d right now be eulogizing the advocates of ‘helicopter money’, ‘paradox of thrift’, ‘multiplier effects’, and the utterly servile advocate of statism, big government deficits and stimulus spending, who now happen to be all over the mainstream media, thrusting rotten economics down our unwary throats. I’m sorry if you didn’t understand that. The point is that the opportunities to learn found me. There was someone to say neti, neti, (not this, not this) and guide me onto real economics.

Ways and means presented themselves to guide me. I can quote at length several such instances in my personal life which convinced me of that, but I am sure you’ll come to the same realization if you contemplate.

The journey of my education really began when I picked up Austrian Economics. Everything else that I’d learnt earlier paled in comparison. The two great learnings I’ve got are from CAT preparation and Austrian Economics.

As my intellectual journey continued, so did my spiritual journey. I started to take to Indian philosophy in a big way. I still do. My spiritual journey complemented my intellectual journey. Best of all, I was learning autodidactically.

I kept my own hours, scheduled my own study sessions. No one to boss me around or dictate to me what I have to learn. I set my own coursework and went about completing it systematically.

From May to September 2010, I focused more on CAT than on other things, and learnt all I could to prepare myself for all the entrance exams I’ll be taking up. The high point of this time was the trip to Jaya’s place, which I’ve recaptured in Memories.

From this month onwards, I started revising the basics and covering all that I’ve already learnt (which isn’t all that much), plus taking tests often in order to prepare myself for the test-taking atmosphere.

“What will you do if you don’t crack the CAT?” is a question I am often asked. My answer to that last year was just two words- “Next year.” Now, the answer’s changed. I’ll be joining any B-School which I feel is ideal for me. Once I’m in, it’s up to me to prove my worth. My learning is not just for writing an exam, it’s for life.

If CAT were a knowledge-intensive exam which tested my general knowledge about the world and current affairs, all the knowledge I acquire would only help me to ace that exam. It would be quite useless after that. Knowledge, especially of this kind, gets outdated fast. Had I spent a year preparing for such an exam, no doubt the time spent would have been wasted away had I failed to crack that exam.

But CAT is not like that. The paper aims to test the skills I’ll need in order to be a manager. So whatever I learn, even in case I don’t crack CAT, I can apply in my life.

Over these past 5 years, I feel I have changed much more than would be expected. From school to college, no doubt everyone changes, but from college to career, the transition takes time. The switch from college to job, everyone goes through, but I find that most people haven’t yet started thinking in terms of career growth at that time. Granted that most people drift into their careers, I still think I should be glad I chose mine through rational deliberation.

In all this, I haven’t mentioned one major factor influencing me throughout: people. All the people I learned from, all those whom I call my friends… if it weren’t for you all, there would be no blog, no articles even and I’d have missed a chunk of what makes me what I am. To write for the sake of my friends to read and appreciate and comment is my devout passion. By reading this, you’re making it happen.