Shrieking News: ISB Completes Placement of Class of 2009

Friday, 6^th April, 2012, Hyderabad: THE INDIAN SCHOOL OF BLUSTER (ISB) today announced that they have finally completed the placements of the MBA Program Class of 2009.

“Our placement office staff worked diligently for three years and achieved what we set out to do: get all our 2009 students placed before the graduation of the Class of 2012,” said Mr. Gnome, the placement head of the school. “We beat our three year target by one day, which is a phenomenal achievement. Not even E. Sreedharan of the Delhi Metro could beat his own schedule,” he exulted.

As readers will recall, 2009 was a particularly tough year for young MBA graduates, with the global recession in full rage and the Indian cricket team losing another overseas Test series. While a lot of ISB graduates got their dream jobs that exactly covered their loan EMIs, thus making them cash flow neutral, a significant number of other graduates got what Economist’s from the Chicago school term as, ‘deferred happiness-current crappiness’.

“We should treat an MBA as a long-term project,” said Dean Kolor (who invited us to call him Dean ‘K’) when we spoke to him. “Once you spend Rs. 20 lakhs in a year on an expensive country club you need strict discipline to get back to the real world. If you can recover your investment within five years then that does not hold you in good stead for the rest of your forty year working life. An individual’s ‘Return on Investment’ should be similar to what most companies in the world will see for the next two decades – negative to the power of zero. No one person can perform better than the economy, you see.”

We found a Co2009 student on campus who has been apparently living off the land for the past three years. “Once I was lucky enough to get a deferred placement in an unknown company at the time of graduation, I had nowhere else to go till the time ISB unraveled the mystery employer and the enigmatic joining date. ISB is a natural ecosystem. You get freshly manicured grass from the rolling lawns; stray dogs are a plenty; a water reservoir ensures hydration through the year. If you are lucky, you may snag one of the peacocks strutting around: you can usually barter their feathers with the girls at ISB, who like to complement their state of mind with a related physical one.”

The student, who refused to be named, maintained that ISB was still the best decision he ever made. “I would have been stuck at my software development job, working till 6-7 PM every day in an artificially air-conditioned environment, eating processed fast food, and going home to a cramped two-bedroom apartment without even a flat screen TV. Is that how a person who has graduated in the top-percentile of IIT entrance exam supposed to live?” he asked philosophically.

McKinsey, the global management consulting firm, had hired five and a quarter ISB Co2009 graduates. A half of those were put to work to permanently being on campus and constantly pour refreshing Kool-Aid to the new batch, another one was lost in the coal mines of Jhasiguda, Orissa while doing project management, and three were absorbed by their Lenovo screens when they stared too long into a PowerPoint. The firm then felt a need to rehire from ISB.

“We experience that with each batch,” Mr. Dumbele Ahole – a Waste Management expert and Partner with the firm in the Mumbai office admitted, “and that is why we always keep some students as back up at ISB. “We pride ourselves with giving the single most difficult case study interview across the big consulting firms in the world that not only pries into candidates’ personal lives, but also monitors their bowel movements for two whole days. Since the object is to look for candidates who are Partner-material, we try and identify the biggest mini-Aholes that ISB has to offer,” he said smugly. “With the Co2009 we got a lot of eligible candidates – they had so much pent up case preparation that had never been released.”

A lot of ISB’s students had also taken up entrepreneurship after graduation.

ISB’s head of ‘Student-Headed Involvement in Total Entrepreneurship’, Mr. Burma-ji (emphasis his own, and an insistent one at that) was the man responsible for the program.

“My mandate is to drive students towards SHITE. At the beginning of the year, most students were day-dreaming of being consultants and rehashing PowerPoint presentations for one client and billing them to another. The more intrepid CA-types want to become investment bankers,” he said smiling mischievously. “But there is no time to better time than the recession to be in SHITE.”

He rambles on, “I was personally responsible for leading 10 percent of the batch into SHITE – a subject I am intimately familiar with. There were those who wanted to get back into IT or, wanted to profitably sustain their family businesses, but I inspired them to think above and beyond long term comfort and satisfaction. As a consequence, we have lot of students who launched innovative companies. Like, one student decided to sell packaged sugarcane juice. Unfortunately, he forgot that the juice ferments without preservatives and therefore the business model had been done before. Still, it was better than working in a company, which was started based on someone else’s proven and successful ideas. Where is the challenge in that?”

ISB was thus able to write off the students who became engrossed in SHITE or, those who went back to their family business and thus claimed 100% placement with 200% salary increment on that segment.

Not everyone from the class of 2009 was happy though. We met Chinmay J. who is a senior Associate at a Mumbai-based investment firm and was critical to the recent groundbreaking China-Hong Kong split.

“I learnt more in my CA than at my classes at ISB,” he began. “My accounting mind was always sharp, I could even correct one or, two of the professors there. I came to the school in order to get into a sell-side firm, but as it turned out those are as rare a species at ISB as an honest Investment Banker. After ISB, I used my own networking and superior discount-cash flow valuations skills to skip past the sell-side and move directly to the buy-side, as there where the action, bonuses, and champions like me are,” he ranted on.

Mr. Gnome confirmed that they have tracked Chinmay J.’s career progression and have already counted his as yet non-credited bonus with his new firm in their placement performance metrics since he was within the ‘three year placement window’.

We also met up with the renowned blogger and bungee enthusiast, Irshad D., another graduate of the class of 2009. We met him in his home office, starting at a white wall, with Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ playing in the background.

“I was way smarter before I went to ISB,” was the only thing he said and as if for proof went back to staring at the wall.

Still there are those that have not given up even three years since graduating.

Phisaddi Das was one of those who had not given up on his pre-ISB aspirations. He says, “I am as commando on my ISB dreams now as in April of 2008. I had been out of school for a long time, but I embraced the environment with both arms and feet. I did all the assignments in my group, burnt the midnight tubelight, took all the available electives at IIT Hyderabad, invited all my Professors for dinner, shoved my right hand in front of people who I did not know, and every morning tried to figure out the meaning of the shaft rising unhindered in every Student Village. When I got a deferred placement through ISB, I touched Dean K’s feet and thanked him for the privilege. I then went out into the real world that Dean K had prepared us for and realized that the world was not ready for my managerial capabilities. I then compromised by taking up a temporary job till I hear back on my dream offer from ISB.”

On being told by us that the placement season is finally at a ‘close’, Mr. Das mentioned some unmentionables, ran out, and buried his head in some sand lying at a nearby construction site.

“See, ISB is not a placement agency,” Dean K says. “We give students here a world class education and an experience that even the combination of James Cameron and a big-ass IMAX screen cannot. Yeah sure, we cost about a zillion times more than an IMAX ticket, but that is missing the point.”

When asked what the ‘point’ is, Dean K told your correspondent that he needs to come to ISB in order to get it – a great marketing pitch, for retards.

The new batch of ISB is going to be the biggest yet and Mr. Gnome, the placement head, had already made plans.

“After the success of the ‘three year placement cycle’ for Co2009, we plan to build on it. We did an extensive benchmarking study against Ivy League schools and came up with a best-in-class plan for the new batch – the class of 2013. It is called the ‘Five Year Placement Success’ program. We will automatically enroll the new batch in it at no extra tuition fees and over the next five years starting at the time of graduation, give the best possible placements to our students,” he said wringing his hands in apparent delight.

To ensure the same level of success for the new program, Mr. Gnome clarified, “We now plan to leverage all our industry contacts and board members – who are from top companies across the world: Scrapbitch Hacks, Letdown Industries, Villagegroup, NoSignal Enterprises, and some Private Disingenuous firms.”

On being asked, why over its decade long history the school did not reach out before to CEOs and MDs of such renowned firms, Mr. Gnome said, “You are missing the point. Also, our team of well-qualified placement cell employees and business development personnel are the best that Hyderabad and our relations have to offer.”

“ISB is about the three ‘S’ – Shiksha (education), Soojh (thinking), and Safar (journey),” Dean K says. “A student embarks on the journey of ISB thinking of getting the best education. We fulfill this journey by charging a premium over the market price and underwhelm the students with what is on offer, thereby maintaining a balance in the ‘srishti’ (universe). If my French is correct, ‘naukri’ (job) does not begin with an ‘s’ so why are we even discussing it?”

Your correspondent finally ran out of logic.

© Fias