Thank god it's FRAday!

Imagine you are at sea standing on a balancing ball. You need to jump from ball to ball to make your way to an island, where you catch your breath and rest for a while. Then you repeat the act to reach another island. If you miss a step, you are in saline water. So also, if you take your eyes of your course. There is no looking back. There is only looking forward to the island. Then there are these high-jumps you need to clear sometimes in jumping between balls.

I am not saying there's no fun; I am talking about my trials at Vastrapur. The bouncing balls are the new topics in different courses we need to study everyday.The high jump bars are the tests, sometimes surprise ones, that we need to take. Miss a topic and you will be stumbling over yourself to catch up with what just went past in a blur. The islands are the weekends--the only times you can afford to look back and reflect upon what you did.

One of the balancing balls is a course on customer value (no, they don't use jargon such as 'marketing' here). Here, we are being trained to 'liberate ourselves from the shackles of rationality in order to understand the nuances of the behavior of an animal called customer'-quoting Prof. AK, who's on a mission to change the way we think and will be glad if we went home more confused than when we came in! Now, the fun part of this this that we get to do assignments where we need to look at good looking women with the best skin tones and lovely smiles. That's because we are required to elicit information on positioning of luxury soaps (partly, our choice of category) in India by looking at an array of TV and print advertisements in the category and then write a report on strategic marketing implications of same. Do you want to 'skindulge'?

We sing alleluias when we learn that a class has been deferred and thank gods for small mercies when the bulletin board is bare at 2 PM. For, at this hour the fate of the class, by way of a surprise quiz or not, is officially announced. Of course, you can check your mailbox over wi-lan. But, a notice is a notice.

The Institute expects highest levels of commitment to pass through the year long test of fire that is PGPX. The industry however does not prepare us for anything like this. One needs about eight hours of preparation outside to class to make it through a day having 3 course sessions. Not reading up for the class is like falling short of length at next the bouncing ball. Most of us are going into 'auto mode' in preparation for the next week that has 21 course sessions over six days. There has been some insinuation about a 'catch-up' class on the seventh day. That doesn't surprise us anymore.

"Why does cash flow?" "KASH (F)low" and the curious "positioning cash flow" are all side effects of a grueling episode most of us are going through. We are trying to imbibe the techniques of accounting as a part of Financial Reporting and Analysis. In a matter of four sessions we have covered aspects from the basic principles of accounting to cash flow statement. 'Covered' is a heavy word that includes all of: reading, discussing, applying, testing, frustration and sleepless nights. When you look at people's online chat-statuses, you see the phrases that were mentioned in quotes at the start of this paragraph. There is so much FRAstration that everyone is feeling FRAil around this subject. There is almost a tacit FRAternity of people whose confidence is FRActured by this subject. Oh, Oh, I am doing it again! I might be already too FRA from sanity.

There are ways to cope and then there are ways to cope. I find it comforting to chat up with anyone who is available at the FK tea stall at 1 AM. And I am glad I am not writing a 'reusable Visual C++ component' like one of my batch mates here, MS, did a couple of nights back. Either of these activities is like playing Bricks on the cellphone- stress-busting as well as entertaining. Can you imagine doing this aimlessly in the middle of the week? Where's the time?

Thank god it's FRAday!