Business Standard: Rite of passage at B-schools

Then there are those courses that have no classroom component whatsoever. One such is the hortatorily-named FIRE, short for Framing Identities & Roles through Exploration

One of the more interesting aspects of the second year at B-school (there aren't many, let me warn you) is the outbound activities that are conducted in different courses. In Team Building at the B-school I attended, for instance, we spent one Sunday in September rappelling, blind-falling, designing an encasing to throw eggs in from a height so they wouldn't break, balancing a ball on a small duct as the duct is held together by slender threads, and other such ponderous tasks.

The idea behind this exercise, which includes the dreaded "Trust Fall" - you fall blindfolded on your back from a not small height in the hope that the group at the base have their arms crossed tight - is to check compatibility among team members. Theory is one thing - and frankly, team building has plenty of the sleep-inducing variety - but the real learning happens on the field.

A retired army colonel who runs an extreme sports company is invited every year to conduct these sessions. Some games are nice, others not so much. In one, you need to push yourself against gravity along an iron chain suspended precariously between two trees. You are only allowed to use your arms and feet to negotiate the ropes, with the rest of you hanging on for dear life. It's not funny (though it looks like it, I grant that). The rush of blood to the head makes the most agog participant dotty. I was there. Man, my brain exploded - I could hear the throb of the blood. It took several rounds of ice-cold soda and plenty of rest to return to normal.

Well, that was something. Of course, out-of-line teaching methods are not implemented only outside the classroom. Films are a common medium that professors employ to impart important life lessons. Lagaan is shown at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad to students of Leadership Discovery. At my B-school, we were shown Twelve Angry Men to drive home the importance of good communication. The slowly building story of one juror forcing the other eleven to see the rightness of his claims was thrilling.

Then there are those courses that have no classroom component whatsoever. One such is the hortatorily-named FIRE, short for Framing Identities & Roles through Exploration. In the one-week break between the fifth and sixth trimesters, students are sequestered inside a room all day, and asked to opine on themselves, the world, this angst-ridden enterprise called existence, as it were. I am not a big fan of the attendant earnestness, but reports indicate students who partake come away "cleansed".

Not just teachers, even seniors use the classroom for, well, innovative purposes. An essential rite of passage of the B-school experience is something called "The Hoax", a one-week "orientation" for newcomers organised by second-year students. This is no ordinary hoax, mind, but a detailed exercise in non-stop sadism. "Sessions" begin after midnight and continue until the wee hours. Juniors are divided into packs of 70 and made to assemble in full corporate regalia in preordained classrooms (the administration is in the know).

And then the fun, if you can call it that, begins. All-night sessions by niggardly "professors" who puzzle over complex derivatives and price-earnings ratios. Exams, elaborate presentations and the threat of DISCO (Disciplinary Committee) if anyone so much as squeaks in protest. Soul-chilling claims hang like machetes in the air - most notably that the performance at Hoax determines placements.

Sleep-deprived juniors think of it as the purgatory. I hate to speak any good of it, but the fact is it's not all torture. There are playful offshoots to the drudgery. One of which entails making slides on epoch-defining issues such as "Postcolonialism in Malaika Arora Khan's item numbers" or "The stingray's sting is a ray of hope". You get the drift? And before I forget, there is also a mandatory writing assignment on how the Mahabharata would not have happened if Shantanu had only kept his libido in check (hint: the fisherwoman).

I used to think of my college as this really cool place where new formats of teaching were thrashed out and adopted, where teachers and seniors burnt the midnight oil to divine ways to engage freshers. Part of the charm of attending an IIM is the bragging rights one earns. My campus was outside the main city and we frequently thought of ourselves as nestling in a place away from the world, a sanctuary of academic learning where cutting-edge business education was imparted without a care for conventions or restrictions. A place, if you will, of bountiful quietude and ultimate romance.

Stop the music, please. It was only the other day that I learnt that the pedagogy followed at my college is thrill-killingly similar across institutes. A friend from Mumbai's S P Jain Institute of Management & Research punctured my haughtiness rather heartlessly when he shared snippets from his own institute's "hoax" and added, for good measure, that he too had been shown Twelve Angry Men as part of a communications class. I swear I wanted to wring his neck, jurors be damned.

The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one