An Open Letter to Dr Ranjan Banerjee the New Dean

I am an alumnus of S P Jain Institute of Management and Research. We alumni were sent a message by the institute announcing the new dean, outlining his resume. The new dean joins in early June the alumni newsletter announced. I thought i would share my musings even if they have less value for the effort. Maybe you too could write to the new dean or could add or subtract from the same. 

Dear Dr Ranjan Banerjee,

I write as an alumnus of the school that you are going to lead and we bear with us our best wishes in your new appointment. We from the alumni have been sent your resume in advance, about a month back and are guardedly delighted that it sounds promising. We wish you the very best and pray for success that you lead the place we cherish as our alma mater. 

We stand outside the ring placing our trust that the faculty and student body that you will lead is successful in its entirely new chapter, after a long and fairly successful first innings. An innings that will be also difficult to match given its singular accomplishment of retrieving a mofussil and nondescript institute in a tiny chemistry lab, to a place among the respected institutes among business schools in India. 

One faculty member described the institute more than two decades ago as a fragile ecosystem, a combustible mixture of ideas, ideals, impossible people all of who are learning, improvising and reinventing all that seems worthy of cherishing. That certainly is the vision and often even with the best of leadership is not easy to accomplish. We would be less informed and wise than the faculty body to highlight the institutes pressing concerns but we might certainly ruminate on what we thought made the institute good if not great. I  also humbly state that this might not entirely be what the alumni body think or even agree, so I would not be presumptuous to stake a claim as their voice. This a mere attempt however flawed. I may also accused of having a biased view which in the interests of full disclosure state, that i also served as faculty there. Yet in humility this may be treated as a mere observation that could be viewed as caution at worst or at best unsolicited advice. Your appearance on the stage is a follow up on a great act with a brilliant performance by a masterful player Dr ML Shrikant (though some might stay marred by its extended tenure). All such second acts are difficult to follow as your onlookers may unfairly have a high set of expectations.

The Missed Bus

Missing the bus is an expression commonly used to indicate a failure to capitalise on an opportunity that was available in clear sight. However I believe it more pejoratively seems to blame the person for either being slow or even stupid; it blames the person for not seeing an obvious wave that sweeps everyone who is in its vicinity regardless of their station or competence.

Being a fresh engineer at a business school the world looks humane and years of wrangling with the mechanical at workshops, labs, books filled with equations than English, it is an overpowering humanising experience. Unless of course you gallivanted through college barely attending or studying; and it does seem so to be true for quite a few of my peers (and several students) that i have known. Suddenly your books are written in lucid prose and you don’t knit your brows page after page chasing the tail of some derivation almost entirely written in Greek that even Greeks would fail to fathom (remember heat transfer equations for a thick cylinder or Nyquist diagrams and Fourier transformations). Here the teachers seem to speak the Queen’s tongue with a lyrical lilt, making us feel like urchins at a dinner banquet at Balmoral Hall. We had in our first term an earnest professor S R Ganesh who spoke softly with a string of venerable degrees from MIT and other august portals; who made me awe struck; who taught us an indecipherable subject (which i still wonder what it was meant to convey) called Perspective Management (never mind the obvious oxymoron there). He was a gentleman and was very imaginative and wanted us to read a book a week (which to us engineering students was a quota for a year or even four) and submit an executive summary. Many of my peers just read the introduction and the blurbs and imaginatively reconstructed the summaries and he scarcely noticed the difference, even sagely nodding to some bogus analogies.  He then gave us one day an assignment to write our life story. Yes he meant a short story of our yet chrysalis like life.  The engineers were convinced that it was an exercise in futility and scratched their heads in bewilderment, lamenting that this was what was precisely wrong with business education. The closet liberal minded ones like me were deeply impressed at what seemed like a profound experiment to build an imaginary narrative that would capture our deepest yearning.  I reconstruct from memory those stories from what transpired more than 25 years ago. I am surprised at what seemed prescient and also remember being deeply hurt by that episode.

Narayani

She was always found pottering about the old garden and seemed ancient and changeless. It seemed to me that she was there even before the building was built. So when she decided to sell her house and leave the house for good in 2010 the jack-fruit tree in her garden was so overwhelmed that she yielded 23 jack-fruits in a single season and astonished all the onlookers at the bounty. She distributed all the fruits to people who had been kind to her and left as soon as she gave away her last jack-fruit. The tree itself died from its tip down the middle and few knew what ailed her. It was a strange sight as the lower branches were green though it stopped yielding any fruit. A few years later when we tried to pull down the top half it had to be sawed off as it was tougher than we imagined and the woodcutter threatened to climb down if we did not double his wage as he panted. This year many years later a single fruit was borne all knobbed and strange.