Remembering Dr Manesh L Shrikant, the Institution

It is Dr Shrikant's first death anniversary tomorrow. I would like to pay my respects ,to him. I have been wary, given a train of eulogies and obituaries that I have penned over the past year, a prospect that I do not enjoy. I have been uneasy about a note that Dr Shrikant had sent me a few weeks before he died, wanting to discuss it before converting it into an article. Unfortunately we never met after that. It was at first glance undecipherable  (even banal) and people close to the dean to whom it was sent were also unable to make much sense out of it (I presume, as none replied). This is an attempt to incorporate the ideas therein, to weave it into this piece that argues that Dr Shrikant imagined the ideal of Vedanta at the heart of SPJIMR. The original  note stands appended to this article at the end. Fortunately I will not receive an early morning call from him asking me for my first draft, first thing at 8.00 am, hoping bleary eyed that he minimises his edits!The presumptions and errors in this article if any, would be entirely mine.

It was Friday 16^th October 2015, and the tithi, the third of the waxing half of the lunar month Ashwin, with Vishakha as the presiding nakshatra that Dr Manesh L Shrikant, our teacher cast off his mortal coil to be at one with all that exists, liberated from earthly fetters, in the Vedantic sense of his cosmology. It is his first death anniversary and in the traditional sense of shraddh (or barsi) we pay our respects unto him. I hesitate to pen any eulogy or mournfully reminiscence dirge like, notwithstanding the dark shadows that seem to haunt me this year. We thank him for the fruits of his labour that has given us our varied returns of personal fulfilment and economic wellbeing, especially from being part of an institution that has secured us not just a career but helped us possibly think better. I pray that his work which is his flesh embodied in the SP Jain Institute in the quaintly Christian sense be blessed with the success it deserves.

My Friend Sriram

A Srinivas Rao    26^th September 2016

He would have been 54 today and would have been as cheerful as always, for neither misfortune nor tempest would dampen his optimism. “A person must have a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge” remarked Nietzsche and Sriram was doubly so. Yet rather than listening to the gurgling brook of his voice over the phone, I am met with silence, four months since his untimely demise. I haven’t deleted his number though, not that he might call, but that I might wake up. I miss his infectious and disarming smile that would put even Medusa lower her guard. This is a reminiscence of a person who was close to me and was my best friend. I have wondered what if any we had in common, I believe it wasn’t much, yet we liked each other’s company and it has intrigued me as much as onlookers. I can’t describe him in eulogistic terms; though he had much that was worthy of applause. Probably what fascinated me were the contradictions which we ever so unconsciously gloss over as we make much of a false sense of consistency as a virtue.  Most of us if not all are inconsistent creatures, inconstant and shifting in our motivations, fears, desires and aspirations, it is ‘human all too human’. Consistency I think is a narrative strategy of the mind that possibly highlights, represses, and interpolates in retrospect, creating a convenient fiction of the self. At a distance from one’s own self one might see the range of protean characteristics that really animates each of us; though we crave for that indubitable, mysterious, unchanging essence which might well be a figment of imagination.

The Foundation Stone

The banyan tree noticed him from afar as he walked towards the temple in the measured pace and calm of a man in his seventies, surprisingly slim and little else but the grey of his hair would even give away his age. The old banyan in the centre of the Bhavan’s campus, standing in the corner acknowledged his familiar presence with a sway of her crown, home to several egrets, herons and water birds that fished in the Bhavan’s pond in that campus, that seemed less green with every passing year. She counted her years not by the locks of hair she let down to support her age but by the number of times women wrapped its girth with a circumambulating thread around on the day of Vata Savitri on Jyeshtha Poornima each year praying for their husband’s longevity. The young girls returning to Pallonji Sadan late evenings from college, imagined the tree to be a haunt of ghosts. The campus then was greener and the banyan hosted many more species of birds than its now manicured look and hodgepodge architecture; held many more secrets in the folds of her green shrubbery of love, learning and laughter. 

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 Importance of Being Jain

This article is written for the alumni of SP Jain institute of Management, the group I am a part of.

The title mimics the brilliant play by Oscar Wilde and I am amused at the strange and unforgiving recurring patterns of history. In the year 2005 there were a spate of mails that had polarised the alumni group about the decision to globalize SP Jain institute (apart from an appointment of a director who was anyway out within a year) with several members commending and others including myself condemning the same. It was not globalisation that was on contest, however though that was the ostensible reason which made some of us look like Luddites opposing the inexorable march of global capitalism (forget the occupy protesters). It was the curious case of the Jains trying to buy back what they considered as truly Jain i.e the brand name. Let me clarify. That global brand dream has soured. The decision to go global at SP Jain was being questioned not because globalisation was bad but because there seemed too much at stake in diluting the brand, intersecting dissimilar governance systems between a profit and a non profit organisation, a larger than needed proportion of the Jain family members on the governing council and likelihood of uneven standards especially in admission despite the inadequate strength of core faculty being spread like peanut butter or rather salt from Dharangadhra Chemical Works of the Jain business lines.