The Road to XL …

The story actually started on 8 June, 2004. It was the last paper of my Second Semester exams, Engineering Drawing - one of the subjects that i loved the most. I was returning home after exhibiting my drawing and imaginative skills for a very gruelling 3 hours, and my shoulders laden with Drawing accessories. I sat on the edge of a seat in a densely packed Second class compartment(my monthly pass had expired by then). The happiness of having completed writing (not passed :-)) my First year hadn’t even completely sunk in when all of a sudden i started thinking - where did i want to be a few years from then ?

The timing was really strange; I had just completed First year and it was really not necessary to think about all that then. Maybe, getting into Engineering was something that i didn’t really feel proud of… maybe i was frustrated that i landed into just the kind of an educational system that i didn’t want to be in… maybe that I really didnt want to write software codes all while, though i was interested in it …maybe that after completing First year, i felt that the grass on the other side is indeed not green … maybe it something else…

Though I had been a very enthusiastic coder in my early years, it didn’t take me long to realize my waning interest in Engineering.  I didnt know what else i was best at, but i definitely knew that pursuing a career in technology would be a compromise. Then the story began. It was that ’something’ which made me see a dream, a dream of pursuing a course in one of the top B-skools, a dream that i knew i can accomplish.

It was sometime during June 2005, the summer vacation after 4th Semester exams when I decided to sign up for CAT training at IMS. Though it was one and half years ahead of CAT ‘06, I still had the full zeal and enthusiasm to crack the exam. On the first day, the centre manager walked in, and delivered a standard inspirational lecture:
“There was a guy who was so determined to get into IIM A, that he took CAT 4 times to achieve it. The first time, he got no calls. The second time, he got calls but not from IIM A. The third time, he got a call from IIM A but couln’t convert it. The fourth time, he got a call from IIM A and converted it too.”

(Whispers all around: wooooooooooowwwww)

The story didn’t impress me much, because I was then so confident that I didn’t know I would need to struggle harder to get even a single B-Skool call !