Hurdles!!!

“Life is like a 110m hurdles dash at the Olympics. You need to be fast, you need to be accurate and you do not have the time to sit and celebrate every hurdle that you have crossed. By the time you have crossed one hurdle, another one is already in front of you”. That’s the example I constantly keep giving my young cousin to motivate him continuously and remind him not to stop after tasting success but to keep moving ahead. The days of the hare and the tortoise are long gone.

A few days back, we in college were discussing among various other issues, whether people at my college, deserved to be in the IIMs. A very vast majority agreed that they in fact were as good as any other person who has actually entered the IIMs and it was one factor called LUCK which was not with them on the 16th of November 2008. And it is because of this that they could not really make it into the esteemed institutes in the country. But a few of them had actually not yet come to terms with the fact. One of our professors at that time told us this, “CAT was the deciding parameter a few months back. But now CAT is over and the deciding parameter has moved to something else. The decision will be made based on how you perform from now on based on some different parameter and not CAT. The parameter may be how you perform in your summer project, how you utilize your time here to gain the maximum, how you innovate and come up with new ideas or how well you are able to prove that you are indeed better than your peers elsewhere. There are people already in the IIMs and they will now have lots of advantages and facilities at their disposal, which you people may not have. And your competition is not the people who are in your class, but those in the IIMs, the people who were as good as you all were only till a couple of months back. So don’t dwell upon the past now. CAT is over, forget it. Think about how you are going to tackle them in the future. Evaluate the deciding parameters for the future and devise strategies on how to prove yourself in those”

What struck me bluntly in my face was the naked truth in the statement. A classic demonstration of the case ‘Do not worry about the past, its already gone’. Even if things in the past have been to your benefit or otherwise, you just have to move on. Though I have been telling this to my cousin for the past so many years, I found a bigger meaning in the discussion that day.

Another beautiful concept given by one other professor goes something like this. It is called ‘handicapped race’. In this, cars of all types (from the vintage era to the latest sports demons) are raced. But the slowest car is given a head start and the fastest cars start last. Thus everybody is on a level playing field. We also need to ensure that we take a head start in case we know that we are not the best or that someone else is better than us. Here better and best are all relative terms. However capable we are, we need to realize that at the given moment, people in the IIMs are definitely in a better position than us, be it due to the brand name or be it due to the exposure that they get. And we do not have an option but to race against them. We only have a choice of starting the race earlier, so as to ensure that we are on par with them. And this requires us to sacrifice something else. So it is all a tradeoff between what we have and what we want to achieve over a period of time.

I am really enjoying some classes and some professors we have are too good. It is these minute points which we need to pick up and build further. Hats off to those professors who actually help us unleash the potential in us and show us the path, and are yet not spoon feeding us. The age old saying, “When the disciple is ready, the master appears” is indeed true.