Monday, May 11, 2009

MBA FAD(M)s

Many people say that MBA is a fad. I say come and attend our FADM classes. FADM stands for Financial Accounting by Decision Making.

The first half of the course was taken by Professor Mohan Venkatachalam from Duke University. Who knew Accounting could be so much fun. Only a maverick like he can make a mundane subject like accounts come alive in class. In a class composed of mostly engineers, he literally brought Taare Zameen Par. Today was his last class and he actually showed a clip from the above mentioned movie wherein the kid draws the winning picture in the competition. He explained the reasoning behind showing the clip that today being the last day, everything he taught will fall into the big picture and it will all make sense.
It all started on our very first day of classes. The first class contained such gems as "Many students say Accounting seems like Greek and Latin to them - one day Greek, next day Latin"! In our class, the Chartered Accountants (CA) were given an option to continue normally or chuck the class to work on a project which would be more challenging to their intellect/knowledge. To elaborate on the choice, he brought up Matrix, the movie. When Morpheus and Neo meet, Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will answer the question "what is the Matrix?" (by removing him from it) and the blue pill simply for life to carry on as before. As Neo reaches for the red pill Morpheus warns Neo "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more." So he enacted the scene to the CAs that he'd offer this just once and if they accepted the red pill, that would be it and there's no turning back. To accentuate the point, he in fact brought 2 actual red and blue pills!

All ISB students were really emotional on seeing him leave and each section is planning to give him some gift as a token of our appreciation. He's such a sport that he agreed to be at the receiving end of ISB's most personal gesture - Dunking (where we throw the person to the swimming pool - generally reserved for Birthdays)!
Now that should be fun.

Over and out. For now.