ET Citi Grandmasters - SPJIMR makes it again!!!

Aditya Gupta and Harish Sridharan are the National ET CITI Grandmasters.They have made SPJIMR proud by winning it at Hyatt today. Other than the loads of goodies, they have also bagged PPI from Citibank and a trip to Egypt. Great going guys!!! SPJIMR family wishes you its heartfelt congratulations!!!

GASP – A way of life at SPJIMR!

15th January 2009 was an iconic day for the PGDM 08-10 batch of SPJIMR. 36 of them had put their heart and soul to ensure that GASP was ready for its 6th play in the same number of years. As the clock struck 6PM, the college just saw, “Red, Red & more Red”. In a message of strong solidarity for the effort put in by the GASP team members, each one of their batch mates came dressed in red, a colour that has now become synonymous with GASP.
What started off 6 years back as a voluntary non-classroom initiative has today almost become a way of life at SPJIMR. GASP (Guild of Actors @ SP) was jointly initiated by the PGDM participants of SPJIMR and Prof. Uma Narain under the aegis of the ADMAP (Assessment and Development of Managerial and Administrative Potential) Program in the year 2003. The baby was born out of a confluence of theatre and management, wherein participants use theatre to put to use the various management and administrative principles they learn during the course.
As the years have progressed, GASP has become an expression of SPJIMR’s creative and theatrical identity. Planned, driven and executed entirely by students, it is an annual event where the new PGDM batch displays its mettle at conducting and acting in a full play staged at the SPJIMR auditorium for all its family members. Each batch chisels its performance into the collective consciousness of the institute, and each year’s performance spins off folklore on the effort, execution and final display during the GASP staging. Through all these years, GASP hasn’t lost out on its primary objective and continues to serve as an ideal recipe to bring to light multifarious aspects of team behaviour and group dynamics.
GASP in the year of its initiation, put up “Tughlaq” by Girish Karnad. Since then each year GASP has grown and blossomed with some phenomenal performances like Mahesh Dattani‟s “The Final Solutions‟ in 2004, Vijay Tendulkar‟s “Silence, The court is in session‟ in 2005 and “Kamala” in 2006. Last year, GASP portrayed an adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre‟s “Men without Shadows”. 2009 though was a time for one of India’s lesser known playwrights, Manjula Padmanabhan to step into the limelight as GASP decided to portray her award winning play, “Harvest” on the 15th of January.
Over five months of effort starting 03rd August 2008 and the D-day was finally here. The day that hundreds of B-school students at one of the premier institutes in the country had been waiting for with bated breath, the day when their very own fellow ‘hotshot managers in the making’ took to stage and dazzled them with performances that would stay “harvest”ed within them for the rest of their lives. The auditorium door opened on the 1st bell, abuzz to a lot of activity. Torch lights flashed all round, with bouncers helping people settle into their respective seats. The sounds of “The Grim Reaper”, GASP-09’s OST reverberated in the background as people rushed in desperately trying to grab seats for themselves and their comrades. A good twenty minutes of hustle-bustle ensued, during which the bouncers worked overtime to ensure that the audience settled into their seats thereby also making sure that the strong buzz receded into a calm whisper.
As the sun set outside and the torch lights faded inside, it was time to bring to light, a product that took the team 165 days to produce. Mr. Javed Siddiqi, noted script writer & Chief Guest for the evening, kicked off proceedings with his encouraging words on GASP and the concept of theatre being an integral part of a b-school participant’s life. Without then wasting much time, he handed over the stage to the people to whom it truly belonged that evening. GASP-09 was raring to go, and pumped with energy to showcase to the audience of more than 300 people, the premiere of its play, “Harvest”.
HARVEST won the 1997 Onassis Prize as the best new international play. It’s a play where good fortune comes at a terrible cost in a futuristic world which is centred on organ trade in India. The play starts with the young, unemployed Om after he lands a coveted job at the mammoth Inter-Planta Services Corporation, his slum life (and that of his Indian family) is transformed overnight. Om has signed away his body parts, in a Faustian exchange for luxuries. The new world order is comprised of Receivers and Donors. In the colonialism of the future, the dominant group will pay handsomely for the right to harvest the healthy organs of the ‘willing’ donors.
What followed was a gripping two plus hours of strong performances from the entire cast with each and every member who took stage even for a second making his/her presence felt. Jaya (Apeksha Patel) with the pure strength of her character, Om (Abhinay N) with a perennial anxiety on his face, Jeetu (Mohit R) with his flamboyance, Ma (Harini VK) with her insouciance, Ginni (Sreelakshmi Hariharan) with her surreptitious and seductive ways, and the guards (Dilip, Deepti & Varun) with their clinical efficiency and no nonsense attitude formed the crux of the cast that left the crowd asking for more.

Supported by strong performances from Bidyut Bhai (Lisa John) and the Videocouch Enterprise Agents (Ankur Dey & Manik Singh), the entire cast held the audience’s nerve for over 2 hours in what proved to be an amazing display of energy, character and mettle. Backed by a great production team, the play gave all those present multiple reasons to remember the performance.
What started out over five months ago with a group of theatre enthusiasts wanting to put up a good play ended up as a passion that each GASPian would carry for the rest of his/her life. Led by Ajay Simha and Deepak Ramakrishnan (Directors) and Ahmed Shariq Mamsa (Production Head) the group took a bow to the thunderous applause that resounded the auditorium for several minutes after the play ended. Whilst the entire team took stage to a standing ovation, it was clear that every person standing there on stage that day and every member in the audience would remember that moment for a long time to come. It was the day that had transformed several people for the rest of their lives and given them something to cherish and be proud of for years to come.
So, after more than a thousand hours of sheer hard work, after all the pain, all the commitment, GASP managed to live up to all the expectations and also live up to all the standards that had been set over time. It had in its very own way, set new standards for the years to come and memories to be cherished for a lifetime.
Its true as they say in SPJIMR - Once a GASPian …. U r a GASPian for life ….

- Ajay Simha & Abhinay N

Gaspians

The Law of Ever Lasting Group Work.

We at B-Schools, learn the art / Science / myth of time management. Concepts like JIT, Optimisation etc are words that we throw around left right and centre. Yet as MBA students we always find, that we never have enough time to get things completed.

In an MBA School, however you do not work alone, you work in groups. And so, the logic goes, that you have more number of man hours to do something, and therefore lesser number of real hours to get that job completed. (Simple 8th standard Mathematics, If you cant recall, it was CH:8 in Maharashtra Board Text Books.)

But this is an MBA school, and we set "New Paradigms", and create a "Proccess Shift", meaning the ways in which things are done. And these "Proccess SHIFTS" fly in the face of any logic you learn all your life from that CH8 of your maths text book.

So here we coin a new law; the "Law Of Everlasting Group Works"

Law of Everlasting Group work: Consider a job which requires 'X' hours to complete by a single person. The LOEGW says that the number of hours taken to complete it in a group will be X * Y Hours, where 'Y' is the number of people working on the issue.
Even Einstein will turn in his grave.

-- Gunjan Bothra

SPJIMR Batch 2008 -2010 (Finance)