Gimme a Legal Notice

Now it is Varna’s turn to receive IIPM’s hate mail legal notice after Gaurav and Rashmi.

…some of the IIPM staff barged into the Jam office. In Rashmi’s words, they “did not offer any new or material facts, other than argument.” Then she got a legal notice from them.

(via India Uncut)

So the tally is three. All of a sudden I began to see a pattern; or am I imagining things because the issue is barely a week old. Nevertheless, here goes: more than three hundred bloggers have risen to support the courageous Gaurav and Rashmi for their part in exposing IIPM as a fraudulent institute. Yet, only three have received legal notices; hell, Patrix and Shanti have put out an open challenge to the fake “management institute” to dare sue them. Also, IIPM has not considered India Uncut or Desipundit–who with dogged perserverance, are keeping the issue alive–fit for the honour they’ve meted out to Gaurav, Rashmi, and Varna.

This got me thinking about the said pattern.

Methinks IIPM sent out the hate mails legal notices to Gaurav and Rashmi because they carried blog posts that exposed the reality of “management education” that IIPM offers. However, Varna’s case is slightly different. IIPM made her the target of intimidation because she narrated some of her personal experiences with IIPM.

Two years ago, when I went to debate at IIPM’s annual festival, I lost a debate I should have won and it was obvious to most people. I asked why. I was told that my manner of speaking was too “un-lady like” and “Too aggressive for a woman”! The second time in that same year that IIPM pissed me off was when (much against my wishes) my college had decided to invite Arindham Choudhary to speak at one of our seminars.

His secretary (the only person I could get to on the phone or in person) said that Arindham would be willing to discuss the subject etc of the seminar and all that only after we deposited an initial fee in his bank account whose number the secretary reeled off with a great deal of alacrity. When asked about the sum I was told “One lakh and forty thousand minimum’! Incidentally my college cannot afford an auditorium and most students travel by public transport.

Two schoolmates of mine are students at IIPM. I met them there two years ago. I was amazed at how any semblance of intelligence they possessed had vanished without a trace and had been replaced by management jargon and neatly pressed tight fitting suits in air conditioned classrooms that had everything but books, pens and learning aids!

The pattern. Or as I said, I may simply be hallucinating.

The Management Guru

A Google search for “arindam chaudhuri” reveals www.arindamchaudhuri.com as the #1 result. I followed the link. “Prof” A’s site is entirely done using Flash.

The “Thoughts” section on his site caught my attention first–I hate to give his site traffic but it is unavoidable The first “article” there reads The MBA Mafia. Poorly written, it is a deconstructionist’s delight. These flaws apart, the “Professor” tears apart the IITs and IIMs using hearsay (and maybe imagination?), personal opinions and wild allegations. His conclusions are ridiculous, to use the politest word. I’ve pasted almost the entire article:

Management education as a term has been defined, redefined and today it is being ill-defined … All the other fields of post graduate studies are post graduate in nature because of the higher level of technicalities and theories in them.
What I am trying to drive towards is the non challengeable fact that management as a stream of studies is more hype than content. Infact, after a certain point its actually not possible to develop it any further. That is why today, famous management experts, international management gurus as well as the top management consulting firms in a last ditch effort are trying to come out with newer models which at best border between being silly and at worst being ridiculous. The same theories are today being reformulated with different and more complicated jargons and new circles, triangles, and rectangles added in the same model. English is a beautiful language. From Hallmark to Archies, they all make millions out of this language by putting the same words like “I love you” in millions of different ways in their cards in an effort to produce emotions in their printing factories. Today’s management consulting firms and experts are trying to use the same to keep their profession alive. […] This time I am trying to drive towards the fact that the enormously tough entrance tests for MBA education is absolutely unwarranted and unnecessary. Neither has the level of input imparted got anything to do with it (my point about history to engineering students being offered MBA) nor has the nature of application of the subject. Infact the realization today is that people with more EQ (Emotional Quotient) are definitely better material for a successful manager than those with higher IQ who could definitely do the country some good working in the R&D labs for which the government invests so much on them rather than nurturing ambitions of becoming MBAs and then eventually leaving the country as well. These people (from IIT and likes) should either pay up for the investment the government makes on them as well as the opportunity cost or perhaps barred from changing streams or be asked to serve the public sector/defence sector/government initiatives for at least seven to ten years before they are allowed to venture into other areas. At this point a few lines on the IIT hype itself, I guess, would not be inappropriate … the reality is that the IIT graduates have not served the country’s interests the way they were expected to, because, they were rare commodities in the Indian market for engineers. Most of them were available floating around freely in America or some rare ones in the Indian MBA market. The reality also is that IIT education has nothing to do with the IT revolution and success stories in the Silicon Valley. Even today the software part of education at IIT is not world class. In fact it is a pity that they tied up with a private education company to spread the IIT, Kharagpur and IIT, Delhi certified courses through a shady arrangement with them (by setting up something called CEP, a private body with a managing director inside the IIT Kharagpur campus and FITT, another private body with a managing director inside the IIT, Delhi campus) in an effort to confuse the students that they were getting something from IIT. It made the so called IIT certificates available from shoddy shops set up across the country. Eventually, the company got closed since even the IIT certification could not cover up the primitive contents that the IIT certified courses had…. I remember, one of the ex deans of FMS, Delhi in a frantic bid to justify the tough entrance tests once said in an interview with CSR that so many questions in so little time basically was a test of the individuals ability to make quick decisions which is the most important aspect of management.

And the next line, which follows the “logical” train is severely hilarious:

The reality however is that, if you take decisions too quickly you would turn out to be more of a damager than a manager. […] Looking at things around I am forced to feel that this country today has a mafia operating in the field of MBA education. A group of people with vested interests who want to keep this simple common sense education limited only to a few so that their starting salaries can be artificially jacked up to anything between Rs. 6 lakhs and 10 lakhs per annum. If they are so good then why don’t our public sector companies too employ them and revive instead of going on sale. Why don’t we produce 2000 MBAs in each of the IIMs with such phenomenal facilities, acres of land and huge buildings? It is not done so that companies get intimidated by the huge infrastructure, in which just about 150 to 200 students are made to feel in the ninth clouds, and get compelled to pay astronomical sums of money. These schools therefore create an artificial scarcity and capitalise on it. If the number of students are not artificially and unnecessary limited the salaries perhaps would come down to Rs. 1.2 lakhs per annum at the maximum which is their actual worth and with more better quality MBAs the growth rate of our country might break the 2% to 3% barrier which the current number of highly educated MBAs have been able to give the country.

Mafia. Right. This article certainly speaks in the language befitting a mafia don.

In a land where the greatness of a teacher is reflected by the amount of education he has spread, here in this field of management we have teachers who want to limit the spread of education for their own respect in society as well as for the profits and superficial glamour of the MBA graduates. They are comparable to our corrupt and illiterate politicians who don’t want to educate the public because of the fear that the first thing educated public would do is to reject them. Infact keeping in mind the level of education of our management educators they are a worse lot, for it is worse to be educated and yet wanting education to be limited so that you can milk it than to be uneducated and wanting the masses to remain so.

Isn’t it ironic? That the Dean of the institute that cannot tolerate criticism, that tries to choke the most fundamental democratic right speaks these words? What Rashmi and Gaurav did can by no stretch be construed as a hatchet job. They’ve merely stated facts revealed after due research: this is fairly evident once you read the JAM magazine piece. A business school that gives out full page ads and convices the public to suck up part with money should definitely be subject to scrutiny. This need becomes all the more urgent in the case of a school like IIPM which

….is not recognized by any regulatory authority be it UGC, AICTE and AIU. The institute has been running courses without the approval of these bodies. All the courses and degrees that they give are not recognized and the students who pass out of the institute dont hold any academic credentials even after spending 2 or 3 years in the institute …. they do their so called BBA and MBA programs together. How on earth can two degree be done in tandem.

Arindam Chaudhuri on the other hand, hurls wild accusations against the IIT and IIM without furnishing a whit of evidence to back them.

The Professor’s site also carries another “thoughtful” gem which relates the “human unfriendliness of the Internet.”

My question is, is it actually 1800 pages or 2 million pages of valuable information for enhancement of consumer choice or thousands of pages of trash trying to make the consumer confused in the name of current internet frenzy? As far as I am concerned I preferred going to my library and picking up 2 latest books on the topic to solve my problem. It’s actually a pathetic job trying to read on a 1 sq. ft. computer screen and scrolling page after page. I think when you have a choice of choosing 2 books out of 20, it is ‘choice’ but when you are to choose 2 pages out of 2 million its ‘chaos’. Already today to reach a site you have search engines, tomorrow to reach a search engine you will have “super search engines” and where it is going to take us to is a scary thought.

But I thought engines are found only in automobiles. But check this out. Priceless.

People might like the idea of free books on the net but very few actually like the idea of reading on a computer, nor do people like the idea of taking out print outs of 100 of pages and carrying them around in a plastic bag. As far as I am concerned, personally, I like the idea of possessing a normal book, for, I can carry it around wherever I feel like specially to the loo where I like to do some reading the most. Imagine carrying your computer to the loo early in the morning!

And some economic theory to prove a point. Which he can’t make.

It is the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility that makes attractive products of today redundant tomorrow and allows new companies to come up with new products giving the consumer better choice. But today, the more you have of Microsoft the more you need to have more of Microsoft and its products because if you need to shift to Apple products you need to change a whole lot of infrastructure, software, hardware and people who need to be Apple oriented.

Apple oriented :-O More economics. Ravikiran, some meat for you…

…tomorrow, in a world without competition, Microsoft is under no compulsion to give us quality. Thus, just like in the case of qwerty keyboards/typewriters which are not necessarily the most rational and consumer friendly, a lock in effect may happen, where shifting to a new more consumer friendly product (as the ABCDEF keyboard of Apple) may be impossible. Already the era of Mergers & Acquisitions is leading to similar fears and adding to it the growing monopolies in the IT industry. This growth is facilitated by the fact that cost curves no more seem to be ‘U’ shaped in the IT industry and instead seem to be downward sloping as the marginal cost seems to be negligible (it is only the cost of R&D which goes into the value of a software and afterwards it is only the cost of copying it in a floppy) thus making monopoly possibilities stronger. The internet works on the basis of similar principles which in the long run does not comply with interests of the consumer.

And then the learned “Professor” gives some lowdown on e-Commerce and blasts Intel on the lines of how-dare-you:

My final fear arose, when I attended a seminar of Dr. Craig Barett the CEO of Intel Corp. on his and his companies ideas about the consumer friendly aspects of the net that the future holds. He described in details how shopping tomorrow would become a pleasure wherein if say a woman wanted to shop all she would need to do is to click “southex.com” for example and the visual of the whole of Southex market would be there infront of her … The situation that I depicted is exactly without any exaggerations the way Dr. Barett demonstrated with the help of his latest software on the huge screens during the seminar. My question is who is he or for that matter Intel to decide what makes life better?

At long last, he delves into human unfriendliness:

Given a choice I and I guess most of us would actually prefer to go to ‘Southex market’ have some “Chole Bathore” try to enter the shop with an ice cream in hand and pick up a fight on not being allowed entry then finally enter the shop look at things around including smart boys and girls and finally may be come out of the shop empty handed after a lot of bargaining and window shopping. And I argue that this is human friendly. In the west don’t people buy costlier products just because they are eco friendly? Would someone please talk about what is human friendly? And I say even if the Intel software makes products a little cheap in the name of humanity, these products should perhaps not be allowed in the markets.

Wow! And this guy runs a business school! But his humour is simply astounding.

Today, an average man in the west doesn’t have any emotional security around a happy family etc., man is living more with animals and dogs than with humans. Now, do we want to take away even that and replace the dog with a virtual pet… Already, people sitting next to each other in big organisations communicate through e-mails instead of talking to each other!

Exactly! My organization has offices over 50 locations worldwide. What does the learned Professor expect me to do? Fly to Arizona and give my project manager my weekly status update?

Or should we for a change at last think about “people for people” instead of people for animals/people for dogs/people for environment etc. for it is sad to see more people gathering for a cause related to environment/ animals etc. while calls to support causes for poverty etc. meets with a lukeworm response.

Lukeworm? Think Professor, think about all the trees we’ve saved by using email to communicate. If the Professor is this concerned about the Internet’s human unfriendliness, why does his institute boast about Wi-Fi? What’s the need to have a website for himself as well as for his institute?

So ladies and gentlemen, this is but a peek into the management guru’s ability to articulate. Read his other “thoughts” and judge for yourselves.

Meanwhile, I’ve done my bit by contributing to the Wikipedia article on IIPM. To express my continued solidarity with Gaurav, my sidebar now sports a section devoted to this issue with relevant links. Let’s keep the fight going.

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