Why MBA ???

"The purpose of liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money."

Well...true to its core!! But when I sit for a brainstorming session with what else but my mind on the other side of midnight, it gives me ambiguous answers. The word MBA itself has lots of meaning which spells nothing but ambiguity. It may be Masters in Business Administration in a much generalised terminology but I am sure for many it stands for "Money Baking Art". What can I say....me and my ambiguous mind, which keeps on playing the Devil's Advocate most of the times. Well talking on the perspective of my holy motherland, India's economy is on a verge of meltdown and we are in despair. Everything is rising let it be unemployment or the recession or the number of candidates, trying their lucks in the mighty race for the B-schools. Well as the stats say, the number of MBA aspirants increased from 2,30,000 in 2007-08 to 2,90,000 in 2008-09, and these figures are massive enough to pop out your eye-balls from the sockets.

Well, between all these tussles with my mind, the main question still remains - Why MBA? Returning to Square One, I ponder, what inspires the huge crowd of aspirants towards the holy fields of Business Management. Is it the lucrative salaries or the challenges of beating the deadlines or the attractive profiles they may get, which can leverage their careers to new heights....whatever it may be, but these questions can land even the most prolific Management Gurus into a state of dilemma. Even if we try to poke our grey cells we would be transported to the times when we attended our GDs and PIs, where the same titanic question was asked to us - 'Why MBA?'. Now these days the coaching institute put a lot of effort to flip the pages of Norman Lewis to come up with the choicest of words in order to fabricate the answers of the clueless aspirants, which reflects only flashy jargons and no quality. But gradually the aspirants are learning to deceive the poor interviewers who try to ask this same colossal question.

To show you its practical implication, lets take you to an interview, where the candidate is yet again caught in the fishnet of the interviewer with the same question. The candidate gasps, tries to loosen his neck-tie, rolls his eyes from one corner of the room to other, stacks up all his bullets, aims and fires - "Sir! That's a pretty good question you have asked. Actually, from the day I was born, I wanted to be a business tycoon. In my school days I was the leader of my NCC troop. I have won many scholarships and donated all to the AIDS Foundation. In my college, I have organised many events and attracted many sponsors. In my company I was the apple of the eyes of my colleagues and manager. I was a great team player and my existence in my project was as important as that of the CEO in the company. And soon I'd be starting a new venture to take the country's economy to the level of the superpowers. That's why MBA, Sir.....that's why MBA!" - and the interviewer is impressed.

Now, take a peek into his mind and you will be treated with a completely different scene, and here is where the deceit part comes into the picture - "Well truly speaking I never knew what management or even engineering is all about. Since childhood the only issues that bothered me were the number of wickets I took or the number of goals I scored. I always aspired to become Govinda with semi clad girls drooling all over me. Then suddenly engineering heppened to me and all my dreams went crashing. I landed up with a job in a software company where my existence was as important as that of a coffee-vending machine. As I was fed up with the peanuts I was earning, I started looking for big bucks and that's when my friends suggested to go for MBA and thus MBA happened to me." - and if you go for a survey, this is what every aspirant's heart would speak out. And this will surely be an eye opener for you.

Well, this is a dark truth that anybody may come face-to-face with, but MBA is lot more that that. India is in a stage of slowdown and the country does need a lot of bright minds to kick-start the economy once again and drive it towards the dream of being a superpower. Each and every sector needs the shoulders of the talented management prodigies to grow in a big way. And this is when the premier Indian B-schools come into play, which puts a lot of blood and sweat to transform these rather clueless aspirants into bright managers and leaders, infusing the principles of Business Management into their veins and showing them the right path towards the nation's glory. So I'd like to thank these prestigious B-schools to let us know the real answer for the colossal question - "Why MBA?".