The Goa trip that went South & then went YEEEHAAA!

This is an amazing trip, which got me broke to rich and helped me fulfil my childhood dream!

It all started on Saturday morning with me having Rs 1500(Thank you Subbu, Moorthy and Vasu for the contributions) in my pocket and 3 tickets:One from Nizamuddin to Madgaon and 2 tickets for consecutive days from Madgaon to Trivandrum. The idea was this: My team - The great Maa II, consisting of Mayank, Atanu and Me(with a good deal of support from Akanksha) had sent an entry for Revving Up!!! - The Case Study competition at GIM, Goa and I was to present the case if our team got selected, but then we weren't sure if we would get selected. I was sure, but Maa wasn't :). So we had tickets for me to directly go home or stay back 1 day and present if we got selected.

Fortunately we got selected and the 35 hour long train journey went well and then I reached Goa, only to find that I was BROKE :(. Now that got me thinking what is the reason for my constantly bad financial condition. I'm in constant debt and can't find a way out of this situation even when I've won a good number of events/quizzes this year(2011). But I guess if I start on that then it'll be another blog post completely. Main issue for the day was I was left with Rs 120 at the start of the day when the event was happening. I had to get back to the railway station at night to catch my train back to Trivandrum and it's a sweet 40 km ride from GIM till Madgaon station, which comes to 600-650 in a cab. Basically I was begging around in Facebook/Gtalk and all other possible means to beg.

The day started well with me getting up ahead of time and getting ready by 9 AM and reaching the hall to find it quite empty. I like all the CONFIDENT MBA's started to look up the slides and added some finishing touches here n there. Then frankly I did get nervous waiting for the PPT to start, so I started chatting with the other teams and had a good time till I was called for the PPT. I was the only TEAM with just 1 guy here and with more than 80 odd pairs of eye balls pointed towards the slides and alternating between me and the slides I started. Initially it all went really well and I was fortunate to have a good panel which didn't interrupt and blocked my flow. That got me going and I was at one of the best presentations of my life I would say!

I finished with the judges quite impressed and asking the very first question which got me really happy, the question was "How many of your team mates worked in Automobile industry?" and when I said none of us, he was even more impressed. After a few questions more he was satisfied about the work we had done and then I got back to my seat waiting patiently for the other teams to finish up their ppt's and went about on a Hyper Facebooking spree. Some 20 comments and 2 updates later the time for the final announcement came. By this time I had 1900 in my SBI A/c. Thanks Sriram and Ajay Aliyan :)

It was a proud moment for me and I could say a very happy achievement for my team when the whole crowd said "IIFT...IIFT...IIFT" when the judges asked "So who do you think is the winner...". I was having the best smile of my life and the smile widened when I got the winners cheque and the three Nano shaped pen drives as special gifts :). It was literally like the cadbury's ad where "dil mein laddo phoot rahe the", the Rs 20000 cheque was just the icing on the cake :)

The glee wasn't contained in me when the HR told me that I have got a spot-offer and asked me to consider joining India's largest automobile company. It was a dream come true for me, a dream that had been in place in my head since I was 4 years old and got onto the hood of a Tata Truck during one of the 1st trips to my dad's workshop at Air Force Station, Avadi. A dream that made me pursue Mechanical Engineering, but wasn't fulfilled at my BTech stage. Even though I got into Tata Steel during my internship and then got a PPO, the happiness that I've now is much greater because this is a dream for me to follow what my father did for 21 years of his life and make it bigger and better :)

Thank you Mayank, Akanksha and Atanu for giving me a chance to fulfil that dream, thank you GIM for giving me a platform to present our ideas and most importantly to IIFT for giving me this awesome chance. Now I really feel my MBA did add a lot to my life :)

PS: 1st job of any Marketing guy is to promote his company; so here goes - Kindly visit www.tatamotors.com The site is updated very recently and hope you'll like the changes :)

PPS: This can also mean that CGPA doesn't stop anyone from getting their dream jobs in an MBA :)