Head over Heels..

6th June, 2009

         It was a bright Saturday evening open to a lot of possibilities for making merry, and I was attending BYJU's CAT workshop at Jyothi Nivas College, Koramangala. This workshop was so much more informative and useful than the T.I.E.M. classes I had attended last year. All  T.I.E.M. did was make false claims of having sent more number of students to IIMs than any other institute. Falling for their advertising, I had joined them last year. It didn't take me long to realize that my 20K had gone down the drain.

        After CAT '08, I was all set to start my prep for this time- the elusive final attempt. A do or die one. It was then that I heard about Byju's classes. Byju Raveendran was a mechanical engineer from IIT and a serial CAT topper, who had this habit of scoring a 100 percentile and rejecting calls from IIMs every year! He was a math genius and an expert in mentally solving even those math problems that mere mortals feared to solve even with a calculator. 1 out of 8 students in his class made it to an IIM! He was a Keralite bloke, with a straight serious face, well built physique and of good height. Though he taught 1200 students in a class at a time, his classes were very well structured and effective. At the end of every class, he along with his knowledgeable aides would wait outside the hall to impart clarity and helped to cement all the concepts and tactics that students needed assistance in. Needless to say, his support staff knew almost as much about the subjects as he did, and were fully qualified.

That was why My confidence level went up after each class.

        June 6th was a "Numbers-1" reschedule, dealing with the Remainder theorem, divisibility rules, Euler's number, Chinese remainder theorem and so on. It was a heavy-on-concepts session and incidentally I had a few concepts to clarify. I directed my queries to one of his support staff, a young lady, who looked more like a Bollywood actress, than a member of the teaching profession! She did resemble Perizaad Zorabian :-) It was spoken among the students in hushed tones that she was an IIM-A topper, who gave up her lucrative placement to teach here. That made me wonder how much more Byju had offered her to bring her here.

        She borrowed a pen from a guy standing nearby, and effortlessly solved the remainder of (11/77)^97 on my book. Then, she had one look at me, and just like one of those hot professors in the commercials who smiled weirdly and scribbled cardiograms on the blackboard when the cool dude entered the class, this lady went head over heals, and handed over the pen to me, profusely thanking me; while I tried to say that the pen actually belonged to the other guy standing there :-) For a few seconds, she froze, thanked me again, (??) and handed over the pen, to me !!! Only when I said it the second time did she understand what she was doing!

Courtesy: sheknows.com

    

        She looked down, gave me a sheepish smile and handed over the pen to the other guy, who stood there witnessing this event with his mouth wide open! Maybe, she was hit by The Thunderbolt. In The Godfather, "being hit with the thunderbolt" was a Sicilian expression referring to a man being spellbound and stupefied at the sight of a beautiful woman. 

           She was short, petite and delicate, with a sharp featured face not unlike Perizaad's; with beautiful kohl laced eyes, wearing some designer Kurti, and having a flowing hairdo like Perizaad's, only better :-)

The break ended and I went back to the class.

           Later, at the end of the session, I was standing at the hall entrance waiting for Byju when she herself came to me and asked me what I wanted. I hadn't expected this. I blabbered something about some topic that Byju had forgotten to cover that day, about which I wanted to remind him. She told me it had been covered in some other class and was about to give me more details when, out of nowhere, Byju swooped in with a mean and impatient look on his otherwise calm face. Instead of debating about it, he quickly summarized that topic for me then and there, with a look on his face that unmistakably conveyed the message- "Are you done now??"

          My eyes were wide open, witnessing this bizarre spectacle. I answered in affirmative, and asked her some concluding questions and left the place, shell-shocked. As I walked outside to the parking lot, all the variables in the equation were showing themselves, the haze around everything was clearing up and soon the picture became clear. One thought rang in my head over and over - - - - - -

"SHE MUST HAVE BEEN  BYJU'S  GIRL !!!!"

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(PS: Byju's classes were a great blessing. I learnt almost everything that he had to teach there, and IF the paper based CAT had continued, I would have most likely landed in a premier-management-institute in India. But CAT 09 was the beginning of the decay of the CAT system of MBA entrance exams. The exam was made online, and had several flaws. The quality of questions and the evaluation and "Normalization" of answers was abysmal and continues to worsen every year. 

A few years later, someone told me that they both were indeed a couple, and that they got married recently. My intuition was not wrong!

Meanwhile, I jumped into the GMAT boat, and used the knowledge gained @ Byju's to secure admission  in a top ranked B-School in USA.)