Dr. Mandi, Session1

Principles of Organization Management. It was the first class of this subject and all the students were waiting for the professor to arrive. Some time later he came and introduced himself. " Hi all. My name is Dr. Prasad. I would like all of you to call me Dr. Mandi".   Because of my "profound" knowledge in Hindi, I immediately asked the guy sitting next to me and found that it means the small temporary shops set up to sell fruits vegetables etc. But that led to the next doubt,"why should some one call himself 'Mandi' ?"

The later I found out that the name was just a tip of the iceberg. After all our introductions, Dr. Mandi started the lesson by the following quotes

"Socho   Becho.… !  Becho Seekho.. ! !   Seekho Socho.. !!!"

"Aaj ka roti ..Aaj hee kamaenghe !
  Behatar padhai kae liye.. Kamai ! !"

He started by talking about the problems of the current education system. He told that current educational system is grossly inefficient in performance, unaffordable  and inaccessible to the many needy people. He elaborated it. The knowledge gained from class rooms are never properly understood and  never utilized properly. Neither the teacher nor the students make honest effort to understand the topic and learn about its real life applications. This makes our education system inefficient. Due this inefficiency lakhs of crores of public money is getting wasted. What all government spends on education is going fruitless since what the students has learned is never is put to use anywhere. This makes our education system unaffordable and inaccessible.

According to Dr. Mandi, students should earn enough to cover up educational expenses from what they have studied. Then only they will understand the value of education and will contribute to the growth of themselves and nation. Astonishingly not even a single student was there in my class who earns themselves for their educational expense. Even me too is in that majority. 

Later he showed a simple cuboid with each of its side made two sticks of different length joined together, such that all the faces of the cubes has two squares and two rectangles.  He asked us to explain what each face of the cube represents. A class containing 70 engineers, who all have scored good percentiles in cat was not able to recognize that it represents (a+b)^2. And the volume of the cube is (a+b)^3. That was a self realization. Even after all this years of studying am I not able understand how to represent (a+b)^2 pictorially. this was the case with most of us. This showed us how inefficiently is our system of education.

He told the story of a few engineering students who earned money to pay for their fees by selling an item. What they sold was a set of pendulums which could demonstrate the principle of transfer of momentum very easily. The theory is pretty simple, which everybody knows, construction is very simple and still no has ever thought of making it. They sold a 10,000 pieces of that.

Only by now I could understand what he has told in the beginning of the  class.

"Socho   Becho.… !  Becho Seekho.. ! !   Seekho Socho.. !!!"

"Aaj ka roti ..Aaj hee kamaenghe !
  Behatar padhai kae liye.. Kamai ! !"

He described the "Mandi" fest, that is held every year in our college. This is where Dr. Mandi is puts into practice the principles told above. I think the video below would give you a small idea of what Mandi is.

 This is where students of NITIE i.e. us are putting to use the lessons in MBA class in real life environment. The students will sell items which are based simple logic, basically of the type which helps the younger ones to learn better on the streets of Bombay. They will learn about basics of marketing strategies, segmentation etc directly from the fields, at the same time generating a considerable amount of money, much more than that was spend for the event.

By the time class ended all of us were eagerly waiting for next "Mandi".