“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull”
-Shakespeare: All’s well that Ends Well
When I first heard of “Mandi” I thought of a witty remark of great American Film producer Sam Goldwyn-“What we really need are some brand new clichés.”When I joined NITIE, I was sceptical about the idea of an event of MBA students selling the toys on street under an unjargonized (pun unintended) name –Mandi. Our Prof Dr T. Prasad had been quite successful in making us “Confused-Unconvinced-but–Ready to go” first year MBA students to assemble in front of distinguished guests and alumni of our college in the media-shinning inaugural ceremony of Mandi. I was hearing some terms arbitrarily “Experiencal Learning” .
And I was praying it not to be another "brick -in -the -wall"event. With all apprehension about the merit of the product we were hoping our stars to smile on us to help us sell some “straw-confetti-made-educational-toys” to Mumbai residents. And we sat on the bus destined to go to Andheri. I with my friend Aashutosh virtually jumped out of the bus near Andheri station (as it was a red signal) and we saw our customers. It was a sea of almost running people coming out of station. Some were standing but staring at us with a grimace on their sweating face. We were at a loss. Two twenty something persons educated in premier engineering college of India and having an experience of two years working in a well known manufacturing company, were dumbfounded. We realized that our 16 year education was a waste; it has never sent us in the ocean to experience the pain …..We were virgin …innocent. We were like larva just trying to come out of their cocoon. Our Education system hasn’t taught us how to sell. I realized the whole educational system is a travesty.
But we fought and after initial hiccups we started selling. We learned the basic lessons of art of selling. We had read about it in textbooks and in Prof Dhume’s marketing ppts-Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning but we had never met these gentlemen in class. But on the street of Irla we came across all of them at once in the face of customers. When hawkers on Andheri penetrated their menacing eyes and police bulldozed us away from railway station we learned the might of Porter’s five forces. But we came out quite successfully and sold our package in 3 hours. But what was important was the experience.
This kind of experiment are still in nascent stage but there is one hard truth that is expressed by the Shakespeare quote above:A great deal depends upon what we do ourselves and not by the grace of God. It is the time for us to challange the disillusioned intellizentia which stress upon rote learning. I Hope that the events like Mandi ,which inculcates the learning by doing ,will someday end the tyranny of voyuerism in education.
