Hahvahd

I first heard of Hahvahd (Harvard) somewhere in 1967 or so. My cousin had joined this newly minted School of Management in Western India, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) and he told me about IIMA and Harvard. Never heard of Harvard till then, though I had been good at quiz programmes…Yale, yes…Harvard, no…

IIMA had been set up in collaboration with Harvard Business School (HBS) and not many people, in those days, knew what they taught out there. In fact, some of us, even forty years after we graduated from IIMA, don’t know what they taught. My cousin gave me the Institute handbook and I remember not understanding a word of the course outlines (Management of Change particularly foxed me. I thought that Management of Change was all about what to do if one had a hundred rupee note and needed a couple of fives and tens in change)…

When I asked my cousin as to what they taught he told me, “Don’t worry…you will get a salary of at least Rs800 per month after completing this course…” Considering the fact that the IAS (Indian Administrative Service, cream of the crop civil service career) probationer of those days got Rs600 per month after going through an arduous selection process, I thought that was enough incentive to embark on a course of studies that I did not have the vaguest idea about. Unlike today, the number of applicants to the IIMs was fairly low, and, so I got in.

There is another theory associated with my entry into IIMA. IIMA had just invested in a mainframe computer and all applications were processed through the computer…for those of you old enough to know these things, the earliest computers processed data using punched cards…the story is that a young girl (punch card operators, they called them) wearing stiletto heels stepped on a card that had my details, resulting in a combination of punch entries that admitted me to the Institute…I am the strongest supporter of this theory…having seen the high levels of academic brilliance among my classmates, there was no other way I could have made it…

I remember the first morning landing at IIMA in Vastrapur. Suddenly out of the desert that lay just beyond the what was the seat of the Gujarat Government in those days, one saw a clump of seemingly unfinished buildings with no exterior plaster…they had paid good money to this Amriki architect, Louis Kahn who designed the place, and, the story is that when they ran out of money to pay him, he just packed his bags and went back leaving the exterior unfinished…all that you have heard about the IIMA campus being modelled on the style of Nalanda is an after thought…

In those days, everything and everyone had to be approved by the alma mater, Harvard. All course material came from there, and, very early in my stay there, the name Soldiers’ Field, MA, etched itself into my brain as the address blurb on case material.

There were still resident white professors from Harvard, and, any desi professor who joined was packed off to the International Teachers’ Program (ITP) for baptism. So much so that when Chandulal, the barber who had set up shop under a tree within the IIMA premises, was away from his post for a few weeks everyone said, “Chandulal, ITP ma gayo…” “Chandulal has gone to do the ITP (at Harvard)…”

With this strong influence of Harvard I had always wanted to see the, what I call, (alma mater) ², alma mater of my alma mater…though I have lived in North America for several years now, this opportunity did not present itself to me till last week…when I went visiting my niece who lives close to Boston…

On the appointed day, after offering prayers in the fashion of a believer doing the once in a lifetime pilgrimage, I set out…Leaving my car at a local subway station, we took the Red Line to Harvard…

Getting out at of the subway, we got our first touch of what is essentially the characteristic of a University town…a middle aged man wearing a track suit with the words “Harvard Business School, Information Technology” saw us looking at the street map and said, “Can I help you ?” We told him that we were in search of the Holy Grail, Harvard Business School, and, he told us, “Over the bridge and to your left…”

Harvard is the quintessential University town…I saw more middle aged men wearing corduroy jackets and walking around in Harvard than I have seen in any other town in North America…(I now have the courage to defy my son who has stopped me, till now, from buying a corduroy jacket on the grounds that they are not ‘smart’)…I did see a few business suits as we walked through HBS, but, the per square mile density of corduroy jacket wearers in North America is perhaps the highest in Harvard…

We crossed the river Charles and came up to the road that had been etched in my mind from reading the address blurb on case material, Soldiers’ Field…I stopped for a minute as a mark of respect before crossing this road…

And then, I could see for myself the tower of the Baker Library building which we had seen on the cover of innumerable editions of the Harvard Business Review (HBR)…I have never visited Oxford or Cambridge in England, but, as I walked through the roads leading to HBS I had the distinct feeling that Oxford or Cambridge was where they got their inspiration from…interesting that so much cutting edge 21st century management thought seems to be being born in a town that has the ambience of a 19th century English university town…

Also I thought of the many young Indian professors who would have come here for baptism in the ‘60s…Seshan, Bala, Vora are some of the names that came to mind…how different the non diverse world of HBS must have been then…and what it must have taken to make the positive mark that they made…

After doing a parikrama (circumambulation, generally done of any temple) of HBS we went to Harvard Yard, where the statue of John Harvard sits…as you go near you will notice that his left shoe shines more than anything else in the surroundings…this comes from the belief that rubbing that left shoe fetches you luck, and, a lot of students must be using this approach to make up for the time spent partying when they should have been studying for their exams…

There is an unofficial tour of the Harvard campus conducted by students (the tour is called Hahvahd), and, I shall conclude with this story that the charming young girl who was conducting the tour told us standing at the feet of John Harvard…

Harvard has the practice of naming the buildings on the campus after the Harvard University Presidents…the word House is added to the President’s last name…so you have a Langdon House, a Quincy House, a Holyoke house and so on…the only exception is the President who was in office between l672-1675, Leonard Hore…try adding his last name to the word House and you will see why…