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CAT, XAT, DI, mock are the words you live with while preparing for MBA entrance exams. Your affair with cool lingo only amplifies at b-school! Here is a sneak preview of campus-speak, raw from India's best b-schools! Reported by Harsh Maskara.
Think that scoring well in a test that lakhs write every year (and a million more dream about), clearing hotly contested group discussion sessions and acing mind boggling interviews is all there is to become a student at one of India's top business schools? Well, think again. B-school is a world in itself with indeed a language of its own. Here's a peek into how India's best and brightest twenty-somethings communicate in the mad, mad world of a B-school!
A first year student of SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai quips, "When I first came here, some words just didn't make any sense! Now I use them without thinking as if they were normal English words." Not that students are simply thrown into the deep end and not given any help whatsoever. At SPJIMR, freshers are given a five-six page 'dictionary' as a guide to the campus lingo. The concept of a dictionary to guide students doesn't stop at SPJIMR. Vijay Menon, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta has also left behind a snapshot of the language that exists there.
Anything you do in class at B-school is, in short, an abbreviation. Whether it's asking a question or giving an answer during a lecture (class participation: CP) or asking a question out of the sheer stress of not having asked a question for the last 8.33 minutes (desperate class participation: DCP/DP). Thinking that you escape because you're in the minority that doesn't ask questions? Well, things will get a touch difficult because there are marks for class participation. And participation doesn't end in the class, mind you. Students do not hesitate to accompany the professor to his cabin and start an unnecessary discussion there in order to earn brownie points. Students at Institute of Management - Nirma University (IMNU), Ahmedabad have termed this phenomenon as 'cabin participation'.
Consider that a student has spouted some gibberish in the desperate hope that some credit would be given. "Some gibberish in the desperate hope that some credit would be given" is simply too long for short form shooting B-schoolers. Obviously, there exists a term for this. And, what it's called depends on the location. In all probability, the student just maroed some 'globe'. (At IIM Indore, globe statements are also called as 'motherhood' statements.) At Mudra Institute of Communication Ahmedabad (MICA), he or she pfaffed around. Students at Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Mumbai have identified the subtle difference between spouting gibberish and beating about the bush. Spouting gibberish is good ol' globe. However, beating around the bush is called pappu dena.
Students at B-schools revel in the deliberate satire of arm twisting the English language and an eavesdropper could be excused for wondering how the same people cracked twisted English passages and sentence correction exercises. At IIM Calcutta, "Plz to send" is the grammatically correct to make a request. "Are there" is the favourite phrase at IIM Bangalore. "The food is here" is hardly used and "Food are there" is the right way to go. These IIMs also emphasise on syllables to get the point across. At IIM Calcutta, 'lesss' means stupidity or plainly outrageous and the number of S's indicate the degree of stress. "Strrraangh" is used to convey approval at IIM Bangalore.
Another important word at IIM Bangalore is RGgiri. RG stands for Relative Grading. RGgiri while not exactly dadagiri, is pretty close to it. An example of it would be when a student has procured sought after notes very close to the examination and refuses to share it with his classmates so that he gets a really high grade by way of relative grading.
At IIM Bangalore, the lingo for describing people and courses also exists. A second year student explains, "A course may be described as 'peace' or 'fighter'. 'Peace' implies that the course is easy and 'fighter' means that it's difficult. If a person is described as 'peace' then it means that he's easy going and relaxed about things. A 'fighter' person may be a very studious or extremely competitive person and it's not necessarily a bad tag. It depends on how you look at it. We also use these words to describe profs." Students at IMNU - Ahmedabad term competitive people and those who always want to jump queues as 'Type A'.
Pre Placement Offers (PPOs) have also been inspiration for slang across B-schools. An FMS alumnus says dryly, "At FMS, a PPO is called a paPPO (pronounced as Pappu) and a PPI is called a paPPI (pronounced as puppee). If say Rohan gets a PPI then we say, "Rohan ko paPPI mil gayi!" We also often call the heavily built ones among us by the name of Pappu. So if a jock aka a Pappu gets a PPI then we say, "Pappu ko paPPI mil gayi!"". Ashutosh Sahoo, an alumnus of National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai recalls, "The 'PPO road' is the backbone of NITIE and has to be used to go anywhere on campus. Thanks to the large number of trees, the crows of Mumbai have made it their homes and grace students with their droppings. During placements, it's an auspicious event because a candidate receiving the droppings (referred to as PPO) invariably ends up getting an offer."
Elements on campus also give rise to interesting catchphrases. At Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), Delhi there's a large open space and students often go there to relax or celebrate. It's termed as 'Top of The World' (TOTW - that was simple, wasn't it). Quite ironically the floor immediately below it is called Minus 1! JBIMS has a huge bathtub on campus. It's used when seniors get placed and are summarily dunked in the pool. About 20-25 people can easily fit into this bathtub and it's called 'JB ka bathtub'.
The campus at Goa Institute of Management (GIM), Goa is 300 years old and used to function as a hospital earlier. Students here have faithfully stuck with the original names of Operation Theater (OT) and Morgue for their hostels. So much so that they even put up a sign reading - "Boys Hostel (Morgue)"! Needless to say, the authorities had the sign put away. However, that didn't stop students from referring to their hostels as 'morgue' and cheerfully getting through their MBA studies. At MICA, a ten minute break in vigil at your computer could have a helpful friend of yours sending out a 'read receipt' mail. This is is a prank mail (could be humorous or defamatory) sent out from your account to the 300 odd student population at MICA. Opening of the mail at a receiver's end is recorded in the read receipt mail which is sent to you and this would mean about 300 mails for you to admire once you're back from your break. Such mails are sent out at least once a day. What are they called? Termination mails. "Every day someone or the other at MICA gets terminated," is a second year student's tongue in cheek remark.
What if you wish to be prim and proper and not engage in this carnage of languages? "In the first lecture itself the prof asked who was the CoCo for the course and we were all looking blankly at him. We hurriedly found out that he meant 'course co-ordinator'. And now we refer to all course co-ordinators as CoCos and in some cases don't even know their real names are! The college lingo is freely used only within the institute as outsiders will not be able to get it. As for why we use it, this is how it goes and we have to follow it." says a first year student at SPJIMR - Mumbai. Samyak Pandya of JBIMS - Mumbai adds, "Bambu is another catch phrase which we use and is often favoured by one of the most beloved profs here at JB. It's like a system works only when there's a bambu behind it. "Bambu ke bina kaam nahin hota hain" is how we use the word."
So, students use it, profs use it, it stays within the campus folks and it's fun to use. Simply not advisable to give it a miss!
Note: George Orwell penned down '1984' in 1948. It is 2008 now, and forget about stifling or censoring words, we still seem to be discovering new ones.